The Commission has been increasingly unhappy with the delay in
implementing the sanctions, hinting recently that unless progress
was made soon it might be forced to impose penalty payments – which
could be as high as 5% of Microsoft's average daily turnover.
The regulator finally drew a line in the sand less than two
weeks ago, giving Microsoft until the end of May to comply.
Microsoft last night met the deadline, and now has to wait to
see if the Commission deems its proposals sufficient – a process
that is expected to take until the end of July.
The European Commission found Microsoft guilty of breaking
competition law last March, ruling that the software giant had
leveraged its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems
onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for
media players.
As a sanction, the Commission ordered Microsoft to give
competitors the specifications (but not the source code) for its
client-to-server and server-to-server communications protocols.
Microsoft was also required to offer an alternative
stripped-down version of Windows to PC manufacturers and when
selling directly to end users and it was fined €497 million for
abusing its market dominance in the EU.
Microsoft paid the fine into an escrow account in July 2004,
where it will be held until the appeal against the ruling has been
resolved – a process that could take up to five years to
complete.
