DailyTech - EU Court Orders Microsoft to Pay up Most of Record Fine

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Software EU Court Orders Microsoft to Pay up Most of Record Fine
Jason Mick (Blog) - June 28, 2012 2:57 AM

60 comment(s) - last by tynopik.. on Jul 11 at 10:47 PM

Microsoft is not happy

Operating system giant Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) became the first high profile victim of aggressive European Union antitrust enforcement (but it would not be the last). Slapped with almost $2B USD in fines, the company was lashed for browser bundling and other tactics viewed by the European Commission regulators as anticompetitive.

Microsoft appealed the fine, but the results were less than what it was hoping for. The appeals body -- the General Court of the European Union announced [PDF] this week its decision to cut the €899M fine to a mere €860M ($1.1B USD), a reduction of €39 (~$48M USD).

A Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters it was "disappointed with the court's ruling."

With the appeals exhausted, it now appears Microsoft will have to pay up to preserve the billions in yearly business it gets from the EU. The ruling is the latest setback for Microsoft in Europe.

The company has suffered from plenty of bad PR in Europe in the wake of UK court proceedings which detailed a sexual harassment by managers. The incident led to several resignations and several civil suits, placing Microsoft squarely in the crosshairs of the EU state's active tabloid industry.

Sources: General Court of the EU [PDF], Reuters

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RE: I think I fugred it out...

By Reclaimer77 on 6/28/2012 3:34:35 PM , Rating: -1

Well I guess we can add you to the list of the dumbass wacko's on this.

Is it any coincidence that the same people supporting this EU kangaroo court are some of our more Liberal anti-corporate posters here?

Microsoft is evil because they are "rich". Your thought process never goes past that, does it?

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RE: I think I fugred it out...

By TheJian on 6/29/2012 6:21:31 AM , Rating: 2

If you call me a liberal those be fighting words Rec :) While I hate that the EU is capitalizing on this, the reason they're after them is just. We already convicted them ourselves (rightfully so - they did come damn close to making IE/Media player defacto - and still trying - Bing/Silverlight too - using IE to do most of it...LOL).

I'd shout loudly from the rooftops that we should burn all liberals if I thought it would do any good. :) OK, we should at least thrown them all together on some island so they can try to fund their own crap. My taxes should just go to pot holes etc :) The govt needs to get it's foot out of my arse and keeps it's hands off my money. Obama needs to go to jail with Holder (he lied to congress under oath...). Last time I checked lying under oath (worse as the head of DOJ!) was a FELONY. Obstruction of Justice at this level is the same. Obama has tied himself to a felon that got an agent killed (and who knows how many mexicans have died).

No liberal crap here :) But MS needs to go down with Apple and Intel. Understand I don't really want them out of business, just broken up so they're unable to leverage their ecosystems (OS, appstore, billions to ban products, buying up all the supply of memory just to keep others from getting a product out etc..whatever they use to club companies with). I'm not anti-corp (lower taxes you stupid dems - it creates JOBS! and keeps them from leaving for 0 tax elsewhere). We have no nvidia chipsets thanks to Intel. Intel made Asus sell me an AMD board in a WHITE box...No Asus label at all anywhere on the board for fear of Intel. I bought dozens of white no label boards and sold them as asus for months...LOL. Everyone knew what they were, it was clear from the design etc. But to get an AMD board then from ASUS you had to accept a NO LABEL motherboard in a white box. Thankfully AMD was kicking Intel's A$$ at the time so selling them was easy and even requested by customers. "You got that white box Asus in yet?"...ROFLMAO. I watched BEOS die because of Microsoft. That OS rocked! Back then it could play videos on all sides of a spinning cube at once. That was cool. Winblows couldn't touch that back then. Gobe Productive was a pretty good Office competitor until MS crushed it and Beos. That was one TIGHTLY written OS! No bloat just performance. I still have a copy of both I think. It was freaky fast and powerful on even crappy hardware. We got windows instead which had trouble with ONE video at the time. I was a reseller, but sadly it didn't last long. They couldn't bleed money :) They were awesome people too. I think they only had a dozen people coding it to completion. Amazing.

http://www.amazon.com/BeOS-Bible-Gobe-Productive-B...
Read those comments! Microsoft killed probably one of the best OS' ever written!

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