States Want to Punish MS for Abusing Settlement Terms

fdiaz5583 writes: "In a legal brief filed with U.S. District, the states cited the comments of a Microsoft executive to bolster their argument that the settlement is weak and has not diminished the software giant's ability to abuse its monopoly in personal computer operating systems. The nine states seeking tougher sanctions against Microsoft said they should be allowed to speak at a hearing on the proposed settlement due to start March 6. Currently they are due to present their alternative proposals at separate remedy hearings starting the following week."

Comments

How many times?

[Bob_Robertson]

How many times must we all "speak up" about the issue?

The first couple dozen articles on the Microsoft settlement got lots of statements of support/disagreement.

Just re-read those, they're still valid.

Personally, I think Microsoft should not have been prosecuted for negotiating contracts in their favor. Who cares? As long as no one is forced to buy their product.

And no one was forced. Ever. Just because the lowest price machines came with Win pre-installed did not mean you had to buy it. White-box machines have always been available. And Linux was around for years prior to Win95.

Bob-

Settlement strong for MS

[andaru]

It seems like what they are saying is not that the settlement it weak, but that it is strong in MS's favor.

It hasn't even been agreed upon and they have already figured out crafty ways to use it to leverage more power over their customers, and possibly assist them in monopolizing new markets.

Like California's and the federal government's energy deregulation plans, this settlement most likely has plenty of loopholes explicitly written into it which give MS all sorts of advantages.

Digression:

The federal deregulation plan is what made Enron possible (Enron is basically a private energy stock market, which produces nothing, provides no service, and adds no value to any product, but the law was written expressly to provide for the existence of such leech entities for the purpose of skimming a profit off of the energy economy).

PG&E helped craft CA's plan, and restructured itself to take advantage of loopholes which it introduced into the plan. (WARNING: the following is simplistic and based on my half-assed understanding of the situation, but I think I have the general idea.) They basically split themselves into two corporations, a parent and a child. The parent company produced nothing, provided no service, and added no value to any product. Its sole purpose was to own the child company. The child company made enormous profits off of bilking the state of California.

Suddenly, despite record profits, the child company found itself out of cash. Where did the huge profits go? They were transferred to the parent corporation, which paid much of them out to their stockholders. The child company had some funds left over after this, so right before declaring bankruptcy, they gave a bunch of their executives and managers cash bonuses.

Back to the point:

Sorry, too much detail. The point is that when the government gets into bed with a corporation in order to pass laws or reach some legal agreement, you can bet that they have paid someone off in order to get some carefully crafted loopholes thrown into the legalese. It is easy to write and hide loopholes in legalese, and later on you can act like the lawmakers failed to close the loopholes because they are only human.

In the CA energy scandal, several companies used the excuse that what they were doing, although obviously unethical, was perfectly legal. They neglected to mention that it was only legal because they had written the law.