Court upholds Microsoft EU antitrust ruling

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A European Union (EU) court has upheld most of the 2004 European Commission (EC) ruling that Microsoft abused its position of market dominance.

The ruling, delivered in Luxembourg this morning, finally quashes an appeal launched by Microsoft in an attempt to stave off its knock-on affects on the way it does business, as well as to avoid paying the €497 million (£343-million) fine - the highest ever single fine handed out by the EC - imposed on it at the time of the original judgement.

The following statement was issued: "The Court of First Instance essentially upholds the Commission's decision finding that Microsoft abused its dominant position."

But the Court did not go so far as to uphold the original judgement in its entirety. Most significantly, it has ruled the parts of the judgement that related to appointing a monitoring trustee should be annulled.

It did, however, uphold the main parts of the judgement: "The Court considers that the Commission was correct to conclude that the work group server operating systems of Microsoft's competitors must be able to interoperate with Windows domain architecture on an equal footing with Windows operating systems if they are to be capable of being marketed viably."

The original ruling against Microsoft came on 23 March 2004, when it was judged to have infringed Article 82 of the EC Treaty.

The EC accused the software giant of abusing its market dominant position because of its refusal to share information with work group server operating system market competitors between 1998 and the date of the ruling that would facilitate the development and distribution of rival products. The judgement forced it to share relevant communication protocol specifications with rivals.

The 2004 ruling also found that Microsoft had asserted unfair dominance in bundling its Windows Media Player with its Windows operating system, ruling that the company should offer a version of its PC software without it in future.

Microsoft launched its appeal against the ruling in June 2004, claiming in large part that the ruling would infringe its intellectual property rights by forcing it to share interoperability information.

Since then, and before the appeal was heard, the EC has threatened the company with even higher fines after protests from competitors that it had was not sharing sufficient code in the spirit of the interoperability ruling.

And the EC earlier this year warned of yet more fines for charging rivals too high a price for sharing code.

"This decision establishes principles for the behaviour of this company. Microsoft should now finally comply with the Commission decision on operability," lawyer Thomas Vinje said in an article published by newswire Reuters.

The European Court of First Instance is the EU's second highest court, made up of a panel of 13 judges. However, even the ruling of this court is unlikely to be the end of the matter.

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