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Justice Dept. Defends Microsoft Against Google

Posted by Zonk on from the friends-in-high-places dept.

Frosty Piss writes "The Seattle PI reports that Google has complained to US antitrust officials about the hard-drive searching tool built into Windows Vista, saying that it stymies Google's similar search program. The complaint, lodged late last year, was revealed Saturday by The New York Times in a story about the Bush administration's handling of Microsoft antitrust issues. The real story, though, is not the Google complaint itself, but how the Justice Department is failing to enforce the Microsoft anti-trust decree. According to the story, Thomas Barnett, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of antitrust issues, sent a memo last month to state attorneys general across the nation, seeking to persuade them to reject Google's complaint."

3 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Thomas O. Barnett by Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the article :

    The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

    Seems strange that they'd hire someone from a law firm associated with Microsoft for the Justice Dept. and then put him in a position to comment on an MS case.
  2. So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All this shows it that Microsoft paid more for their politicians than Google did.

  3. Re:hmm by keithjr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You're not missing much. This is the argument that MS would use if this case were to ever come to fruition. It's the same way they dodged the Netscape suit: claim that the product being complained about is actually an integral part of the functionality of an operating system in today's computing model.

    This worked with Netscape thanks to the sharp rise in internet use by the common user when IE started coming bundled with Windows. At that point, a web browser was indeed an intergral part of the OS and thus not criminal for the OS provider to provide one. This is the line of reasoning that can be leavied against Google: search functions are now necessary for day-to-day use.

    But then again, it will never come to that, thanks to Microsoft's clever investments in government.