Microsoft opened a new front on Wednesday in its six-year war with the European Commission by insisting that it has fully complied with the 2004 anti-monopoly ruling imposed by Brussels and accusing it of ignoring evidence and denying due process.
The defiant response by the world’s biggest software group to the commission’s charge of non-compliance brings closer the threat of daily fines of up to â,¬2-million — backdated to mid-December — and the prospect of a new legal battle.
Brussels, whose stance has stiffened in the past few weeks, has accused the software group of failing to provide ”complete and accurate” interface documents enabling rival workgroup servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs.
On Wednesday night, the commission said it alone would determine compliance and cast serious doubt on the claims, insisting that Microsoft had provided new documents late and these were not much different from earlier ones. It also suggested that the offer to open up the Windows source code might not be enough to ensure full compliance and needed to be explained.
Microsoft lodged its formal response to the allegations of non-compliance issued on December 22 just eight hours before Wednesday’s deadline and called for the threat of fines to be lifted. It accused Brussels of ignoring evidence ”in its haste to attack the company’s compliance”.
It confirmed that it wants an oral hearing on the allegations before national competition authorities and senior European Union officials — a process that delays the imposition of penalties and may not be complete until just before the Court of First Instance, Europe’s second-highest court, in April hears the company’s appeal against a record â,¬497-million fine for abuse of dominance.
In a hardening of attitudes, Microsoft backed its assertion of compliance by filing a 49-page report from five unnamed computer-science professors in Britain and Germany backing its case. ”These are very, very credible scientists,” it said.
Their evidence flatly rebutted the view of Professor Neil Barrett, an independent British trustee approved by both sides, that Microsoft’s interoperability information was ”totally unfit at this stage for its intended purpose”.
Barrett and the EU officials handling the Microsoft case visited the Redmond headquarters of the software group in Washington state last month to examine more fully the technical documents and parts of the source code behind the Windows operating system the group offered to disclose in an effort to comply with the 2004 decision.
They are known to have returned unconvinced while Microsoft’s opponents in the open-source software community dismissed the source-code offer as ”largely irrelevant”.
Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said it was ”like asking to learn Russian and being handed Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original”. He accused Microsoft of ”always playing for time, delaying, stalling and wiggling out of its obligations”.
But the group said staff and contractors had spent 30 000 hours creating 12 000 pages of documents and offered licensees 500 hours of free technical support. — Guardian Unlimited Â