613 millions of US dollars? Wooooh pal, take it easy! The amend that MS has to pay ranks to the top level of the fines ever commited by the commission, but makes perfect sense in the frame of the antitrust laws of Europe. How is the calculation done? It depends on many factors too complicated (and boring) to recall in this place at all.
In this particular case, it was calculated on the company's year incoming , because antitrust law in Europe use this particular value to calculate all the fines. The reasoning to this is quiet simple, if there is an income form an illegal concurrent practice (as the commission stated) it is pretty logical that the fine will be calculated using that income as a parameter.
The highest limit is set to up the 10% of the years revenue of the company. In this particular case, it is around 1,6% of the annual income statement of Microsoft. High? Well, it could have been worst, but fear not, money are not the main point here. Microsoft does have an annual income that is calculated on about 53 billions $ (source "The Economist"), so even if not a breeze, this money haul is something that MS can live with.
No, the real point about the fine is that if you're fined you're guilty of something and thus there is a precedent on which others can work. At the announcement commissar Monti did say that they do not think that there would have been other plaints like this one, but I already have found out that Outlook express, IE and another part of the API are being pointed at by three different companies in plaints that will be deposited shortly. If only the money interest you, be reassured though. For my experience, the appeal court will probably drop the value from 30% to 50% making it more bearable.
Talking business
The second part of the decision regards the time limit of 120 days in which MS has to give away complete documentation regarding protocol of interoperability and communications between the server's interfaces of non Microsoft groups that permits to them to operate with the other side that is thought as being composed by Windows operating server PCs. The documentation has to be updated regularly as the technology evolves; that to permit to competing companies to adjust their softwares accordingly.
This part of decision rose the second best amount of moans and wails, why?
In part for a misunderstanding about the decision itself, that seemed at a first glance to ask for the opening of the code of the communications protocols API's, in part because it seemed that this revealing of information was made as a plain punitive measure more to wound MS than to restore the Law order. Both assessments are wrong, because the measure have nothing to do with the API's actual code but with the mere communication protocol. Let's explain it in an other way. There are two people that looks at a three, both of them are stranger to the other, let's say that one is Japanese and the other is Arab. Both have two sets of languages that roughly expresses the same concepts, in both of them there are the same concepts, but logically expressed with two different languages.
Now let's say there is another person there that speaks Arab but does not speak Japanese. It goes per se that only the Arab could speak with him. Let's also say that both the Arab and the Japanese wants to tell to that person that there is a tree. In both language there is the word tree and the way to name it and describe it, but if that person understands only the Arab, so the Arab just tells "look there is a tree" and the exchange of informations is done. Supposing the Japanese wanted to do the same he could only try alternative ways of communicating the message; those methods are surely less direct that the base message, and will surely take more time and work to be effective and transmit the information.
Translated to technical view it means that if you do not know the language mode, you'll have to use alternative interfaces and retroengineering to put you through your problem and this will take more time and be, surely, less effective. The commission has thus stated that those information permits to MS the effective monopoly of the market, blocking the others competitors to effectively enter the market or get a fair share of it for their work.
Here is the first problem, how does the commission change this situation? The first idea could would have been to simply oblige MS to open the API's code and give them away free. This is plainly ridiculous, because, even if the monopolist, the intellectual property of MS has to be guarded as much as the other competitors, so it would be impossible to ask them to do that, but infringing the UE law on intellectual property. The decision is simple, the only part that Microsoft has to render open are the way the message exchange works.
Not the code, mind me, only the documentation that explains the logical operations that are behind the exchange scheme, permitting to everyone to understand the mechanism and so to create an interface that works for both side, going back to my metaphor, giving the Arab grammar to the Japanese.
Now the second part of the problem, that roughly translates to "Hey, wait a second! I worked for it, do I have to give it free?" the answer is "Nope" the commission states in the next paragraph that if the documentation involves technology that is covered by patent warranty on the EU territory, there will be a meeting with Microsoft to decide an acceptable price for this piece of information. So MS has to sell it, thing that surely isn't pleasurable, because it means the end of one part of their market overhelming strenght, but the fact is that being the monopolist, they are treathed slightly differently from the other competitors.
One last clarification; many software houses like the creators of Samba objected that this would be unfair to the one that actually has gotten around the problem with much work and will. I understand their problem, but this is a wrong conclusion based on two errors. The first one is that none is obliged to buy this piece of information, because it is an expense and thus it cannot be forced on anyone. The second is that the commission did not say anything about retroengineering and alternative ways of solving the problem, accepting the fact that companies had already dealt with the problem.
Long story short, you buy the grammar or you continue to use gestures, but the grammar may NOT be a secret.
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