Microsoft waived its right to a hearing before European antitrust regulators to further answer charges that it failed to offer customers a browser choice screen, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company faces fines in the billions for the blunder.
In a Jan. 24 filing with the SEC, Microsoft noted the ongoing investigation by the European Commission, the EU's antitrust arm, and gave a short status update of the case.
Microsoft waived its right to a hearing before European antitrust regulators to further answer charges that it failed to offer customers a browser choice screen, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company faces fines in the billions for the blunder.
In a Jan. 24 filing with the SEC, Microsoft noted the ongoing investigation by the European Commission, the EU's antitrust arm, and gave a short status update of the case.
"We have provided our written response and waived our right to a hearing," Microsoft said in the Form 10-Q.
Last October, the Commission filed formal charges against Microsoft, saying it had failed to abide by a 2009 agreement requiring Windows to offer consumers a choice of browsers other than Internet Explorer (IE). At that time, the Commission gave Microsoft four weeks to reply to the charges, called a "statement of objections."
Microsoft also had the right to request an oral hearing to respond to the allegations. It was that hearing it waived.
The document filed last week with the SEC did not specify when Microsoft notified the EU of its decision to decline a hearing, or when the Commission might rule.
Microsoft again found itself in antitrust crosshairs last year when the Commission said Microsoft had not displayed a browser choice screen on millions of EU Windows 7 PCs over a year-and-a-half stretch from February 2011 to July 2012.
The company has been required to show the browser choice screen to Windows users in Europe since December 2009, part of a settlement after officials launched an investigation into charges that Microsoft abused its dominant position in the operating system market by tying IE to Windows. The screen offers users alternate browsers, including Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox.
Microsoft quickly admitted it had botched the ballot screen and apologized, but said it had been strictly a "technical error." It also restored the screen to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) users.
In fact, Microsoft could have considerably softened the antitrust blow if it had paid attention to a tip on its own support website just weeks after the ballot screen went missing.
Joaquin Almunia, the EU's top antitrust official, has talked tough when asked about the Microsoft case. "Companies should be deterred from any temptation to renege on their promises or even to neglect their duties," Almunia said during an October 2012 news conference to announce the statement of objections.
But Almunia has also hinted that the fines will not be anywhere near the maximum of nearly $9 billion. By EU law, fines can be as high as 10% of the guilty company's total revenue during the time it violated the law.
