Microsoft Antitrust Update

You can't help but know that Microsoft and the Department of Justice (plus several of the states that joined in the suit) are attempting to settle their antitrust dispute. The rest of the states are holding out for a settlement with more teeth, or a continuation of the case. A few links from the past few days: The LA Times looks at the states still opposing Microsoft. Microsoft defended the settlement before a Senate committee, which was crippled by political maneuvering (see also the NYT story). The speech given by the CEO of Red Hat is online. Microsoft filed a brief with the court, unsurprisingly urging the court to accept the settlement. The Register has a story on the proposed settlement, which is available at the DOJ Antitrust website. Linuxplanet has some advice for people who want to comment on the settlement - you've got 60 days from November 28. Finally, Microsoft has named two people to help it comply with the proposed settlement.

Re:Compliance Officers?

[lucifuge31337]

My understanding of this proposed arrangement was that there would be three compliance officers.
- One chosen by Microsoft
- One chosen by the DOJ/US Government
- One chosen by the above two people

Re:The settlement isn't so bad

[Trepalium]

[...] two changes I would make Microsoft release all the API specs in a public forum and make them freely available, instead of just on MSDN.

Microsoft already publishes all the API specs included in MSDN in a free public forum [microsoft.com]. They don't even make you logon to passport anymore to get at the stuff. The problem is that MSDN is no where near complete, and undocumented APIs, protocols and file formats abound in Windows.

Comments on Proposed Civil Settlement

[Cy Guy]

You can read the proposed Civil Settlement [uscourts.gov] (pdf) and the responses [uscourts.gov] as well. They also are pdf files being just scanned images of the letters recieved.

The responses are interesting, most of the ones I have read from School Districts indicate that they are afraid that they get very little value out of the settlement, since the software will be donated, and the hardware will be largely used requiring more maintenance than the benefit it provides. In efffect the schools are saying that they will be saddled with a much greater percentage of the total cost of ownership than Microsoft. So if the intention is to punish Microsoft and reward the schools this is the wrong way to go about it.

more info on the hearing

[dcgaber]

Senator Leahy had invited Jim Barksdale (co-founder of Netscape) to testify on the effects the RPFJ would have had if it was in place when Netscape was starting up. Microsoft balked at having him testify and said they would have refused to appear if Barksdale was there. So Barksdale was dis-invited, but sent a letter giving his answer. That letter was partially read by Sen. Hatch and said that Netscape would have never received VC funding. Pretty damning stuff.

Leahy asked Charles James (head of Antitrust for DoJ) to respond. He dodged saying that he had not read the letter yet and it seemed like typical hyperbole that was being spouted off (but also said he could not characterize it as such given he has not read the letter). Leahy asked him to formally respond for the record, which will be done in writing (I assume).

It was a little suprising to see such a little used procedural movement to kill the hearing. Leahy was visablly upset, but admitted its a Senator's perogative. Ironically, it was Sen Byrd (who knows every minutia of procedure) who was upset over TPA (fast track trade negotiation authorization for the President on trade treaties) and called that mark-up to a halt--however, it had already been succesfully reported out of committee at that point.

So what was left was 4 Senators upbraiding MS and calling the settlement for the sham it is. The only one defending the settlement was Sen. McConnell who clearly wanted to get his 1 minute in before the first recess (for votes, asked to be heard when Leahy tried to do a 20 minute break so he would not have to come back). All McConnell said was that 70% of the public favor a settlement, so any settlement is good. Leahy responded by saying that he too favored a settlement, but not a meaningless one riddled with loopholes.

FYI, the 4 senators attacking MS were Leahy (D-VT), Kohl (D-WI), Hatch (R-UT), and DeWine (R-OH), a bi-partisan group to say the least.

Don't like it? Then help fix it!

[Arethan]

Bitching about how letting MS put it's products into our children's classrooms will only increase their foothold isn't going to help when you only do it on slashdot! Here's the contact info for making your argument known! For those extra lazy people (myself included), they are also accepting emails!

US Postal Services:

Renata Hesse,Trial Attorney
Suite 1200, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Washington, DC 20530

Email:
[e-mail]

Fax:
202-616-9937 or 202-307-1545

Try not to be too rude. Remember, someone has to actually read these, and you'll only make them ignore your arguments if you are snide. Also, try to get records of reciept where possible. (Send by certified mail, use email reciepts, get fax reciepts) Supposedly ALL recieved comments will be published in the Federal Register. So if you don't see your comment in it with all the others, then you will have your reciept to back up your claim that not all comments were considered and included!

the point on the scale

[mckwant]

I don't recall the name of the metric off the top of my head, but one that is commonly used is the summation of the squares of the market shares of the various companies, or:

[sigma from 1 to n] (% mkt share) ^ 2

So, if we assume that MSoft has 90% mkt share of business desktops, then their (whatever the name of the metric is) would be upwards of .9^2, or .81, which is very high indeed. Traditional industries usually break down into something like .4,.2,.1,.1 + niche players, and I think the legal bound on the overall metric is usually something like .4 for monopoly.

