Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice
bbc.co.ukI think more companies should be fined like this, as a percentage of their anual revenue. Except that I would further increase the percentage - up to 50% or even 100%.
It's very simple: citizens go to jail, companies can't; so we have to make them pay, a lot. When fines are a fixed amount, the corporations have to simply earn more by committing the crime than they would have to pay if caught; banks are very adept at playing this game.
Listen, 50 percent or 100 percent of revenues - that easily leaves you with a bankrupt company. That's not in the interest of consumers.
Microsoft was fined around 1 percent of their global sales for a violation of the terms of a kind of a settlement in an old competition case (antitrust case). Microsoft already knew that if they violated the terms they would be fined up to 10 percent of their global revenues: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-09-1941_en.htm?local...
Microsoft mostly complied with the terms of the settlement, but not entirely as the OP describes. In that light the 1 percent fine is probably not way off.
>committing the crime
If a someone in a corporation is actually committing a crime , then, yes they can go to jail.
If they have committed some kind of civil offense or if it's a criminal offense with no jail term attached then they don't go to jail. There's nothing special about corporations that prevent the people in charge from serving jail time.
In many cases, it's much easier to prove that a corporation did something illegal than it is to research who exactly in the corporation was responsible (except for the CEO, of course, but to hold the CEO criminally liable for everything a company does would be too open to abuses).
A primary (if often unstated) function of corporations is to diffuse individual responsibility and accountability.
Decisions -- where they are rational -- become a cost/benefit analysis. If you really want to deter the behavior, the costs have to outweigh the benefits. (Perhaps significantly enough to outweigh various arguments about what the true costs and benefits might be.)
And... this still says nothing about the damage that may have been caused to victims, and compensation for same. (For example, take someone's health away in certain fashions, and no amount of money can replace it.)
Serving time for a purely corporate offence is very very rare. Health and safety negligence is most common, but even the horse war scandal in Europe (where unfit horses were sold as beef and then into ready meals) it's unlikely and people there committed fraud as part of course of business
That's a matter of prosecutorial discretion. The point is they can serve jail time. What's the point of changing the law so that they can be fined 100% of revenue. The same discretion will still apply.
This fine is plain stupid. Why EU doesn't fine Google for the same thing on Android. Android is in a monopoly position in EU and I do not saw any broswer choice screen when I first start my Android phone.
> Android is in a monopoly position in EU
Not even close. It's in a majority position but nowhere near a monopoly.
Although it can probably be considered to be a "dominant position", but then come the next part:
1. Has somebody complained
2. Is "Android" using its dominant position to distort the market
Well, the original ruling may have been stupid and might have become irrelevant by now. But the fine is very reasonable: MS didn't do what the courts ordered it to do. Plain and simple.
Android's 61% market share in Europe is hardly a monopoly:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-raises-market-share-to-5...
The browser choice option was merely one agreed solution to the problem that as owner of the ecosystem (windows) MA was not letting any other browsers in.
The highly competitive marketplace for mobile devices gives you as a consumer a wide variety of choices of operating system, and each operating system (apart iOS) is adjusted by the operator to best fit their idea of market
You can choose devices, you can choose different versions and setups of android. There is a competive market
The fact that its not free as in speech is not the problem (it should be but)
You're seriously confused as to what a monopoly is and what a monopoly implies.
There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly. What is, however, illegal is to abuse your monopoly to keep and extend your monopoly to other domains.
Btw Google / Android isn't near anywhere a monopoly in the smartphone / tablet market.
What would be illegal would be, for example, Google using its search engine to eliminate any mention of the word "Apple" and of the "apple.com" domain or, worse, only allowing access to negative criticism of Apple products. But they aren't doing that (at least not that we know of).
On the contrary MS has been officially judged has being a monopolist abusing its power to try to keep and extend its monopoly. Both in an US judgement and in an European judgement.
Heck, even selling the Xbox at a loss for years and years while living on monopoly money is a dubious way to enter a market (but personally I wouldn't mind if MS faded into irrelevancy and had only its Xbox division doing fine ; )
Google / Android + Chrome is not a monopoly in the same sense that Windows + Internet Explorer isn't neither. Maybe in other ways MS has abused its position, but not in IE. At least in my opinion.
