Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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.