Microsoft feels the deadline heat

The software giant, Microsoft’s deadline to comply with remedies imposed for violating antitrust laws is inching closer.

Microsoft has just eight days to comply, the European Union’s competetion chief said on Monday.

Microsoft could be fined upto $ 5 million daily for failure to comply with sanctions imposed on it last year in a landmark antitrust case.

Asked whether she could open proceedings to fine Microsoft from June 1, Kroes said: "It is to premature to say that."

The Commission, which polices competition in the 25-nation European Union, fined the U.S. software giant a record 497 million euros ($ 654.9 million) on March 24, 2004, and ordered it to change the way it does business.

Kroes said she had agreed on the May deadline at a meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last month, convened to seek a breakthrough in the five-year-old dispute.

Asked to elaborate on the range of possible remedies, Kroes replied: "I promised Steve Ballmer that I wouldn’t discuss in the outside world what we did discuss."

Meanwhile Microsoft has maintained that its extending whatever cooperation it could to resolve the issues. The 2004 ruling required Microsoft to make its ubiquitous Windows operating system available without Windows Media Player, so computer makers could buy alternative software, to play films and music, from RealNetworks and Apple.

It also ordered the company to share information with rival makers of servers used to run printers and retrieve files, an issue known as interoperability. The company was supposed to propose a trustee to monitor its compliance.

"We continue to work hard with the commission to reach an agreement on full compliance with the decision," a spokesman for Microsoft in Brussels said when told of Kroes’ remarks.

If the deal with Kroes falls through, the Commission could decide that Microsoft has taken enough time to comply with the decision and open a new procedure against the firm to fine it for non-compliance.

That would require a formal statement of objections, an advisory committee of EU states and, finally, a decision by the full 25-member European Commission.

But such a procedure could move very quickly, because there is very little that needs proving -- Microsoft so far has not met requirements that it comply with the remedies to the satisfaction of the Commission.

If the Commission moved quickly, it could complete work before its summer recess at the end of July.