EU Fines for Microsoft Approved, Off the Record

mattaw writes "The Register is carrying a report that all 25 member states of the EU have found Microsoft guilty of non-compliance, off the record. Microsoft is in line for a fine of $2.51 million per day backdated to December 15th 2004 for failing to meet the terms of the EU commission's ruling."

So that's...

[CtrlPhreak]

So roughly that's a year plus 7 months is ~575 days * 2.51 million, that's ONE BILLION DOLLARS! (1,443,250,000) Who let Dr. Evil run Europe?

Thats A LOT of money

[bombboyer]

As of July 5th, 2006: 567 days * 2.51 million per day = $1.423 BILLION Is there any way to avoid this fine?

300 engineers

[1u3hr]

from TFA "I can assure you that we are continuing to work day and night with our 300 dedicated engineers to create documentation which is complete and accurate to satisfy the European Commission."

300 engineers to document some protocols? I could believe 10, maybe 20 could get the job done in a few weeks. How on earth could 300 engineers work together on such a (excuse my ignorance/naivete) trivial job for two years? Hasn't this guy heard of The Mythical Man Month? MS aren't idiots; they've designed the process to fail. They deserve every cent of the fines.

Re:so?

[Salsaman]

I'm all in favor of Microsoft opening some of their interfaces...

That's exactly the point. The EU told Microsoft to do so two years ago, and Microsoft failed to comply. What else should the EU do other than fine Microsoft ? Hold a gun to Bill's head until he's finished writing the documentation ? Put the company executives in jail ?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sad day for America

[rodac]

Some years ago a large swedish company was fined for anti-competitive practises and price dumping on the italian market.

that is a big no-no and they were fined the standard 10% of the annual global revenue.

10% global annual revenue hurts big time if you are a multinational company.

many other european companies have been fined in the same way.

lets add that up...

[indy_Muad'Dib]

2.51 million per day backdated to december 15th

202 days

$507,020,000 USD

plus 2.51 each day til they are im compliance.

thatsa pretty big chunk o cash.

they expect to make 11.5 - 11.7 billion this year, losing 5% is pretty bad.

Re:so?

[Vo0k]

Add three zeros to a million and you get a thousand million.

It's called milliard. At least in most of Europe.

num - US - UK

10^3 - thousand - thousand
10^6 - million - million
10^9 - billion - milliard
10^12 - trillion - billion
10^15 - quadrillion - trillion
10^18 - quintyllion - quadrillion

You need to specify Europe or US when speaking bignum, or you may end up 3 orders of magnitude away from desired goal.
In Poland we say "Microsoft placi 1.4 miliarda dolarow" and nobody mentions billions of dollars that easily.

Re:so?

[OzRoy]

But you don't rent your copy of windows. Forcing them to stop trading will not stop your current copy from working so your computer will not stop on that day. All it will mean is MS won't be able to sell Vista etc in EU countries, something that will hurt MS more than anyone else.

Re:good for the EU

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be kidding. Microsoft is the only one _you_ see on the news probably. The EU is very strict on this sort of things. Have a look at the EU vs Alitalia [nytimes.com] or the EU vs Olympic Airlines [eubusiness.com], or the EU vs BMW and GM [eu.int]. The EU even goes against its own country members if they fail to comply with EU law. No matter how people want to see it, microsoft is not the innocent victim here...

[Offtopic]Congrats to Italy for Barrying Germany 'Squadra Azzurra' Style! I hope you guys lift the cup in the end![/offtopic]

Re:so?

[binkzz]

Just to be a pain, over here in Holland (and several other European countries), it goes:

million -> milliard -> billion -> billiard -> trillion -> trilliard.

It would be correct to use billiard and trilliard in the UK as well, though it's not used.

Reference: http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwo rds/billion [askoxford.com]

Re:so?

[fbjon]

Not only the UK either, that system works in most of Europe. Basically: 10^6 = million; 10^9 = milliard [wikipedia.org], 10^12 = billion, 10^15 = billiard, and so on using the same pattern.

See: long and short scale [wikipedia.org]

Re:so?

[MickDownUnder]

So ... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?

It's not like they have done nothing, they have actually gone to some expense to comply with many of the anti-trust rulings, and information they have been required to produce is available, just not to the satisfaction of the EU's technical/legal advisors.

You can find info on Microsoft's Communication Protocols here [microsoft.com]
There's also a program which gives access to source code specifically trying to appease the EU here [microsoft.com]

I mean it's pretty hard for Microsoft to defend themselves in this circumstance, where the group they are in dispute with is also the judge and jury.

Have you thought perhaps maybe just maybe the EU has decided it'd like a slice of Microsoft war chest and has just decided it'll make up whatever excuse and take some.

Fine backdated to 2005, not 2004

[valentyn]

The headlines are wrong. The fine is retroactive to December 15, 2005.

Re:So that's...

