European Union Slapped 731 Million US Dollars Fine on Microsoft Corp

The European Union slapped a fine of 561 million Euros or 731 million US dollars on Microsoft Corp on 6 March 2013 for breaking its browser promise. Microsoft Corp failed to offer its customers the choice of the browser, which is why it was slapped with the fine by EU.

In 2009, Microsoft Corp had made a legally binding commitment to make sure that the consumers had their own choice for selecting the browser instead of making the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as their default browser. Now, Microsoft broke that legal commitment, resulting in fine. Investigation conducted by EU found out that Microsoft did not follow the legal obligation between May 2011 July 2012, which meant that around 15 million users did not even know about a choice of the browser.

This is for the first time that European Commission; the EU's antitrust authority fined any company for not complying with the agreed commitments. It could also have resulted in the fine of 10 percent of global turnover of Microsoft or around 7.9 billion US dollars approximately.

It is important to note that Google too is in dispute with the European Commission over ranking of the search engine results.