The European Commission (EC) has appointed Professor Neil Barrett, a computer scientist, as the Trustee who will provide technical advice to the Commission on issues relating to Microsoft's compliance with the EC 2004 Decision, the EC announced here on Wednesday.

"Professor Barrett will begin his mandate immediately," said the European Union (EU) executive in a press release.

The EC decided in March 2004 that Microsoft Corporation broke the EC Treaty's ban on abuse of monopoly power by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players.

Therefore, the EC decided to impose a fine of 497 million euros (around 596 million US dollars) on Microsoft and required the company to implement remedies as regards both work group server operating systems and media players.

The Decision also foresees a Monitoring Trustee to assist the EC in monitoring Microsoft's compliance with the Decision.

According to the EC decision, the Monitoring Trustee "must be independent of Microsoft, must possess the necessary qualifications to carry out his mandate, and have the possibility to hire expert advisors to assist him in carrying out tasks within his mandate."

The Monitoring Trustee's role is to provide impartial expert advice to the EC on compliance issues, like the interoperability remedy.

In accordance with the terms of the Decision, Microsoft submitted several candidates for the position of Monitoring Trustee.

The EC said it "carefully examined" all candidates in terms of their expertise and impartiality, and determined that Professor Barrett was "the most qualified" to carry out the Monitoring Trustee function.

Source: Xinhua