Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd confirmed in February that
the Commission has the power to impose penalty payments of up to
five percent of Microsoft's average daily turnover. But the
Commission has so far been reluctant to impose fines for failure to
comply that could, based on last year's turnover, amount to around
$5 million a day.
According to reports, the hastily arranged meeting between the
European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes and Microsoft
CEO
Steve Ballmer on Tuesday night was initiated by
Microsoft. The meeting was said to be friendly, but Kroes refused
to compromise on the need for the software giant to comply with the
terms of the Commission decision reached last year.
This found that Microsoft broke competition law by leveraging
its near monopoly in the market for
PC
operating
systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems
and for media players.
The Commission imposed sanctions, ordering Microsoft to give
competitors the specifications (but not the source code) for its
client-to-server and server-to-server communications protocols.
Microsoft was also required to offer an alternative
stripped-down version of Windows to
PC
manufacturers
and when selling directly to end users and it was fined €497
million for abusing its market dominance in the
EU
.
While some progress has been made towards compliance, Microsoft
still has work to do.
"Mrs Kroes said that the Commission expects the decision adopted
in March 2004 to be complied with urgently and in full," said Todd,
according to the
BBC
.
