“European Union regulators are preparing to charge Microsoft for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering the company to offer users of its desktop operating system a choice of web browsers,Reuters is reporting.
The EU opened an investigation into the case back in July, to determine whether Microsoft had kept the commitments it made under the antitrust ruling which stipulated users should be offered a choice of browsers to ensure a more level playing field for competitors to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.
At the time of the investigation Microsoft conceded it had “fallen short” of the ruling — a mea culpa flagged up by EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia in the latest comments on the case.
“The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company’s breach of an agreement. We are working on this,” Reuters quotes Almunia as saying. ”It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement.”
We’ve reached out to Microsoft and the EC for comment and will update once we hear back. Microsoft said its July 2012 statement on browser choice compliance still stands — in which it admits “falling short”, apologizes for doing so and blames the failure on a “technical error”:
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on TwitterDue to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS [browser choice screen] software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7. The BCS software has been delivered as it should have been to PCs running the original version of Windows 7, as well as the relevant versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, while we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”
