Facing daily fines of about $2.4 million from the European Commission, Microsoft has displayed a confident public face on their compliance with antitrust regulator demands.
Microsoft’s associate general counsel in Europe spoke to journalists in Brussels. “What we have submitted to the Commission responds to all the requirements they have made known to us,” Horacio Gutierrez said.
A report on MacWorld UK noted how a decision on the hefty fines Microsoft faces won’t be forthcoming until July.
Up to now, Microsoft has been fighting the European Commission on opening up its products to third-party developers. Those third parties want to achieve interoperability with Windows Server platforms, but need access to the protocols involved to do so.
In December 2005, Microsoft provided technical documentation and offered to license source code to developers. Developers dismissed the documentation offered as being too general in nature to be of use, while regulators saw the source code offer going well beyond its request for “complete and accurate technical documentation” as requested.
Microsoft had requested more time to respond to the Commission’s request for a response to its Statement of Objections; the Commission rejected that request last week, which drew a much different response from Gutierrez in CBR Online:
“Last week the Commission said it was premature for Microsoft to allege they are riding roughshod over our rights of defense,” said Gutierrez. “Today we are less than a week away from the deadline for filing our response and have been denied access to the complete file, so I suppose it is now official and they are indeed riding roughshod over our defense rights.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
