The European Commission plans to raise the ceiling of future fines on Microsoft to 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day if the company continues to defy an antitrust decision, a diplomatic source said on Monday. He was speaking as European competition regulators met to discuss the amount of a fine the European Union"s executive arm will impose on the software giant for failing to comply with the 2004 decision that it abused its dominant market position.
The Commission declined to comment. This will be the first time the Commission has fined a company for what it sees as defying an order to remedy an abuse. The current ceiling for the fine is 2 million euros a day. The penalty, likely to run into hundreds of millions of euros, comes on top of a record 497 million euro fine the Commission already imposed in its landmark antitrust decision against Microsoft in March 2004.