[vidarh]

They'd also have to pull out of the European market, or the EU will simply confiscate any revenues directly from their distributors. Seeing as most larger PC manufacturers bundle Windows for instance, they could easily confiscate that amount just by forcing any of those manufacturers into handing over Microsofts payments.

Non-payment is not an option if they'd like to continue to sell their products to the EU. Seeing as the EU has a population of about 490 million, I kind of doubt that they'd consider a fine like that enough of a reason to pull out.

Re:so?

[Xiroth]

Well, they'd have to break a treaty [wikipedia.org] to do so, so I doubt they'd be willing.

That's as far as I can tell, anyway - admittedly my knowledge on internation politics isn't crash hot.

Re:Sad day for America

[salmacis2]

Perhaps you should do some research [europa.eu] before making insinuations that the EU's decision was based on anti-Americanism or protectionism.

Re:so?

[Sique]

Most european countries don't grant copyrights, they have signed the Berne Convention, which indeed states an inalienable right to the Author of a Work of Art. But this right is bound to the author himself and can not be contracted away (there is no work for hire in the Berne Convention). According to the Berne Convention MS Windows and MS Office would have hundreds and thousands of authors, and it's just for the sake of simplicity that Microsoft can act with power of attorney for those authors, but only for those derivated rights that come from Authorship and are an explicit part of the work contract. So Microsoft would not be allowed to agree to a completely new usage of the Work (e.g. using its binary sequence to generate music scores) for itself, but it would be forced to get the permission from the original authors.

All that said: A signature state of the Berne Convention can NOT suspend copyright.

Re:so?

[GreyPoopon]

So ... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?

No, it's more like Microsoft HASN'T gathered its employees to clearly document interfaces in compliance with the EU ruling.

You can find info on Microsoft's Communication Protocols here

I believe the EU (and Microsoft competitors) already responded to that. The documentation isn't clear enough, and conveniently leaves out many hidden details that continue to provide Microsoft with a competitive advantage.

There's also a program which gives access to source code specifically trying to appease the EU here

And if you read the pages behind the link you provided, you'll see very clearly that the program has ROYALTIES attached to it. It would be acceptable to charge a reasonable one-time fee for technical documentation, but ROYALTIES??

I mean it's pretty hard for Microsoft to defend themselves in this circumstance, where the group they are in dispute with is also the judge and jury.

Not really true. The "judge and jury" has only become part of the dispute because Microsoft has failed to comply with their previous judgement.

Have you thought perhaps maybe just maybe the EU has decided it'd like a slice of Microsoft war chest and has just decided it'll make up whatever excuse and take some.

Have you considered that Microsoft is, as usual, trying to get away with the appearance of compliance while at the same time continuing to milk their own cash cow?

Re:so?

[Haeleth]

Easy. Refuse to honor their IP. All MS copyrights in europe become public domain, all patents are invalid. Done deal.

That would be the nuclear option in the ongoing trade wars with the USA. America would retaliate in kind, and the likely outcome would merely be to increase the rate of economic decline in the West and economic growth in neutral powers such as India and China.

I doubt either the USA or the EU would see this as a beneficial outcome.

Re:So that's...

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the European Union is even the largest economy in the world.

Billions and Billions

[sadtrev]

From an old copy of the OED :

A billion is bi-million which is a million squared (10^12)
A trillion is a trillion which is a million cubed (10^18)
etc.

Sometime in the 1920s American journalists started using billion for a "thousand million" and it caught on. Prior to that the term wasn't commonly used. Sometime in the 1980s the BBC gave in and started to mis-use the term as well. It causes a lot of confusion in the rest of the world (except India, which has its own plethora of names) where they do use the term milliard.

(completely offtopic) The prize money in the TV quiz show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" in Indonesia is 10 Milliard Rupiah.

Re:hmm, free budget money

[Karem Lore]

This is just an ignorant statement. If you think that any of those 25 countries will see any of this money you are very very mistaken. You will probably find that this money will be put into research grants, charitable projects and pay court costs. It is obvious from your statement that you have no idea of how the EU works, what they do and how they do it. You probably have no clue as to the differences between the European Union, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of EU, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the Ombudsman, the European central bank, or the European Economic and Social Commitee.

In fact, I believe the vast majority of people on slashdot have no idea of what the EU is all about, and I would go so far as to say that the majority of UK citizens do not fully understand the system.

If you want to know, check out Europa [europa.eu]

Karem

Re:The Future (thought experiment)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, very insightful.
Apart from the fact that Debian would include several media players and browsers, none of which were produced by themselves and would probably be delighted to include others of sufficient quality. So the monopoly abuse question (which is what the MS issue is all about) would never arise and your example is total bollocks.
Also the fact that anyone is free to take the debian source, make a totally compatable distro and include whatever media players etc. that they like (which can't be done with windows) makes your example double extra mega total bollocks.

I wish I wasn't forced to post as AC (by slashdot's bizarre IP address blocking which seems to exclude entire ranges from logging on for no apparant reason) so I could see if you attempt to justify your amazingly ignorant opinion which always crops up at least once every time the MS/EU issue is discussed.

