Microsoft: Find a Real Fix
On Tuesday, California sensibly joined eight other states and the District of Columbia in refusing to sign the slap-on-the-wrist antitrust settlement the Bush administration reached with Microsoft last week. Eighteen states and the district had been part of the federal government’s suit against the software giant. The agreement, which requires no substantial change in the company’s business model, is, as an attorney for a competing software company said, “a reward to Microsoft, not a remedy.”
Simply put, the gutless federal settlement if allowed to stand would give Microsoft, which already controls 95% of the world market in PC operating systems, carte blanche to eliminate challengers, effectively staunching the competitive juices that push computer geeks to design software that ordinary people find easy to use.
California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who helped lead the states’ opposition to the settlement, should now work with Bush antitrust head Charles A. James and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to close the most glaring and harmful loopholes that the indisputably smart people at Microsoft were able to slip into the federal settlement.
One key provision, for example, supposedly requires Microsoft to disclose coding for new versions of Windows, so that independent software developers can write programs that won’t crash when they run on that ubiquitous operating system. Read the fine print, however, and you’ll discover that Microsoft only has to disclose codes to developers already doing business with it and only has to show them coding once the company has distributed a new operating system to 150,000 “beta testers”--people who volunteer to use early versions of software to ferret out glitches. But Microsoft has never used that many testers and could avoid disclosures simply by continuing to limit the number it uses.
There are frustrations to bedevil consumers as well. Another provision of the settlement supposedly requires Microsoft to allow PC users to remove the icon for Internet Explorer if they prefer to use Netscape or another competing Web browser. But the settlement gives the company an entire year to rejigger its programming to let users remove that little blue “e” (a fix an independent programmer can make in 20 minutes).
Users still couldn’t delete Explorer itself, and Microsoft would be free to nag them with a “Restore system settings?” prompt every two weeks. Should a bleary-eyed Web surfer inadvertently click “Yes,” the icon reappears and-- aargh! --Explorer reasserts itself as the default browser.
On Monday, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), whose party received two-thirds of the $4.7 million that Microsoft contributed to the 1999-2000 campaign, called the federal settlement “a home run for consumers.” He said state opposition would harm the nation by “dragging the case out in these tough economic times.”
The opposite is true. If the states that oppose the federal settlement begin working with Judge Kollar-Kotelly and James to close the loopholes now, there’s no reason why conduct restrictions could not be applied to Microsoft by the end of this month--a full year before the federal remedies would kick in.
Lawyers for the federal government should work hard to help lift the cloud of litigation that’s hanging over Microsoft. But they should work just as hard to free Microsoft’s competitors from the oppressive shadow of a bullying monopoly.
