“Sellout” isn’t too strong a word to describe the U.S. Justice Department’s settlement (press release) with Microsoft. Neither is “dangerous.” (Here’s the full text.)
This deal, assuming it takes hold, is not even a wrist slap. It’s a love letter to the most arrogant and unrepentant monopolist since Standard Oil. It’s an invitation to keep on plundering and whacking competition in the most important marketplace of our times, the information marketplace.
“The goals of the government were to obtain relief that stops Microsoft from engaging in unlawful conduct, prevent any recurrence of that conduct in the future, and restore competition in the software market-we have achieved those goals,” Charles James, the head of the department’s antitrust division, said in a statement released Friday in Washington.
Those may have been the goals, once upon a time. But James and his quisling colleagues didn’t come close. What’s more, they surely know it.
Bill Gates’ own statement would be amusing if the situation were less disturbing. The deal, he was quoted as saying, “imposes some very tough rules and restrictions on our business.” That unctuous garbage is about what you’d expect from a man who made it clear that his company would never agree willingly to any serious curbs on its behavior. Microsoft still hasn’t made any such agreement.
The settlement not only doesn’t doesn’t even force the company to stop doing what eight federal judges found illegal, but it provides no penalty for the illegal acts. Locking in the ill-gained profits of crime — bank robbers wish they could get such dispensation.
Who gets to monitor this malodorous deal? Why, the same Justice Department that made it, with no input from the states or anyone else apart from a “Technical Committee” that keeps an eye on the company’s behavior. The work and findings of this committee, which will be appointed by the department and its new pal, Microsoft, will be a state secret.
In the alleged concessions on future behavior, Microsoft gives up almost nothing that matters anymore. A couple of the measures, such as giving computer makers modestly more freedom, might have made a difference five years ago. They are close to meaningless today, given the pervasiveness of the monopoly.
So where do we go from here? Just where Microsoft wants us to go, apparently.
The states knew they were going to be sandbagged on this case. The Bush administration hasn’t hidden its intentions to let the lawbreakers go free. The fix was in, and everyone knew it.
Will the states fold, too? Many will, no doubt. Mere state governments don’t have the money to fight a monopolist that generates more than $1 billion in extra cash every month, just a portion of the profits that even in an economic downturn keep rolling into the coffers.
Some states will probably keep fighting. Despite having won a case that showed Microsoft to be a sneering, brutal lawbreaker — with no intention of reforming — they’re now total underdogs.
The next step is a Tunney Act hearing, where the judge is supposed to determine if the settlement is in the public interest. The last judge who held a Tunney Act hearing on a Microsoft antitrust settlement was so incensed by what he saw that he, like the judge in the trial, shot off his mouth and got tossed off the case.
The European Union is also a slender reed of hope. But the EU will be under enormous pressure from the U.S. to go along.
With a nation and world preoccupied by terrorism and war, the Bush administration has awarded the hen house to the meanest fox in the woods. The message to corporate America is simple. Do whatever the hell you want, because antitrust law is effectively dead. Ideology and money have triumphed over common sense and competition.
What a sham. What a shame.