Why? Because IE was a default browser, all the OS have a default browser. Microsoft didn't prohibited anybody from installing another browser.
If we consider that a monopoly and something punishable, then Android + Chrome is another monopoly. In EU, Android has over 61% market share [1]. And every Android comes with its default browser. And as your parent said, I don't see any ballot screen telling me to choose an alternative browser, but Google doesn't keep you from installing other browsers. Is the exact same situation.
[1] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-raises-market-share-to-5...
Actually, Microsoft did contractually prohibit OEMs from pre-installing other browsers and making them the default instead.
Never heard of that. Source?
Mainly the US anti-trust case <http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm>. Example:
> At the same time, Compaq removed the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop of its Presarios and replaced it with a single icon [for Navigator]
>When Microsoft learned of Compaq's plans for the Presario, it informed Compaq that it considered the removal of the MSN and Internet Explorer icons to be a violation of the OPK process by which Compaq had previously agreed to abide. [...] Finally, after months of unsuccessful importunity, Microsoft sent Compaq a letter on May 31, 1996, stating its intention to terminate Compaq's license for Windows 95 if Compaq did not restore the MSN and Internet Explorer icons to their original positions. Compaq's executives opined that their firm could not continue in business for long without a license for Windows, so in June Compaq restored the MSN and IE icons to the Presario desktop.
The whole antitrust case in the States was about that: MS abusing his status to force OEMs not to install another browser.
As gjulianm stated, Android is a monopoly in EU. So I do not see any valid argument that Android should be punished the same way as Microsoft is/was.
> As gjulianm stated, Android is a monopoly in EU.
Android is — at best — in a dominant position, but Android also isn't a monolithic entity.
Then comes the second problem: ignoring the non-monolithic nature of Android where e.g. Samsung and HTC — while all using the same base system — compete with one another) being a natural monopoly (or even in a dominant position) is not illegal, abusing such a position to distort other markets is.
If you are an EU citizen and can make such a case, you should feel free to bring it up to EU competition courts. But you have to make the case first.
So you would send people to jail for not giving dumb users a browser choice that is only going to confuse them anyway?
Laws should be followed. If laws are bad, you should change the laws, not disregard them.
Some laws you have an obligation to not follow.
that is upto the court to deicde, tomp got a point that since companies cannot be jailed, they should be fined a percentage of their revenue!
This case was a percentage of their revenue? But Tom called for 50% or 100% which seems excessive for such a nonsensical law.
I was pointing out a general principle, not this specific case. What I had in mind is stricter punishment for more black-and-white crimes: not paying employee taxes/social contributions, not issuing receipts and thus avoiding sales tax, etc. I'm pretty sure that if fines were this high, compliance would become very high as well.
This fine would only make sense if Microsoft prevented users from installing a different browser.
Consider an analogy: let's say there's a power company who runs a monopoly on generating electricity. They also provide natural gas services to their customers. There is, however, a bunch of other smaller natural gas companies just a phone call away that people can buy natural gas from; all you have to do is call them and have a technician come and flip a switch in your home. Is it really harmful to the consumer if the power company with the dominant market position doesn't give their customers the phone numbers of the companies competing with its natural gas division? No.
You don't understand the context. MS did indeed prevent OEMs from installing another browser; it's like they were forcing house builders (which have to use electricity) to connect only their own gas services to new houses.
And for that sin, MS will keep paying for a long time; they're basically an ATM for the EU now. This is not great but hey, they do have a history; once a felon, forever a felon, so to speak.
But that doesn't fit with the analogy. Downloading and installing a third party browser is next to effortless. Who cares if the OEMs didn't install them? In my analogy the third party gas companies had to send out a technician to install their service, but could presumably do that free of charge to entice the customers to switch to their service.
It still prevented other companies to have similar, competing agreements with house builders, and inflicted extra costs on them. As such, it's clearly an abuse of a monopolistic position in one market to influence another.
In any case, this is not open to debate -- both the American and European justice systems found MS guilty, so that's how it is.
