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Bush Administration Stops Microsoft Breakup
The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had been instructed by the Bush Administration to cease its drive to break up Microsoft, which has already been found guilty of violating U.S. anti-trust law in a complaint filed by the Federal Government and 19 states. See the BBC or CNN for more. It isn't clear what wristslap, errr, remedy the Justice Department will seek instead. Update: 09/06 15:21 PM GMT by M : Declan McCullagh of Wired notes: "The text of the DOJ announcement is here. Wired News has an article. Also, the DOJ says a 'Senior Antitrust Division Official' will brief reporters at the department's DC headquarters at 11:30 am ET, so look for some followup stories from that."
The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had been instructed by President Bush...
Funny, i don't see any claims that George W. Bush told anyone to do anything.
Typical Slashdot bias.
P.S. Write your state senators and tell them to press on -- the trial can go on without the DOJ.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
He didn't give an order to the judicial branch, the Department of Justice is under the executive branch. It is a law enforcement body. They are persuing the charges but they aren't a judicial body in charge of the case, That would be the distict court. Bush gave no order to the court (at least not officially)
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Where does this say Bush was the reason for stopping the MS breakup? I see a reference to the Bush administration, but I assume that means someone he appointed (ie John Ashcroft) is the person who "Stop[ped] the Microsoft Breakup".
The article that I first saw on CNet said that this announcement was *ONLY* the Justice Department and that this did *NOT* represent the wished of the individual states.
The newest CNet article is unclear, saying that the Justice Department and the States and the Judge will all meet over the next two weeks.
There might be a chance that the states won't go along with this. The Attorneys General of the states tend to be more progressive in consumer protection.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
From the BBC article:
The US Department of Justice has announced that it will no longer push to have software giant Microsoft broken up.
The decision by the Bush administration reverses the Clinton White House legal strategy against Microsoft.
Bush is the head of the Bush administration, so one can presume that it was him that made the decision.
Read the BBC article.
Well, although MSFT has seemingly been going sideways.. In reality it has been trying to drop all along. MS has been buying back MSFT in order to keep the price stable. I'd guess they've stopped doing that and are hoping this new news will allow it to maintain price naturally.. Guess not eh?
Now you might speculate that they're lying, and that Bush actually did order this action, but to report so as fact is clearly very poor journalism.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Really. The point is not that Bush is letting Microsoft off the hook--he's not. The Bush administration (important to remember that) is saying, ``we don't think a breakup is called for, we want to see conduct remedies instead''.
This is not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general who has been one of the biggest movers in the states' suit against Microsoft, has agreed with the Bush administration's decision on this matter.
When even the most aggressive of all the state AGs agrees that ``conduct remedies are enough, they'll do'', what in God's name are the rest of you mewling about?
Let's also note that the Bush administration is no longer pushing for a breakup. That doesn't mean a breakup won't happen, because in the end, it is the judge hearing the case who gets to decide what action is necessary to restore competition to the marketplace. If the judge in question thinks a breakup is called for, well, it doesn't matter a damn what the Bush administration or the states want--Microsoft will be broken up.
This is, realistically, not news.
Perhaps if you weren't as fucking ignorant about government as the Slashdot editors, you'd post a comment that made sense.
Hint: the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch. The judicial branch, as any good 7th-grade civics class will teach you, is made up of the courts.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe you should view some public opinion polls there dude, just about every poll I've seen has showed the public does NOT think they should be broken up. Just look at cnn's front page, its nearly 70% in favor of the DOJ. Get your facts straight, slashdot's opinion is a small fraction of people.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
MS should have included an HTML renderer that could be used by many apps to display help, errors, whatever (Apple has just this as part of their OS, used for Apple Help). MS should even have written their own browser which takes advantage of the HTML renderer.
However, you'd have to be daft to think that a browser is anything more than an application. It should be trivial to remove a browser, just as it is trivial to remove other "essentials", like a word processor, spreadsheet, or compiler.
MS went out of its way, making its systems less stable and slower, just to make sure that removing the browser would be impossible. Furthermore, it then threatened anyone who wanted to include an alternate browser. This is anti-consumer behavior (shipping a worse product just to screw a competitor) and anti-competitive behavior.
The first isn't a crime, just stupid if you aren't selling to a captive audience. The fact that MS can do these sorts of stupid things proves that it has a captive audience, which makes MS and also makes anti-competitive behavior illegal.
