The European Commission - Directorate for Competition has officially dropped its antitrust charges against Microsoft, after Microsoft agreed to provide users of its Windows operating system a choice of web browsers. Under the new deal, Microsoft will avoid future E.C. fines and, from March, consumers will have a choice of up to twelve other web browsers.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has analysed the most important elements that a settlement should contain to allow real competition in the European software market. It has summarised those key points in a letter sent to Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

Microsoft has dropped two outstanding appeals of European antitrust rulings, following the deal struck with the European Commission at the beginning of this week, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

Neelie Kroes, the chair of the European Union's Commission on Competition, has been given a new job that takes her out of the regulatory area and into a less powerful role than the one that netted her so many headlines.

" 'Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards,' is the message of a letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market..."

"The European Commission has fined Microsoft 899 million Euro for anti-competitive behaviour by restricting access to interoperability information through unreasonable royalty payments prior to October 2007. This is in addition previous fines of 497 million Euro and 280 million Euro applied in the same investigation, resulting in a total penalty of 1.676 billion Euro.

«Microsoft is the last company that actively promotes the use of software patents to restrict interoperability. This kind of behaviour has no place in an Internet society where all components should connect seamlessly regardless of their origin,» says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

THE president of the FFII says that he "has just copied the European Commission's video where Neelie Kroes explains that Microsoft can tax competitors with patents." Here is a high-resolution version [MPEG] and the Ogg version below.

"I have always said that open source software developers must be able to take advantage of [the 2004 ruling]: now they can," the Commission's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes boasted in a press release.

In the next seven days, both Microsoft's European Union and United States antitrust cases will reach critical junctures. A routine U.S. hearing tomorrow will likely be anything but routine. Elsewhere, an appeals court will issue a ruling on the validity of Microsoft's adverse antitrust case in Europe.