Right, because the American and European justice systems have never gotten it wrong, before.
No. The issue isn't that the end use couldn't install a browser, the issue was that Microsoft forbade OEMs with the threat of removing their distribution license from pre-installing other browsers, thus preventing competition at point of sale. This is anti-trust. It's not a 'stupid' law, it extremely sound. Microsoft, in all reality, should have been broken up as a result, but because the judge mouthed-off (and some heavy lobbying), they were treated more leaniently.
It's completely crazy.
We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time, what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
> It's completely crazy.
There's nothing crazy about it.
> We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time
We've accepted that browsers are necessary, the EU seems to have not accepted an OS natural monopoly can be leveraged into a browser monopoly. Sounds perfectly sane, and a good thing.
> what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
Apple does not have a monopoly marketshare, which lead to the original decision which Microsoft then broke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...
Then why stop at browsers?
Why not do the same thing with AV, audio players, text editors, file browsers, CD/DVD burners, etc... ?
The EU did in fact do the same with media players (Microsoft had to bundle "Windows XP N", a WMP-less version of WXP). The rest has precious little importance in the grand scheme of thing and their regulation is thus pretty pointless.
they did on iOS (for a while). Safari is bundled with iOS
> they did on iOS (for a while).
No. Apple never had a super-majority (or even a majority) of the smartphone marketshare, let alone in the EU where Symbian and BB historically held strong marketshares during iOS's tenure.
iOS's best has been 30~40% in some european country (not even EU-wide). Although it does capture the vast majority of profits, but that's not really relevant to antitrust-type cases.
I believe Samsung currently has a bigger share of the EU market than iOS. There never was a case of monopolistic abuse from apple in the EU, because they never came close to a monopoly.
One has to wonder whether the whole "elitist" strategy from Apple isn't, in fact, a way to avoid the sort of responsibilities Microsoft took on, both towards developers, the "enterprise" community and the wider population.
Apple never had a monopoly in either the tablet or phone market. And it doesn't look like it will.
This fine is the outcome of repeated failures on MS’s part to properly implement court-ordered reparations, rather than a direct fine required by the original judgement.
Yes but the original judgement was wrong too - politically motivated you might say
Yeah, it had the political motivation to uphold the European laws regarding abuses of a monopoly. Evil ...
Got to protect those people who can't figure out how to open IE and download the browser that they really want.
As has been said N times elsewhere, this is about the fact that MS stopped OEMs from bundling other browsers, even though they were allowed to bundle other software.
No politically motivated as in a small European browser maker that't always had the smallest market share on Windows decided to make a complaint over something completely ridiculous i.e. MS bundling a browser with the OS
When Apple have a monopoly, they will be part of these rules as well. As soon as you enters monopoly status in the EU, there is certain rules and regulations that you need to comply with.
> As soon as you enters monopoly status in the EU, there is certain rules and regulations that you need to comply with.
So is it in the US as well.
>We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time
Where? You're making that up.
IE has been bundled in Windows since XP (Win2K even?), Safari has been part of OSX since 2003
Every phone has a browser, and many did before the iPhone launched in 2007 (even if all they had were crappy WAP browsers)
It's only a small percentage of the taxes that Microsoft has dodged, er, "structured away". Microsoft can pay the fine using their cash that's stranded overseas without having to repatriate it back to the US and pay taxes on it.
Here is the European Commission's press release about the decision: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-196_en.htm
Whilst it is Microsoft with bags of money and all that, I don't really see how such a huge fine (even for M$) is warranted.
Yes, they stopped offering the browser choice, but at what point did someone from EU-HQ contact MS-HQ and tell them they'll be fined if they don't put it back in? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually re-instate the "feature" once they were threatened with a huge fine.
It might have been better for Microsoft to have actually been forced to give money to the other browsers to promote their products, or alternatively, just bundle Firefox/Chrome with Windows and be done with it.
There was an explicit order in the previous anti-trust ruling that required it. The ruling stated they could be fined up to 10% of their revenue if they failed to comply. They did not comply. They were fined.
It's not like they weren't told about it first.
