View Full Version : Microsoft may face $5 Million a day fine
PS Gamer
03-22-2005, 21:38
Microsoft may face $5 million fine a day
Regulators gird their loins
By INQUIRER staff: Monday 21 March 2005, 08:01
A REPORT in today's Wall Street Journal claimed European regulators of monopolies are to decide soon whether to fine Microsoft $5 million a day for failing to comply with antitrust sanctions.
The article claimed that the European Commission is taking advice from the Free Software Foundation of Europe which alleges Microsoft is putting obstacles in the way to its software code.
It said it has seen a letter from the ginger group to the commissioners claiming that Microsoft is creating its own terms on how it complies with the EC sanctions.
The antitrust regulators have the power to levy five per cent of Microsoft worldwide sales a day, said the Journal, in this article.
* MEANWHILE Microsoft said in a statement that it has expanded its Shared Source Initiative to seven more countries in the European Union. The code will be provided to some companies, OEMs, system integrators, and academic institutions in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.
An MS representative said: "Transparency leads to greater trust and opportunity.
Hmm, I wonder if this will fall through....and will it hurt any game development?
Here's the article: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21979
Nope, won't affect game development at all.
MS profits over $10 Billion per year right now. It looks likely to break upwards of $12 Billion per year by end of fiscal year 2006.
That fine does not even equate to $2 Billion per year.
Se7enwolf
03-23-2005, 01:52
It could very much hurt them since they put money towards differnt parts of the company
I would agree, if this was a big enough fine to put them in the Red. But it doesn't even come close.
Back in the day when MS was only making about $1 Billion a year in profit the US government fined them $1 Million a day. That didn't affect them either.
One guy at slashdot had a very intresting idea, that the European Comision should take the money from MS's fines and donate them into open source development. :D :D :D
While good in theory, there is a problem with that logic.
That would be a government or government entity unfairly funding a competing organization in the world market.
While it is fair for Governments to fund Software research in education, which usually is open source, or decide to exclusively use open source, they cannot directly fund the development of open source technology to try to hurt a Corporation on the world market.
While good in theory, there is a problem with that logic.
That would be a government or government entity unfairly funding a competing organization in the world market.
While it is fair for Governments to fund Software research in education, which usually is open source, or decide to exclusively use open source, they cannot directly fund the development of open source technology to try to hurt a Corporation on the world market.
But, this is Europe that we're talking about here. That sort of thing would be okay under their semi-socialist governments.
Epsilon-Zero
03-23-2005, 03:09
microsoft always fights these things anyway. they have lawyers around the clock working. most of these cases are brought up by free source activists looking to get their name out.
While good in theory, there is a problem with that logic.
That would be a government or government entity unfairly funding a competing organization in the world market.
While it is fair for Governments to fund Software research in education, which usually is open source, or decide to exclusively use open source, they cannot directly fund the development of open source technology to try to hurt a Corporation on the world market.
But, this is Europe that we're talking about here. That sort of thing would be okay under their semi-socialist governments.
it's much simpler than that, the anti-trust law was voted to fight the american multinational mega corporations like MS, do we want the american corporations to take our money and put out of business our (european) corporations? hell no, so vote a law to either forbit them from achieving their goals of monopolising our markets or make it at least very hard for them to do so, that's the bottom line of the european anti-trust law, it also applies to the european corporations as well but it was not made with the european corporations in mind, the target was clearly the american ones.
TheSpinningCube
04-08-2005, 14:24
I know this a bit off-topic, but what happened to the ruling by the European Commision where they fined MS something like $3Bn, for putting thier own software into windows, which was deemed unfair to the competition.
still ongoing and it was a $500 Million fine give or take.
Now that's what I call tag team! :D Great work!
heerokenshin
11-16-2006, 10:09
sounds kinky
sounds kinky
Go to bed.
:wink:
Go to bed.
Yeah...ya weirdo, lol.
Thanks Kieran. 8)
Oh and on a side note, I edited that feature article. Lots of errors that I felt like fixing and since a buh-jillion people are viewing that, I figured I should correct some things here and there. That, and the fact that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing I didn't satisfy my Grammar Nazi OCD.