Euro watchdog to charge Microsoft on web browser choice boob
Fines of up to $7bn loom for breaking promise
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Microsoft will be slapped with "a formal proceeding into the company's breach of an agreement", the European Commission's competition chief Joaquin Almunia confirmed today.
He apparently told reporters that the process was likely to be dealt with swiftly "because the company itself explicitly recognised its breach of the agreement".
Microsoft admitted in July that it had violated a deal with Brussels' antitrust officials. For 17 months it failed to comply with a legally binding 2009 settlement in which Redmond was supposed to display a choice screen to its European Windows customers – allowing them to pick between its own Internet Explorer and rival browsers Firefox, Chrome and others on the market – until 2014.
Almunia - who was speaking at a conference in Warsaw, Poland, this morning - told the audience about the challenges his office faced when it comes to investigating global outfits such as MS and Google, which is also currently being probed over competition concerns by the commission.
He said:
When it comes to implementing competition law, a good authority must be blind to where the headquarters of a firm are located or how much influence it has on world markets.
This is crucial if we are serious about protecting the interests of all European citizens and I imagine it is also quite reassuring for investors to know that we treat all companies alike.
In the past, we have taken on companies such as Microsoft. To meet one of our concerns, the company pledged to let consumers choose which web browser they would use with its Windows operating system.
By its own admission, Microsoft has failed to keep its promise. I take compliance very seriously and we are now considering the next steps.
Microsoft could be hit with fines of up to $7bn, which is roughly 10 per cent of the software giant's global turnover. ®
COMMENTS
Re: New anti trust case please
The odd virus you may get (unlikely for most that dont surf beyond amazon,bbc etc.) is nothing, compared to the time wasted on the incessant, re-enter your password to change that 'gov.
Pretty much sums up the difficulty in melding good security and convenience really. The most efficient security will always be inconvenient in some way, but the masses don't want that. They want to be able to just click and it's done, the problem is they whinge about the low security when something goes wrong.
You may get your thrills from being in a terminal window and trawling through usr, lib and randomly named directories
I would say that Windows is the one with randomly name dirs to be honest. It's the only popular OS out there without the Unix file-structure. OS X, Linux, BSD all have /usr and so on. But I guess it's 'random' because you're not used to it (reminds me of people on forums asking where their C: drive had gone).
I do use the terminal quite a lot, but only where it's more efficient to do so. I don't actually have to use it though, you know, we have GUI's too.
My mother uses Kubuntu without too much difficulty, no training required. What's your point?
EU should look into others
I think the EU should stop concentrating on M$ and perhaps look at Apple locking out their phone's system so you can;t change the default browser - yes you can install chrome but can you make it default ... nope. seems Apple are doing what the originally accused M$ of and no one is taking them to court. stinks!
Re: New anti trust case please
Anyway, isn't it an established fact that BSD flavours are generally superior
I'm gonna have to run out and grab some popcorn for the discussion resulting from that comment I think.
I agree though, handing taxpayer money to one company (whether Canonical, Microsoft, RedHat or whoever) is a bad move. I guess really it needs to go into funding alternatives that people need, so perhaps look at some of the things that might stop people switching and fund projects to help bring software in that area up to scratch.
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