EU drops Microsoft anti-trust case

The European Union is to drop anti-trust charges against Microsoft after the company agreed to give Windows users a choice of up to 12 other web browsers.

Under the terms of the deal with regulators, Microsoft will avoid further EU fines if it provides a pop-up screen that lets European users - from March - replace Microsoft's Internet Explorer or add another browser such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome.

This will also allow computer manufacturers to ship PCs without Internet Explorer in Europe.

Neelie Kroes, the EU's competition commissioner, said it was an "early Christmas present for more than hundreds of millions of Europeans" who stood to benefit from having "effective and unbiased choice" between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and competing browsers.

"The (European) Commission has resolved a serious competition concern for a key market for the development of the internet," she told reporters.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said the company was pleased with "final resolution of several long-standing competition law issues in Europe" and looked forward to building "on the dialogue and trust that has been established between Microsoft and the Commission".

Microsoft is not out of the woods yet though, as it was warned it can still be fined up to 10% of yearly global turnover without regulators having to prove their case if it doesn't stick to this commitment for the next five years.

The deal comes after more than a decade of EU anti-trust action against the world's biggest software company.

Ms Kroes also warned that she was still looking at complaints from software rivals that the company wasn't sharing key information that help others make products compatible with Microsoft software.

In January, the EU charged Microsoft with monopoly abuse for tying its browser, Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system software used on most desktop computers - this, they said, was an "artificial distribution advantage" that rivals didn't have.

Press Association

about time Microsoft gave in on this one.