For US tech giants, massive antitrust fines matter less than being ordered to change the way they do business, according to the European Union official who pushed through landmark decisions against Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp and Google.

While a €1.06bil fine for Intel in 2009 sent a “big message” to Silicon Valley, levying such costs isn’t the most important thing regulators can do, said Cecilio Madero Villarejo, who retired last month from his role as a deputy director-general in the European Commission’s competition authority.

“The number doesn’t matter - what they care about, these companies, is that you declared them as having violated the law,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “What they hate” are “remedies we impose”.

The Spanish lawyer said the EU withstood immense pressure from the US and intense company lobbying to reach its current status as the technology industry’s most feared antitrust regulator. Without an early win against Microsoft 16 years ago, Madero said “it would be 100% unimaginable” that competition and digital commissioner Margrethe Vestager would now be poised to impose tough new rules on American platforms.

“The regulation that we are now preparing is extremely ambitious and it’s going to happen,” he said.

In a historic decision in March 2004, regulators slapped Microsoft with a then-record €497mil penalty, finding that it unfairly tied its media software to its ubiquitous operating system and hampered rivals by withholding information needed for their servers to work with Windows.

Getting there wasn’t easy. Madero, 64, said he picked up a “half-dead” complaint from Sun Microsystems when he became head of an antitrust unit focusing on technology. The bets were against the EU ever managing to overcome a Microsoft “tsunami” of technical discussions.

US officials also exerted influence ahead of the decision. Madero described getting an “ultimatum” from the US Department of Justice’s Renata Hesse during otherwise friendly talks in San Francisco.

The company tried to dissuade the EU’s team and “until the very last moment I thought that they will manage to force us to settle like they had forced the DOJ”, Madero said.

‘Outstanding’ cooperation

Hesse declined to comment about the meeting, saying her close working relationship with him on Microsoft led to “outstanding” cooperation.

Microsoft had no comment beyond pointing to a book by its top lawyer Brad Smith in which he calls its clashes with regulators at home and abroad in that period a “painful experience” where the company learned to “look in the mirror”.

Its failed appeal in 2007 emboldened the EU, as complaints came in aimed at the likes of Intel, Qualcomm Inc and Google.

Without that court victory for the EU, Madero said antitrust enforcement would have been closed down. It helped “set the patterns of conduct for antitrust authorities around the world”, he said.

Qualcomm didn’t respond to a request for comment, while the other two companies declined to comment.

 - Bloomberg