Ongoing EU Threat Spurs Interoperability Pledge

To avoid further antitrust fines in Europe, Microsoft has pledged to reveal more information about how its products interoperate with one another and to license this information under less restrictive terms. The announcement came days before European regulators fined the company €899 million (US$1.36 billion) for imposing unreasonable licensing fees on communications protocols the company was ordered to reveal in Mar. 2004. That dispute has probably reached its conclusion, and the interoperability pledge could prevent two newer investigations from creating similar headaches for the company, which has now paid more than US$2.3 billion in European antitrust fines.

Latest Fine Covers Past Behavior

The latest fine, levied on Feb. 27, 2008, concerns the terms on which Microsoft offers information about Windows protocols.

The European Commission (EC), the administrative body that handles fair competition law for the European Union (EU), first started investigating Microsoft in 1998. That investigation led to a Mar. 2004 order that Microsoft offer competitors documentation of several Windows protocols, as well as license patented Windows technologies to those competitors. (For a detailed timeline of the dispute, see the sidebar “EU Legal Timeline“.)