The Commission has been increasingly unhappy with the delay in implementing the sanctions, hinting recently that unless progress was made soon it might be forced to impose penalty payments – which could be as high as 5% of Microsoft's average daily turnover.
The regulator finally drew a line in the sand less than two weeks ago, giving Microsoft until the end of May to comply.
Microsoft last night met the deadline, and now has to wait to see if the Commission deems its proposals sufficient – a process that is expected to take until the end of July.
The European Commission found Microsoft guilty of breaking competition law last March, ruling that the software giant had leveraged its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players.
As a sanction, the Commission ordered 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.
Microsoft paid the fine into an escrow account in July 2004, where it will be held until the appeal against the ruling has been resolved – a process that could take up to five years to complete.