With MS now including a media player as a "core" part of its operating system while "accidently" breaking QuickTime plugin support, I'm more and more convinced that separating MS into OS and applications (as well as a third company for languages and compilers) needs to be done. Not going to happen, though.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
A lot of people saw this comming. During the election flame-wars, many people were posting right here on slashdot that Bush would stop the breakup. This should be a surprise to very few, and certainly none who frequent this board. Bush is so deep in the pockets of big business and industry, it should come as no surprise that Microsoft would jump on that bandwagon when the opportunity arose.
Microsoft donated a total of $4,617,726 to all election campaigns in 2000. Although it does not break down specifically where the money went, 53% went to republicans, 47% to democrats. From an industry standpoint, Bush received $1,177,770 from computer and internet companies, and Gore $580,634. Certainly not huge numbers, but a quick analysis on how Bush's number is more than double the #2, and then there is a pretty linear dropoff, it is not at all unfaur to conclude that since Microsoft was far and away the biggest contributor from this industry group, a large percentage of the Bush money is from them. (A bone for the flame-mongers: More analysis of these numbers would, of course, be necessary for a solid conclusion.)
Although this decision may have also happened had Gore won, I do not think that would be the case - he is too knowledgeable about the tech sector. Also, knowing how Microsoft respects the law, it wouldnt surprise me at all if they made many more untraceable contributions (dont tell me it cant be done, its done all the time). I also wish opensecrets.org would show contributions for the 2004 election, that may be more revealing.
Is any more proof necessary that this is now truely a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation?
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
What most everyone seems to be missing is that the DOJ does not get to decide the sentence for MS. That is in the hands of the judge the case was handed to. She can still break the company into little mini-microsoft clones if she wants to. There is a degree of less likelyhood to that happening, but it does not change the fact that it is up to her not Ashcroft, Bush or the DOJ.
Excellent idea. I've created one here: http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display&uid=&id
Mind posting some details there, Jamie, or in the journal of the first guy to make the move if I'm not the first one? That'd get the discussion started, hopefully...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The appeals court only assigned a new judge to determine the penalty, they didn't say she could not issue a breakup. The judge can still issue a breakup order if she decides to, the DoJ just stopped asking her to.
That would be:
(A) the allowable arsenic standard which was fine for 99.8% of Clinton's term(s), instead of the new standard which would require replacing BILLIONS of dollars worth of water treatment plants for an unquantifiable lessening of one common environmental hazard, and
(B) the exploration of 1% of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (not drilling, at least not yet), a "refuge" that was created in the last possible moments of the Clinton presidency (Why wasn't it worth protecting before then, or was it just to make Bush look bad for wanting to look for oil there?), and
(C) the stem-cell research allowed and encouraged by President Bush, despite the lobbying of most of his advisors and the Republican Party?
Your FUD seems all the more ironic in reference to this story.
120 characters?! Who do they think they are, telling me I only get 120 characters? This will never do. I must have mor
1. This does not get M$ off the hook. There are 18 state attorney generals who are also plaintiffs here. ALL OF THEM must agree to any deal with the Redmond monster. This has been a big problem in past settlement negotiations (thank God!).
It only takes one state AG to keep the ball rolling here. True, it will be hard without the DoJ to help.
2. President Bush ABSOLUTELY made this decision. He appointed Ashcroft and he owns him. Remember how Ashcroft was down in FL disrupting the recount? AG was his payoff. Also remember Bush is the head of the executive branch of the US government, and the DoJ is part of this branch. Bush was talking about letting M$ off before he was even elected.
Bush is a political whore and the big corps. of the USA are his Johns.
Right, and the distribution organizers are tantamount to OEMs. Linus et al don't force distributors to include (or not) certain packages, and in fact a perfectly legitimate distribution could consist of only the kernel. However, Microsoft *does* tell the OEMs what they can and can not include in their installations, and this has been the argument against tying (which you acknowlege and dismiss without reason).
I can understand bowing to the peer pressure on apologizing for Microsoft's behavior for them (DoJ leads the way!), but it certainly doesn't justify the behavior. DoJ gearing up for a settlement (terms undisclosed, of course ;) just encourages the environment that allows corporations to do whatever they want and pay a small fine if some crybaby raises a stink. How long did you think it would be before "it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission" would become a fundable business model?
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Salon
Cnet
The Economist
Washington Post
National Post (Includes trial timeline)
NY Times
Globe and Mail
and heh.. MSNBC
$16M in political contributions [Common Cause] by Microsoft in the last four years obviously didn't go to waste. Time Magazine and the BBC also have good (although a little dated) articles on the size and scope of Microsoft's intense lobbying effort since the antitrust trial started.