Microsoft failed to comply with a requirement of a legal settlement, so they are obligated to pay the fine. I doubt anyone here has reservations with that point because it's simply an artifact of the rule of law.

However, the reason several of us find this news disturbing is that we found the original judgment disturbing and the fine reminds that the judgment's settlement requirements are still in play even though, with every passing day, they become more anachronistic. A reminder of a slow-moving government interfering with and not understanding technology to the point of actually damaging technology in the long-term.

The market and technological evolution meted justice to Microsoft in a purer form: loss of market share via improved competition.

I am a fan of Mozilla (by which I mean the lineage of Netscape and Mozilla). I had deeply mixed feelings when the US Department of Justice went after Microsoft for attempting to coerce Windows users into also using Internet Explorer. They made it especially easy to use Internet Explorer, sure. They encouraged naive users to think "Internet Explorer" simply was the Internet, sure. But they never once prohibited me from installing Netscape, Mozilla Suite, or Firefox.

Moreover, they never prohibited me from encouraging friends and family to do the same. If those friends and family rejected my recommendation it wasn't because Microsoft was being anti-competitive; it was because at the time Mozilla was genuinely not-so-great. It was my preference but not everyone's. Still, I considered it my duty, in a manner of speaking, to support Mozilla at all costs because Microsoft was evil.

Yes, I considered Microsoft to be an "evil" (using the word in a very lightweight way) actor in the market. I didn't like how Mozilla was being treated. But on the other hand, I don't feel that anything they did should be considered illegal. If I recall, the only thing I found especially distasteful was how difficult they made it to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the Windows desktop. Like "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer," it required a bit more force.

I also didn't like how even after I installed Mozilla, IE would come up in odd places like applications' help files. So I couldn't outright uninstall it. But flipped around, and reviewed with a modern eye, they were incorporating HTML rendering into non-browsing contexts well before most of us decided that, yeah, HTML is probably a decent platform for rendering styled text in a variety of contexts. Might as well embed an HTML rendering control. We just didn't like that it was IE's Trident (or whatever it was called back then). We wanted it to be Gecko, or later Webkit.

I am convinced that Microsoft slowed down and all but paused their browser development effort with IE 6 at least in part thanks to the legal pressures they were facing from the US and EU. I know that had I been at the Microsoft helm, I'd consider the web browser somewhat tainted and would try to focus engineering and sales efforts somewhere else where my organization wasn't feeling as much government heat, deserved or otherwise.

Years later, I think, they decided to test the waters again, slowly at first. Eventually they awakened to the fact that Internet Explorer had been completely eclipsed during that time, and it has taken them years to catch up. Some would argue that IE 10 is only today roughly at feature parity with its competition.

When you and I bad-mouth Internet Explorer 6, I recommend we direct at least a portion of our vitriol at the DOJ and EU. If I am right that Microsoft's seizing up of browser development was motivated even in part by their legal troubles, then the DOJ and EU are partially and indirectly responsible for the IE 6 malaise. Government meddling, I believe, actually made the situation worse for us.

But the EU insists on continuing to meddle, to continue punishing Microsoft even though the rest of the market looks on and laughs.

When people say, "why aren't they going after Apple for iOS?" I hope they are being rhetorical. That would be awful. The DOJ and EU should not go after either organization. When one perceives monopoly, it's important to be as serious and objective as possible: is it possible that the preferred product is actually the best for customers, even if for reasons we don't agree with, such as ease of use? Allow the market to sort itself out. The market is doing really quite well without the meddling--at least among those who have avoided it--so, thank you, but no thank you.