Microsoft has not quite rehabilitated itself after a decade of court oversight. That’s the essence of a federal court’s decision Tuesday to extend for two years a consent decree that Microsoft has been operating under for 10 years.

The decree included a wide-ranging set of remedies intended to give competitors a level playing field and was slated to expire in December. The Justice office sided with Microsoft in asking that the settlement be allowed to expire.

But 10 states led by California and New York asked Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to extend the agreement to 2012. The two-year extension to 2010 represents a middle ground taken by the court.

Documentation Failure

The key reason for the extension, the judge wrote in a 78-page opinion, was Microsoft’s failure to supply documentation for the communications protocols it agreed to license to competitors.

“The court’s decision in that matter is based upon the extreme and unexpected delay in the availability of complete,

accurate, and useable technical documentation relating to the communications protocols,” Kollar-Kotelly said. “The court concludes that the moving states have met their burden of establishing that that delay constitutes changed circumstances, which have prevented the final judgments from achieving their principal objectives.”

Microsoft had been expected to produce the documentation available by February 2003 at the latest. But “More than five years later, the technical documentation … is still not available to licensees in a complete, usable and certifiably accurate design,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

Not a Sanction

Microsoft and the states had already agreed to extend the documentation portion of the agreement to Nov. 12, 2009. But Kollar-Kotelly decided that without the documentation in place, none of the other provisions have had a chance to work. The court appears to view the entire settlement as a package to repair the harm that Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior inflicted on the market.

But the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News