Europe's antitrust agency had put Microsoft on the honor system, letting the company monitor its own compliance with a 2009 settlement that required it to offer other browsers to Windows users, the EU's top regulator admitted.
That eventually led to the Brussels-based European Commission slapping a $732 million fine on Microsoft today.
"The reports we were receiving had not signaled us of this breach," said Joaquin Almunia, the head of the antitrust agency, when asked how the oversight went undetected for over a year.
Those reports, it turned out, were coming from Microsoft. "We trusted in the reports on the compliance [from Microsoft]," said Almunia. "We were not trying to explore Windows Service Pack 1. But maybe we should have tried to complement their reports."
He admitted the Commission may have made a mistake letting Microsoft police itself, rather than appointing an external overseer. "In 2009, we were even more naive than today," Almunia added. He also suggested that the agency would change how it monitors deals struck in the future.
The 2009 agreement required Microsoft to show European Windows users a browser ballot, a screen that displayed download links to rivals' browsers, including Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera.
But Microsoft made what it has repeatedly called a "technical error" when it omitted the ballot from Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) for 14 months, from May 2011 until July 2012. Approximately 15.3 million users did not see the ballot as intended, said Almunia.
One U.S. antitrust expert struggled to understand why EU regulators let Microsoft supervise itself.
"The Federal Trade Commission, where I used to work, has an entire compliance department, with lawyers and economists, to make sure orders are complied with," said Robert Lande, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and director of the American Antitrust Institute. "That's kind of elementary. It's not rocket science."
Lande also blasted the Commission for allowing a repeat offender to police itself. "Why would you put a three-time offender on the honor system?" Lande asked, referring to other antitrust actions against Microsoft, both in the U.S. and in the EU, that have resulted in billions in fines.
Today, Microsoft reiterated what it has said since mid-2012. "We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it," the company said in a statement. "We provided the Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake -- or anything similar -- in the future."
Microsoft's quick admission of the omission, multiple apologies, and cooperation with the EU authorities, were factors Almunia took into consideration when deciding on a fine, he said today.
According to Microsoft, the browser ballot was left out of Windows 7 SP1 when an engineering team forgot to update code that distributed the choice screen.
Microsoft did not report the oversight to the Commission: As late as December 2011, months after the ballot stopped being shown, Microsoft reported that everything was fine. Instead, an unnamed complainant alerted the EU. Almunia has declined to identify the complaint's origin, but one possible suspect is Mozilla, which has been the most vocal of all of Microsoft's browser rivals about its practices.
Lande thought the explanation incredulous. "You can't say it's accidental for 15 months," he argued today. "Microsoft says it was a technical glitch, okay, one month, I understand, you left it out of a batch. But not for 15 months. That doesn't look like an accident to me."
