They've reached a settlement equal to a slap on the wrist. They've agreed to share their API with third parties and a couple of people to verify that for a couple of years (it expired in 2007).
So basically nothing.
So basically nothing.
Umm..no.
IE could now be un-installed on Windows.
After various settlement fines in the US with several parties, the EU took it further and also leveraged its largest anti-trust penalty of that era. (~1 billion)
Microsoft were forced to share ALL their earlier private computing API's as open specs. MS word, excel formats, SMB, etc. This was amazing and resulting in several OSS libraries.
Why is this important?
That being said, I didn't know much about computers back then, so I probably messed up somewhere.