They had been threatened a few times before implementing it. It's about time we stopped to play this game and make it clear stuff like that won't be tolerated at all.
It wouldn't have been better for Microsoft. They know very well that each product they establish as a monopoly increases their chance of coming back as an all-around industry leader. Actually, I'd be willing to bet this wasn't a "technical error". I've never seen features just unexpectedly disappear out of any piece of software.
Yes, I stopped obeying the speed limit, but at what point did someone contact me and tell me I'll be fined if I don't stop obeying the speed limit? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually make me obey the speed limit once I were threatened with a huge fine.
Do you think that makes sense?
This thread seems to be heavily flagged, but nobody mentions in their comment that it's irrelevant or that they've downvoted or flagged it. Any of the flaggers would care to share their reasons?
That's about $50 per user believed to have been affected by the error.
It's meant to punish Microsoft for failing to comply with the ruling, rather than compensate other browser-makers for the users potentially lost.
Isn't this the primary difference between civil and criminal law? Additionally, isn't this a civil case? It would seem to me that the entire point of the trail would be to deal with the lost compensation/opportunity cost issue.
It's a high fine, but on the other hand, EU did not ask for much. I am sure MS will spend some more energy on implementing court orders in future.
I understand the premise of the fine, but how is this supposed to help the consumers and businesses who now have to foot the $50 bill per seat?
If MS raises its prices, it will weaken their market position - that's the punishment for their malbehavior.
By that logic no company should ever be fined as it hurts their users.
They probably made much more out of their previous monopoly anyway.
I think the EU should stop collecting taxes and get American tech giants to fund the public service with spurious fines.
EU competition law is a completely different beast from US antitrust law, and whilst I disagree with both forms, the EU definitely suffers from more of a Tall Poppy Syndrome: if you're a market leader with a disproportionate share of the market, it's almost assumed that you're acting in bad faith, and it's up to you to prove you're promoting 'fairness' and 'competition'.
If anything is 'anti-competitive' it's rulings like these, which punish people for producing quality software and increase the uncertainty of doing business in the EU.
There's a good comparison of the two systems over here: http://www.iie.com/publications/chapters_preview/56/10ie1664...
What does this mean for ChromeOS or Firefox OS? I'm seriously curious how the legal system considers them in light of this and why MS hasn't mentioned them (to my knowledge) in their defence.
Neither ChromeOS nor FirefoxOS have a majority market share in the OS market that they use to push competitors out of the browser space. No problems for them.
Simple - they do not have de facto market dominance
When they do and take actions that are detrimental to the proper functioning of a free market they will get fined as well
Microsoft is not evil, not by any normal definition of the word, but they are using power to keep power. That's normal, and that's why anti-trust laws are draconian - something is needed to equalise the odds
That's indeed my thought, why only Microsoft? Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.
> That's indeed my thought, why only Microsoft?
Abuse of a natural monopoly.
> Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.
Stuck at 10% global marketshare (probably below that in the EU), there is no risk Apple will be able to leverage a dominant OS position they don't even remotely have into market distortions in related domains.
I'm sorry but what about the ipod, iPad, iPhone.... Can't remember them giving me the choice of where I want to buy media. This must be a joke?
This still seems rather unfair, why are other proprietary operating systems not obliged to incorporate a similar feature? It's Microsoft own operating system and they should be allowed to incorporate whatever piece of software they'd like, albeit to a reasonable extent.
On the other hand, I do find it weird there are no repercussions like this for Windows' new secure boot "feature".
> why are other proprietary operating systems not obliged to incorporate a similar feature?
Because "proprietary" is irrelevant, the operative word relevant to the original judgement was "monopoly". And more precisely abuse of a natural monopoly.
> It's Microsoft own operating system and they should be allowed to incorporate whatever piece of software they'd like, albeit to a reasonable extent.
If they were sitting at a 10% desktop OS market share that would be the case. But over the last ~150 years, natural monopolies have come to be seen as too dangerous (due to their ability to leverage an essentially impregnable stronghold into dominance in other domains through "legal" market distortions) to be left to play by the normal rules, so many first-world countries have additional rules for monopolistic entities to follow.