Re:The Future (thought experiment)

[GotenXiao]

Not relevant. In. The. Slightest. Debian wouldn't be locking you in to using only that free media player and web browser, like MS are.

You have to have IE loaded on your Windows box for it to work. Media Player cannot be removed entirely from the system. MS' protocols are undocumented heaps of proprietary shit.

Hell, it took the Samba team months/years to reverse engineer the protocols Windows uses for networking. How much less time would it have taken if it had been documented? How much closer to 100% compatibility would Wine be if it had full documentation for the Windows APIs?

Re:Sad day for America

[Anspen]

in answer to your question: yes.

Only a few years ago Volkswagen was fined about 450 million for anti-competitive practices

Re:so?

[SillyNickName4me]

It's completely reasonable not to document the full capabilities of a framework or software component.

They have explicitly been ordered by court to document the full capabilities of certain frameworks and protocols. There have been long arguments about it and the judges found that in this case it is completely unreasonable for Microsoft to keep those secret for a huge variety of reasons mostly relating to Microsofts market position and behavior. Had they been reasonable themselves in past times, this would not have happened.

It is completely reasonable to expect a company to comply with the law and court rulings in a territory where they want to do business

Publishing an interface is a big deal, since a published interface is set in stone for eternity.

And if they don't document them properly how are their own products going to work? Oh, and changes can be dealt with by updates to the documentation (silly concept eh?)... Oh, those don't exist? back to square one, how is your own software supposed to implement them..

It's simply good design practice to expose as little information as possible about how to exploit/abuse the internals of a component.

1. Hiding your implementation details is not a design decision, it at best a way to hide the idiocy of your design decisions
2. Keeping interfaces obscure is not helping the non exploitability of Windows at all. Not only is this argument well known to be false (security through obscurity), Microsoft's products also show how consistently it fails in the real world.

So.. the only argument you have there is that it is in itself reasonable for them to want to hide certain information. Too bad that due to their own misbehavior in the past, they are not allowed to hide some information that they'd like to keep hidden. Since they didn't comply, they got fined.

Re:so?

[DrXym]

So you'd rather they ship an empty OS? or include 5 dvds of every single competition that they can legally redistribute? I don't see where theres a better alternative.

A better question is why a full blown media player, music ripper, web browser, or other application should even be considered part of the OS. But if Microsoft are going to ship such things and freeze out the competition, then yes they should be required to ship alternatives on their DVD. Since they have 1.2Gb of space left even on the largest Vista dist, this does not seem unreasonable. Alternatively they could put a very straightforward post-installation step which offers to download their own, or competitor's products from the web or from a supplemental disk.

Neither option is insurmountable or technically challenging.

Re:So that's...

[Isbiten]

Even with this fine, Europe is still an incredible, unbelievable source of profit to Microsoft. Collectively, the second largest economy in the world

Actually it's the largest economy in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Europe an_Union [wikipedia.org]
The European Union has the world's largest economy, slightly larger than that of the United States of America with a 2005 GDP of 12,865,602 million vs. 11,734,300 million (USD figures) (using nominal US Dollar GDP) according to the International Monetary Fund.

Re:This fine is WAY too light.

[tehcyder]

$2.51 million per day is an operating expense, not a fine. Their revenue is $25 million per day

Not sure where you get your figures from, but an additional 10% of your gross sales is a big hit by any standards. Your net profit on $25 million gross a day would only be something like $8 million anyway.

Are you really that stupid, or are you trolling?

[schon]

I can run a mixed Windows and Linux system in either a flat TCP/IP network or a Microsoft style Active Directory. I can even use a Linux box as the DC. How exactly does that not mean "interoperability"?

Because MS does everything in its' power to make it not interoperate.

because offering a peek at the goddamned source code didn't go far enough, right?

No, it didn't. Not when the "peek" meant that you can't actually fscking use anything you might learn from it. If the "offer" didn't include a draconian NDA, then it might have come close.

What great MS spin you have there. You must work for the justice department.

Re:so?

[Criterion]

"Yeah, because offering a peek at the goddamned source code didn't go far enough, right?"

No, because the source code is NOT what was ASKED FOR. How can people not understand this? Go read the halloween papers. You will see why MS went as far as to try giving source instead of actual API documentation, because that is how badly they DON'T WANT to do that, not because they can't, or it's too hard as they say.

Here, feel free to read up on what is actually going on right here...
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html [catb.org]
then maybe you'll see how much of a bully MS actually is. Anything that would put a stop to that has my full approval.

Re:The Harrison Bergeron Principle

[jonored]

The media player issue was phrased in the positive, not in the negative. Not "You must not bundle the Media Player with Windows", but rather "You Must provide a version of Windows that does not include the Media Player." More options to the consumer, not less. They can still sell bundled Windows and Media Player, they just need to sell only Windows, as well.