There is barely concealed delight today in the long corridors of the European Commission. Delight and huge relief.

At stake in this epic courtroom battle was the whole principle of intervention by Brussels regulators to force giant companies with near monopolies to open up their business secrets to rivals — all in the name of fair competition.

Microsoft, which makes about £1 billion dollars profit a month, had unlimited resources to contest rulings by the European Commission in 2004 that forced it to share software codes — so others could make compatible products — and to sell its products separately rather than obliging consumers to buy packages.

In a ruling delivered by judges in Luxembourg in only five minutes, the scale of Microsoft’s defeat was apparent immediately. Not only were the anti-trust rulings by the European Commission deemed appropriate, the record fine of 497 million euros (£345 million) was also upheld and the bulk of costs awarded against Microsoft.

The end result, EU officials believe, should be greater choice and lower prices for consumers as other companies take advantage. The Commission has always maintained that Microsoft’s 95 per cent market share in PC software crushed competition.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has argued all along that such punitive rulings will deter its innovation and invention, if all that happens to a really successful company is that it is forced to hand its winning formula straight to competitors.

Microsoft’s lawyers will therefore be pouring over today’s landmark judgment at the Court of First Instance — Europe’s second-highest court — to see whether an appeal to the European Court of Justice is possible. They have two months and ten days to make their decision, but today sounded shaken by the one-sidedness of the court’s verdict.

While the implications of a defeat for the Commission would have been the effective neutering of its anti-competition department, the ramifications of today’s court victory are less clear. It has established that aggressive action against near-monopoly companies is justified, but there are few organisations as huge and dominant in their fields as Microsoft.

The implications for the company are not just European, but global. It will have to “unbundle” other products and may even cause US regulators to come down harder on Microsoft.

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