In the EU, companies in dominant positions have "a special responsibility not to allow [their] conduct to impair competition on the common market".
In my opinion this sheds some light on Sinofsky's departure. That's quite a fuck-up and it happened on his watch.
Microsoft is stupid for making this mistake but the fine is complete BS in the first place. I think it would make more since to fine them over search engine options since that's where the money is actually made. If someone can explain how money is made off the browser alone then please enlighten me.
Microsoft will probably counter-fine by raising its prices by 1€ in EU. Europe will happily pay for it.
Ah, it's the "Don't upset corporations or they will punish us with infinite price hikes" mantra.
If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!
€1 was just figure of speech. (Still, Governments pay for a ton of Microsoft products; Ms office, Windows, Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint licenses, SQL server licenses etc. etc. How much money do you think Ms makes from EU governments in one year? in 5 years?)
High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.
> High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.
High software prices generally hurt businesses more than individual taxpayers. The 1EUR fine would be a catastrophe for Microsoft's PR, however.
That kind of move would also push a non-trivial population to alternatives (however weak) like Google Docs.
>SQL server The rest I can understand but please tell me this isn't true
If they can raise their prices by x without harming their business, why haven't they done it already?
It harms them, but only in the long term. But if a company is fined, increasing prices is the easiest way to balance the numbers.
Microsoft already started hiking prices for some of the enterprise products, and for now they can afford this.
I disagree with this kind of reaction:
1. I don't think it's useless, when companies raise their price they loose customers so Microsoft will probably be more careful next time.
2. If it is useless in practice, we should change the law but surely not let them do what they want, just because it's useless.
So they fined a company which controls almost entire European Government infrastructure. Company screws up, gets fined, things will continue business as usual, Microsoft still can do whatever they want, at least in the medium term. What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm, they can check the future deals, look for alternatives. Then they can have an upper hand and then no companies would screw up a simple thing like this.
> What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm
Yeah well, fighting IE's monopole is trying to reduce dependecy to Microsoft.
Why don't they start fining car manufacturers for not providing customers with a choice of seats made by other manufactures? Antitrust law in the EU is a load of bs, coming from someone who uninstalls IE first thing after installing Windows.
You're misunderstanding. The problem is that Microsoft is using its OS monopoly to try and create another one. These special anticompetetive triggers only come into effect when the company has a monopoly.
To be more clear, there is noting illegal about HAVING a monopoly. It's what you do WITH a monopoly that matters. If you don't have a monopoly, you're much less restricted with what you can do.
To correct you analogy, it would be if one car company manufactured 90% of the cars and decided to sell the cars with its own tire brand.
Fair, I get you. I still wouldn't have a problem with the corrected analogy. Firstly, I consider the web browser an integral part of an OS even if you have the choice to replace it, so it's not creating a further monopoly, it's just part of the package (just like tires and the body of a car).
But more importantly, problems caused by some monopolies (e.g. extortion), and monopolies themselves, have historically been the RESULT of government intervention. Other web browsers obviously can compete considering IE is not the most widely used browser anymore.
First, let me say that I like Microsoft. I'm a happy Windows user and developer but what they did with IE was wrong and I'm happy someone tried to hold them accountable.
Originally, Netscape was a thriving company and able to make money by selling it's software to consumers. Microsoft crushed them by giving their interferer browser away for free with their Windows monopoly. For many years after that, consumers had a terrible browser with little to no alternatives.
Eventually, web browsers found a way to compete but consumers suffered with the artificially created IE monopoly. Innovation to slow down and even went backwards during those years.
You're looking at the world today as if it was always thriving with choices but MS inflicted many years of damage to consumers by illegally driving out competition and stifling innovation.
It's important for governments to protect competition and prevent monopoly abuse. You might argue that MS got away with killing Netscape because the fine was worth it for them but at least they were stopped from preventing more damage with their monopoly. Who knows what other businesses they would have tried to shut down.
That it is an integral part is relatively unimportant all the time there exists an independent market for it.
Tires are an integral part of cars, yet there is a thriving market for tires. A car manufacturer that got to Microsoft level market share and tried to shut out other tire manufacturers would face the same kind of scrutiny.