Of course, the lawyers get involved with the definition of "market," as it's in Microsoft's interest to define market as broadly as possible, and it's in the DOJ's interest to be as finite as possible, since the DOJ can then "prove" that MS has a monopoly over the "secretary level OS sales among Fortune 30 companies involved in airplane wheel manufacture." Meanwhile, MS would claim that they only hold 10% of the "business machine requiring an electrical circuit" market.

Not an answer, but it might help on the question of monopoly scale.

The Constitution Was A Cathedral, Not A Bazaar

[ObligatoryUserName]

While I agree with the sentiment that Open Source often seems All-American, and generally jives with the ideals of a young Thomas Jefferson - the Constitution was written by a group of elite individuals (perhaps unique in the world at the time because their elite status was not solely based on their parentage), in a closed and sealed up building [google.com], where no one was allowed to report the proceedings to the populous at large. After they had created their new document for government they set about to use the tools of mass media (The Federalist Papers, and other forums) to convince everyone else that their Constitution was The Best Thing for America. (Even though most of them thought of themselves as Virginians, or New Yorkers rather than as Americans - Hamilton being the only obvious exception that springs to mind) And it worked, they convinced us to adopt their method of governing. Sure they had to add a patch that some of the end users demanded (Bill of Rights), but their creation was otherwise untouched.... wait a second, this isn't alt.history.colonial, is it? In brief, Szulik's speech was a nice sentiment, but his vision of how the Constitution was drawn up is imaginary.

Re:Stop complaning

[dcgaber]

There is nothing wrong with having market share or perhaps even being a monopoly. But when you abuse your position to foreclose competition, not only does that hurt competition (which hurts consumers) but is illegal.

That is great that you had that option to choose your OS. However, most people buy their computers through major OEMs and don't have the luxery of building a system and compiling their own OS on the system. They have a system with Windows pre-installed, whether they know they have another option or not. An average user is not going to dl an iso and re-partition their drive to put another OS on it. They are not going to purchase another OS (even for super cheap) at CompUSA when their is an OS right there. And OEMs are not going to offer another OS pre-installed because of MS retalitory conduct (and that part is illegal).

So, the user brings their computer home and it has windows preinstalled. Included is a web browser so the user is not going to dl netscape/opera or whatever else. Also included is a media player (hard bolted into the browser) so they are not neccesarily going to dl another player. Not included is Java, so develepers will stop java development (don't believe me, why do so many web builders, aside from laziness, code pages for IE that look wierd on different browsers).

Another key consideration is office. In a business, files are transferred in MS formats. Why would a company put on an OS that can't handle applications that they need? MS will not port office to linux for this specific reason (and as good as Star Office is, it can't handle conversions flawlessly).

I would suggest that anyone who questions what MS did is illegal read Judge Penfield's findings of facts [usdoj.gov]. Or read this article [ccianet.org] for a basic summary This details all the ways that MS broke the law. Contrary to what MS says, a conservative 7 Judge Court of Appeals upheld the majority of this decision and found MS behaved illegaly [ccianet.org].

What MS does is limit users choice. They do this by taking one monopoly and leaveraging that into another monopoly. I could care less what OS people use, what browser people use, and what software people use. But I do like to have a choice as to what to use, and I like venture capitalists to not fear investing in technologies that MS already is competing in , intends to compete in, or may just so happen to decide later to compete in. As Barksdale, now a VC, said in his letter, a VC will not invest in a technology if MS ever has an intention to use their monopoly to "compete" (read destroy) that technology. And while the open source community is great, VC is also neccesary otherwise these technologies will wither on the vine.

Re:Don't like it? Then help fix it!

[dcgaber]

Actually, this is a private antitrust suit. You should let your views be known here:
The Honorable J. Frederick Motz
Chief Judge
United States District Court for the
District of Maryland
101 West Lombard Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201

and you can email here:
[e-mail]

The DoJ is not involved with this as it is a private suit. Two letters that we wrote can be found here [ccianet.org] and here [ccianet.org].

If you have a problem with the DoJ proposed settlement, there are places you can file your comments too. They have been listed repeatedly here.

CSPAN Coverage of the Testimony

[geomon]

Available for viewing - roughly an hour long.

Here 'tis [c-span.org]

Re:Proof, Then

[Kwil]

I'm not a lawyer of course, but I think you should consider filing a suit in small claims court. A refund has been promised and is not being given. That's a breach of the terms of sale, is it not? You should probably name both Dell and Microsoft as the defendants.

If you use small claims, you can do the work yourself, saving yourself lawyer's fees while for Dell/Microsoft, it will literally cost them more than the amount of refund you deserve just to have their lawyers look at the paperwork. To be honest, I think that the responsibility for the refund does actually fall on Dell, and if they can't get their money back from Microsoft, that their own tough luck.

Heh.. tell them to file small claims court suits as well. :-)