p2pnet - rss feed: MS now ‘clear’ on EC ruling
p2p news / p2pnet: Microsoft hadn’t properly responded to European Commission demands that it honour its anti-trust agreement to open Windows protocols to make it easier for competitors to compete because, it seems, Bill and the Boyz hadn’t really understood what the EC wanted.
However, yesterday, a “breakthrough” occurred, says the Financial Times.
Microsoft had, “finally understood what the competition regulator wanted the software group to do to avoid the threat of fines of up to €2m ($2.4m) a day”.
“Microsoft’s opponents said the group’s statement could mean it was preparing a climbdown to avoid the threat of fresh financial penalties. They also stressed that the Commission’s ruling clearly described Microsoft’s obligations, and that Microsoft should have complied with it more than two years ago. However, following a two-day hearing into the case, Brad Smith, the group’s general counsel, said the group had at last been given the ’specificity and clarity that we need in order to work in a constructive way’.”
It all came about on Thursday night after Microsoft engineers and professor Neil Barrett, the British computer scientist who acts as the EC’s technical adviser on the case, agreed what steps Microsoft had to take to move into compliance with the March, 2004, decision, says the story.
“A Commission spokesman stressed that Prof Barrett and Microsoft had been meeting for several months and that the Commission hoped that direct contacts would ‘eventually lead’ to full compliance,” says the FT, adding that according to a lawyer who’d attended the hearing, ‘It would indeed be a breakthrough if they complied with the March 2004 decision. The decision is very clear. They have known perfectly well what they have to do to comply ever since’.”
Also See:
Financial Times - Microsoft mood is upbeat at Brussels hearing, March 31, 2006