Since when couldn't you just open IE and download your browser of choice?
The browser ballot is BS imposed by bureaucrats.
Since human nature meant a substantial percentage of users are uninformed about what is available to them, and this is part of what made Microsoft monopoly abuse possible.
Hold on...
So when a consumer is not aware of XXX, it's Microsoft's fault?
*Substitute XXX for anything you want - alternative browsers, quantum mechanics, his own mortality, etc.
Personally, I think it's the consumer who should accept that responsibility.
Back in the day, Netscape charged for their browser. You couldn't just download your browser, you had to pay. Even though IE wasn't as good, people stuck with it because it was the free option that was already there.
Never mind that even if a browser is free, alternative browsers face substantial friction. Many users don't even understand what a browser actually is.
Or more related, why can Microsoft bundle Paint and Outlook without providing alternate graphic programs and mail clients?
Practically speaking? Because no EU company that sells a paint program or email program has filed a complaint. This action was started by an Opera complaint to the EU -- not because the EU was looking around for things it didn't like.
You "uninstall IE" eh?
For now, it´s "just" browser applications.
Another trip to the Microsoft piggybank.
I wonder what they do with this money actually. Same as is done with tax money?
The money paid to the European Court goes back into the EU budget.
And lowers the amount member states have to pay (it does not increase the budget)
Oh that's an interesting detail. That way the EU doesn't enrich itself but it ensures that such "profits" are equally divided among member states. (Because it all saves them money they would otherwise have had to pay.) Nice to know.
Okay, thanks for the reply
Yep, I it does.
Okay, thanks
Also, my comment didn't make much sense, I must have missed a word or something.
What motivation have Microsoft got to pay this?
The right to continue to do business in the EU? That's what's at stake.
I don't think they can just cut off every Microsoft consultancy, every Windows user and throw them out of the EU.
If they did, I'd be heading to Brussels with a pitchfork along with about 100 other people at my company.
I don't think this has anything to do with companies that offer services around Microsoft products - this will be about the Microsoft subsidiaries and assets located within the EU - there will probably be at least one Microsoft legal entity within each country where they have a direct presence, not to mention significant assets like large data centers.
Which is still an issue for a lot of people who depend on them.
That's an issue those people would need to take up with Microsoft if Microsoft decides to risk their business over this. If they don't pay, they will have assets frozen, just as any other company or individual that refuse to pay their fines. Simple as that.
I know they will back down, but it makes me wonder; what if they didn't?
Could a business, a corporation, go to war against another entity. Countries go to war all the time and while it may be "illegal", it's only the loser that has to suffer the consequences.
What if Microsoft just decided screw it, and flipped a magic switch somewhere and shut down the entire EU infrastructure. No OS, no web servers, no SQL, no sharepoint, etc. Trashing or stealing every bit of data along the way? Freeze Microsofts assets you say? What if they could freeze or steal a great portion of the EUs assets?
Sure, the EU would get over it eventually, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I think it is funny that these types of comments always come up in threads about EU rulings but are never made when it is the US government.
Businesses do go to war regularly against nations. Its pretty much how the mineral, precious stone and oil industries work.
Afghanistan looks like a useless chunk of dirt until you dig some holes.
If Microsoft did it, I'd probably laugh a bit at the irony simply because its how the EU operate.
Unpaid fines continue to grow. Eventually it would perfectly within reason to seize (take) Microsoft's copyright on windows making piracy perfectly legal.
I seriously doubt MS will commit seppuku over a fine. Which is really what scoffing at this would get them.
More than likely, they'll roll out changes to their browser preferences now (that they've been caught red-handed) and maybe include a "browser bundle" that has Firefox, Chrome and IE in newer versions and recommend OEMs deploy the same. Naturally it may still default to IE if the user clicks "next". That way, they can maybe negotiate down the overall sum of the fine saying "hey, sorry we're late, but look! We're doing the changes."
They already have been doing that for a long time. They are in compliance now.
Getting to decide by what means they pay it, rather than have EU courts order some of their assets confiscated.