Brussels, 27/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - In a ruling delivered on Wednesday 27 June (Case T-167/08), the General Court of the EU upheld the Commission's decision of February 2008, imposing a periodic penalty payment on Microsoft for failing to allow its competitors access “on reasonable terms” to interoperability information and to authorise them to use that information to develop and distribute products competing with its own products on the work group server operating systems market (see EUROPE 9611). The Court, however, reduced the amount of the periodic penalty payment from €899 million to €860 million to take account of the fact that the Commission had permitted Microsoft to apply, until 17 September 2007, restrictions concerning the distribution of “open source” products (the date of the General Court ruling T-201/04 upholding the first Commission decision of 2004 against Microsoft for abuse of a dominant position and ordering it to grant access to competitors to the appropriate information “on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” (see EUROPE 8673).
In its ruling of 27 June, the Court rejects all the arguments put forward by Microsoft in support of annulment of the 2008 decision, taking the view that: - given the pricing principles drawn up by Microsoft and the Commission, Microsoft was in a position to assess whether the remuneration rates it was seeking up to 21 October 2007 for granting access to the interoperability information were reasonable for the purposes of the 2004 decision; - application by the Commission of these pricing principles, and in particular the criterion relating to the innovative character of the technologies in question “gives an indication of whether those rates reflect the intrinsic value of a technology rather than its strategic value”, namely the value stemming from the mere ability to interoperate with Microsoft's operating systems; - assessing, as the Commission did, those technologies' innovative character by reference to its constituent elements, namely novelty and inventive step, has as its sole purpose to preclude, as required by the 2004 decision, any remuneration received by Microsoft from reflecting the strategic value of the interoperability information.
Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia welcomed the ruling in a press release. (FG/transl.rt)