The European Commission in Brussels is seeing red over Microsoft’s defiance of the sanctions that were levied against them for their anti-competitive stance. This fine has been imposed in response to Microsoft’s failure to comply with a 2004 EU ruling, and Microsoft’s fine is a now a record figure of 899 million Euros.

This is not the first time Microsoft has been fined. It has been fined on two occasions in March 2004 and July 2006, mounting to 497 million Euros and 280 million Euros respectively.

EU’s main grouse is that Microsoft has used its dominant market position to weed out competitor software makers by linking its own software as default applications. This makes Microsoft the first company in the 50 years of the EU competition policy to be fined for failure to comply with an antitrust decision.