The European Commission said Wednesday that it no longer needs a full-time monitoring trustee to ensure Microsoft's compliance with its 2004 antitrust decree. Instead it intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants.

The trustee was brought in in 2005 to access the interoperability documentation that Microsoft had been ordered to furnish competitors. The holes in the stuff ignited further recriminations and boosted the fines levied on Microsoft to over $2 billion.

Now the Commission says that "given that the original set of interoperability information has already been documented by Microsoft, increased opportunities through private enforcement provisions in Microsoft's license agreements for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts, and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision, it can reduce surveillance.

Wonder how long this kind of temperance will last. The EC has subsequently brought a new raft of antitrust charges against Microsoft. It current wants Microsoft's browser unbundled from the Windows operating system and the latest report about Windows 7 test versions says Windows 7 will let the user turn IE8 off.