Free Republic

Robert H. Bork, self-professed champion of the free market, has weighed in against Microsoft and lined up with the Justice Department's Antitrust Division under Clinton acolyte Joel Klein. Bork denies that he has reinvented himself, dismissing critics who say he was seduced by fat consulting fees from Microsoft's arch-rival, Netscape. Nonetheless, the former judge and Supreme Court nominee has astounded partisans on both sides of the dispute, who recall that his non-interventionist approach to antitrust dates back more than two decades. What triggered this transformation? One explanation may be that Bork is wrong on the facts. Writing in the Washington...

For a couple of embarrassing years in the mid-'90s, Microsoft's primary lobbying presence in D.C. was "Jack and his Jeep." As the software giant's sole in-house lobbyist, Jack Krumholtz, then 33, had to battle endless traffic jams to get from Microsoft's suburban sales office to Capitol Hill. "Early on I spent most of the day in my Jeep Grand Cherokee on my cellphone," Krumholtz says. "I hit an all-time low on the day I was parked on a Capitol Hill side street reading through my mail with the laptop on the steering wheel." No longer. After the Justice Department filed...

WASHINGTON--An economist testifying for nine states seeking tough antitrust sanctions against Microsoft balked on Thursday at supporting one of the key provisions in the states' plan. The states' economist, Carl Shapiro, told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that he could not give an opinion on whether Microsoft should be forced to sell a version of the Windows operating system with some features removed. This concession came after a Microsoft attorney showed the judge a previous court filing in which Shapiro praised an alternative, mostly cosmetic alteration of Windows, now being offered by the company to settle its antitrust suit. Shapiro...

<p>The Bush Justice Department may have wrapped up a decade of Microsoft pursuit, but nine state attorneys general are still holding out for a public decapitation. So it is certainly, well, revealing to see the AGs get caught in flagrante with Microsoft's business competitors -- AOL Time Warner, Novell and Oracle, among others.</p>

Microsoft still wields incredible power over PC makers, despite a November settlement with the Justice Department, a Gateway executive said in written testimony filed in federal court Monday. Anthony Fama, Gateway's group counsel, said in testimony submitted by nine states and the District of Columbia that the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker can still use Windows licensing agreements and other contractual provisions to extract concessions from PC makers. Fama, who also appeared in court Monday and will likely take the stand again Tuesday, was critical of the proposed settlement because, he asserted, it effectively gives Microsoft too much wiggle room. Microsoft,...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. LOS ANGELES -- A federal grand jury indicted a Japanese carbon fiber company and its California-based subsidiary Tuesday for obstruction of justice related to a price-fixing probe. The one-count felony indictment accuses Toho Tenax Co. Ltd. of Tokyo; its American subsidiary, Toho Carbon Fibers Inc., and Jinnosuke Takeda, a Toho executive in Japan, of concealing incriminating documents that had been subpoenaed A federal grand jury investigating possible violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act subpoenaed the documents in January 1999. Officials at Toho Carbon Fibers, which is based in Menlo Park, declined...

Microsoft sharpshooter Joachim Kempin, who was convicted of illegally shooting antelope in Montana in 1998, has been turning his guns on a more familiar target: Microsoft's own OEM customers. The States' remedy hearing opened in DC yesterday, and States attorney Steven Kuney produced a devastating memo from Kempin, then in charge of Microsoft's OEM business, written after Judge Jackson had ordered his break-up of the company. Kempin raises the possibility of threatening Dell and other PC builders which promote Linux. "I'm thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux. ... they should do a delicate dance,"...

YOU may have thought the government's marathon antitrust case against Microsoft was over. It's not. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly oversees a new set of hearings today as she attempts to determine the proper penalty for Microsoft, which reached a settlement in the case with the Justice Department last November — only to see nine of the 18 states involved in the case dissent from the agreement. The deal Microsoft and the DOJ made last fall forces the company to release more information about its Windows code for personal computers, allows PC makers more latitude to install applications...

Microsoft, DOJ seek to close the deal By Joe WilcoxNews.com March 6, 2002 nbsp; WASHINGTON--The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday conceded that it settled with Microsoft in part because trustbusters failed to prove part of the basic theory of the antitrust case. In his presentation before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Justice Department lead attorney Philip Beck said that Microsoft was able to hold on to a monopoly in Intel-based operating systems only through anti-competitive acts. But the government was not in a position to make that argument stick, he said. quot;We tried very hard the first time around,...