In an interview with the New York Times, Ms Kroes said the competition commission had received a number of informal complaints against Microsoft’s bundling of applications since she took office in November 2004.
European Commission spokesperson, Jonathan Todd, confirmed that the competition commission is considering the complaints but said that no decision has been taken on a course of action, adding that the commission does not have to wait for formal complaints to take action against a company it suspects of anti-competitive behavior. Neither Ms Kroes nor Mr Todd revealed any details of the new complaints.
Microsoft is in the process of appealing a record E497.2m ($613m) fine and other remedies imposed by Mario Monti, Ms Kroes’ predecessor as EC competition commissioner. In June, Microsoft launched a version of its Windows XP operating system without Windows Media Player, but conforming to other sanctions has not been as smooth.
The company had risked being fined 5% of its daily global sales after the commission become frustrated with its previous efforts to comply with the EC’s interoperability antitrust sanctions and, although an agreement was reached in June, the two sides still cannot agree on whether interoperability information should be made available to open source software suppliers.
Ms Kroes has declared herself determined that open source developers should have access to the information, and Microsoft appealed to the Court of First Instance recently to get a legal decision on whether it should be required to share communications source code with open source software vendors.
Microsoft’s appeal against the antitrust ruling as a whole is still ongoing and will be heard by the European Court of First Instance’s Grand Chamber. A final ruling is not expected until 2006 at the earliest.
