Brussels, 10/05/2002 (Agence Europe) - According to the Friday edition of the British daily The Financial Times, the European Commission is considering adopting a hard line toward Microsoft by forcing it to answer its requirements, which would force it to undertake radical changes at the production and sales level of the Windows operating system. After three years of investigations into the case, the Commission's competition services are in the process of examining a large range of measures aiming to dissuade Microsoft from abusing its dominant position in the software market. Hard measures, reports the daily, which nevertheless adds that no final decision has yet been taken. The measures envisaged would force Bill Gates' company to radically revise its production and sales methods for the Windows operating system and for the Media Player software. More specifically, the Commission could call on Microsoft to separate the Media Player from Windows. Plaintiffs in the case, lead by AOL Time Warner, feel that the incorporation of Media Player into Windows as a standard for the latter confers upon it an unfair and disloyal advantage over the competing programmes such as real Player. One of the solutions being studied in Brussels would be to allow computer manufacturers to chose between a Windows system offering Media Player and a Windows without Media Player. Such a requirement would thus force Microsoft to produce a lightened version of Windows, which the companies fears, calling in favour of a similar arrangement to that concluded with the United States government and certain States, arrangement that allows computer manufacturers to remove the Media Player icon from the computer desktop without removing the entirety of the programme. The measures considered by Brussels would thus go beyond what the United States competition authorities required from Microsoft, underlines The Financial Times, which does not hesitate from raising a possible degradation in relations between the European and American competition authorities. All the more so that the Commission is also considering requiring that Microsoft provide a significant amount of technical information to competitors.