The EU threatened to increase the penalty of Microsoft

The European Commission has increased pressure on Microsoft yesterday, warning that there will be new fines and accusing Microsoft of "repeatedly resisting" its three-year-old ruling.

The European Commission believes that Microsoft has set a high price to "unreasonable" for server software development, causing frustration among rivals. Meanwhile, Microsoft leisurely added market share.

" During the 50 years of European antitrust history, this was the first time we had to face a company that did not comply with the decision made by the Commission ," European Commission representative Jonathan Todd said. comment.

Source: Reuters Todd said the cause of the long-running controversy was largely because of Microsoft's behavior. " This is a company that gives itself the right to not follow any antitrust judgment ."

However, Microsoft 's main lawyer, Brad Smith, said that the penalties and problems that the company faces in Europe are "unlike".

" We have complied with antitrust laws on all five continents over the past 15 years and have never experienced these kinds of problems ." Microsoft will have 4 weeks to respond to these allegations.

Patent protection

In March 2004, the European Commission announced a record penalty of up to 497 million euros for Microsoft, and ordered the company to immediately change its business model. The committee concluded that Microsoft did not provide information to other server software vendors, with the intention of limiting competition.

For its part, Microsoft says it will charge this information, because they are based on their own inventions and inventions and are protected by patents.

However, until yesterday, the European Commission still said that business information is not "normal", whether it is by patent registration or not. " I will enforce formal measures to ensure that Microsoft complies with the Commission's decision ," the EU president said.

In response, Microsoft said the price they applied to software information was 30% lower than the market average. Meanwhile, the Commission's Todd representative said no Microsoft competitor paid for the information, because the price was too exorbitant.

" Since the Commission's decision so far, Microsoft's market share in the small business server market has grown by 75%, " Todd said. Most likely, the EU will apply a daily penalty from December 16, 2005 back here. If true, Microsoft will have to pay hundreds of millions of euros.

The money will stack on the 280.5 million euro judgment imposed by the EU last July, when it concluded that Microsoft " did not explicitly instruct how to use server protocols ". That is not including the record fine in 2004.

Trong Cam