Brussels (Belgium) – Once more, the European Commission (EC) has launched two formal investigations into competitive practices, alleging that the company may have abused its dominant market position and violated the EC Treaty.

According to memo released by the EC earlier today, the Europe believes that there is reason enough to look into competitive practices of Microsoft again. Following a $683 million fine imposed against the company in March of 2004 and confirmed last September , the EC said it is investigating whether Microsoft refused to disclose interoperability information “across a broad range of products” and whether the integration of the Internet Explorer into Windows promotes “competitive harm” by promoting proprietary technologies.

The Commission claims to have received information that Microsoft failed to disclose interoperability information relating to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and its .NET Framework. It appears that the EC will focus on the Office Open XML introduced with Office 2007 and determine if this file format is “sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products.”

The compatibility complaint came out of a filing by Opera on December 13, which accused Microsoft that the tie-in of Internet Explorer into Windows violates European Union guidelines. Opera noted that the addition of Microsoft-proprietary technologies that have been added to the web browser would reduce compatibility with open internet standards and therefore hinder competition.

Also, The EC said that it has received allegations of “tying of other separate software products by Microsoft, which include the products desktop search and Windows Live. “The Commission's investigation will therefore focus on allegations that a range of products have been unlawfully tied to sales of Microsoft's dominant operating system,” the memo reads.

At this time, Microsoft is not charged with a violation of Article 82 of the EC Treaty. However, the EC noted that, while the Commission has no proof of an infringement, it will be investigating the case as “a matter of priority”.

The EC’s decision to look into information disclosure practices relating to the interoperability of products of Microsoft may come a bit as a surprise, since it was exactly this issue that brought Microsoft a $683 million fine last year. Back then, the conclusions of the EC stated that to supply its competitors with ‘interoperability information’ and to authorize them to use that information to develop and distribute products competing with its own products on the work group server operating system market, between October 1998 and March 2004. As a result, the required Microsoft disclose the ‘specifications’ of its client/server and server/server communication protocols to any undertaking wishing to develop and distribute work group server operating systems as a result of its findings.

We will find out in the coming weeks and months, if this case will repeat itself simply with different products at its focus.