The commitment to offer the browser choice was agreed in late 2009, as part of a settlement with the EC of charges Microsoft violated competition law. Microsoft agreed to make available for five years (until 2014) in the European Economic Area a "choice screen" enabling users of Windows to choose in an informed and unbiased manner which web browser(s) they wanted to install in addition to, or instead of, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The EC opened proceedings to investigate the potential non-compliance with the browser choice commitments in July.
Microsoft said in response to the latest EC move that it "moved quickly to address this problem as soon as we became aware of it" and has since taken steps to improve its internal procedures. The company apologized for the "mistake" and said it will continue to cooperate fully with the commission. It has four weeks to respond to the statement of objections, after which the EC will decide whether to levy fines.
European competition commissioner Joaquin Alumia said in a statement that the EC has already warned Microsoft about its upcoming Windows 8 release and how it should not pose any problems for consumers to use a different browser. He added that competitors had raised concerns about other areas of compliance by Microsoft, but the EC decided that further investigation of these was not warranted.
