MS Claims EU Antitrust Malfeasance

Microsoft called the European Union on the carpet Wednesday, arguing that the EU was ignoring "critical evidence in its haste to attack the company’s compliance." The statement was part of a 75-page response to charges that the company was not complying with a 2004 European Commission antitrust decision.

The company was mandated to respond to a December statement of objections, the EU's version of a formal indictment. The company was threatened with fines of 2 million euros per day for non-compliance.

Hundreds of employees worked for 30,000 hours to create some 12,000 pages of technical documents, Microsoft said. The company has also agreed to provide 500 hours of technical support and opened up its source code to those who obtain a license to view it.

To back up its claim, a 49-page report from five computer science professors in the United Kingdom and Germany was sent along with the response.

"We believe that [the interoperability information] has provided complete and accurate information, to the extent that this can be reasonably achieved, covering protocols, dependencies and implicit knowledge," the report read.

Microsoft further accused the EU of ignoring evidence and denying the company due process in its decisions. It complained that it was only given several weeks to make requested changes to technical documents when the commission had the documents for several months.

The Redmond company also claimed that the EU did not review changes Microsoft had made to technical documents before issuing its statement of objections.

"When the Commission issued its Statement of Objections on December 21, 2005, the Commission and its experts had not even bothered to read the most recent version of those documents which Microsoft had made available on December 15, 2005," Microsoft's filing states.

As of press time, the European Commission had not responded publicly to Microsoft's filing.