The EU Commission's Fine on Microsoft - What's Wrong With It? ~pj Updated

Gregg Keizer at ComputerWorld has some legal experts' reactions to the EU Commission's fine on Microsoft for failure to live up to its promises regarding making competing browsers available to users. The consensus is that it's incomprehensible that the Commission left oversight of the matter to Microsoft, who, of course, told them that all was going fine even when it was not:

"The reports we were receiving had not signaled us of this breach," said Joaquin Almunia, the head of the antitrust agency, when asked how the oversight went undetected for over a year.

Those reports, it turned out, were coming from Microsoft. "We trusted in the reports on the compliance [from Microsoft]," said Almunia. "We were not trying to explore Windows Service Pack 1. But maybe we should have tried to complement their reports."

He admitted the Commission may have made a mistake letting Microsoft police itself, rather than appointing an external overseer. "In 2009, we were even more naive than today," Almunia added.

Could be. But that's not the only problem.

What about the fact that in effect Microsoft has been able to "buy" noncompliance? By that I mean, the browser screen was supposed to be made available for 5 years. It wasn't made available for 14 months. Is the browser screen going to be kept in effect 14 months longer than the original cutoff date, to make up for that breach? According to this New York Times article, the date is still 2014. If so, Microsoft makes out like a bandit, once again. I've written to the EU Commission asking them about this issue, and I'll post any reply I receive.

Update: I heard from Maria Madrid, Press Officer: "The formal duration of the commitments has not been extended, but the Commission takes note that Microsoft intends to offer the browser choice screen for an additional period of 15 months after the end of the commitments."