Memory fades quickly, but many will nonetheless remember that back in 2004 the EU hit Microsoft with a $ 613 million dollar antitrust fine. The basic problem? That Microsoft does not share enough information with its rivals to allow interoperability. The ruling required Microsoft to (1) share technical specifications that would enable competitors to build software that would interopt with Microsoft's products and to (2) share source code and allow competitors a version of Windows free of the Windows Media Player.
According to a statement released by the European Commission earlier this month, Microsoft has still not complied with this order. There is considerable debate over whether the new documentation provided by Microsoft provides enough information to allow its competitors to build interoperable software products. The European Commission claims that the documentation "as it stands is unusable," a view echoed by TAEUS Europe, Ltd., a technology consultancy familiar with the case.
This April Microsoft will be appealing the ruling before the European Court of First Instance, but it is unlikely that the ECFI will let Microsoft off the hook. There are, however, a broader set of concerns. One might wonder whether antitrust law is really effective in this context. The original ruling in the EU case was handed down in April of 2004, and now it appears that either (a) Microsoft has deliberately tried to undermine the EC's order by providing insufficient technical documentation or (b) Microsoft has acted in good faith but its competitors have simply not been able to use the technical information Microsoft has provided to produce interoperable software. Whichever theory one finds more plausible, it's hard to ignore the sheer amount of time the compliance process is taking.
And assuming for the moment that Microsoft is engaging deliberately in delay tactics (the Plaintiffs in the domestic case against Microsoft report that "[i]n the substantial majority of cases Microsoft is no longer meeting the Service Level Guidelines ("SLGs") established to measure the timeliness of its initial response to technical documentation issues submitted by the Technical Committee), what kind of teeth does antitrust law really have in the technology space? If Microsoft has decided that stonewalling the antitrust compliance process is the rational thing to do, then, at the end of the day, what does antitrust regulation really do for the consumer?