Justice Dept. Defends Microsoft Against Google

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."

Comments

Thomas O. Barnett

[Serious Callers Only]

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.

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[Doc Ruby]

Why does it seem "strange" that Bush would appoint a Microsoft lawyer to the Justice Department that was supposed to stop Microsoft from abusing its monopoly, after the Clinton Justice Department got the court to declare Microsoft an abusive monopoly that had to be stopped? "Unjust", maybe, but how strange is it for a Justice Department that's got its chief, Attorney General Gonzales, lying to Congress every day to coverup Bush's political purges and cronyism? Not to mention all the Patriot Act travesties Bush's DoJ has committed. Haven't you heard what a zoo they're running over there?

What you might not have heard is that Jack Abramoff, the crooked lobbyist who helped build Bush's crooked Republican Congress, got his start lobbying out of Bill Gates' father's law firm, Preston Gates. It would seem strange if Microsoft weren't getting the benefit of the crooked system it's helped train and build.

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[andydread]

How the hell is this strange. This is the Bush administration.
They put oil executives in charge of the EPA
they put antitrust defence lawyers in the Justice Dept.
They put drug company executives in charge of the FDA

I mean really now. Take a look here. http://www.iraqtimeline.com/bushcab.html

And maybe someone can lookup these clowns and see what their prior industry affiliation is http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[Qzukk]

What makes this wrong?

It's a conflict of interest.

Look at it this way, why don't we take your idea here and run with it. Let's put the rapists in charge of crisis centers and murderers in charge of prisons, after all, they have "background" in the field.

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[AdamKG]

See, crazy me, I'd want a anti-trust prosecutor running anti-trust prosecutions.

But that's just me.

Re:google is EVIL!

[Phil246]

rtfa.
Google is asking that microsoft provide a way for the user to disable it, so that other competing desktop search programs dont battle each other for system resources and ultimately both slow the computer down.
They arent asking for it to be removed outright

Grep against Google

[Esteanil]

On another note, Google has ordered all Open Source programmers in their employ to issue weekly "patches" that include disabling grep from all linux/BSD distros.
"Grep is an evil command, and as a company that will do no evil, we must have evil commands removed." said a Google spokesman, before returning to his weekend pasttime of clubbing baby seals.

Re:Grep against Google

[figleaf]

1. The indexer only runs when no other applications are using system resources.

2. Its a Windows Service you can easily turn it off.

Why is slashdot full of trolls today?

Re:Grep against Google

[Macthorpe]

Instant Search merely interacts with the indexing service. If you turn Windows Search off (which is trivial) then indexing stops and the Instant Search reverts to doing a file-by-file search a la Win98/95, which is exactly what Google's Desktop Search doesn't do.

You're right to say that the Instant Search box cannot be removed, but Google are saying that the indexing that is being done interferes with their own indexing, which in fact it does not as Windows Search indexing only occurs on idle CPU cycles, so Google's will be given a higher priority. They're also saying you can't deactivate it, which you can - GDS modifies the Services when it sets itself to start on boot, so it's once again trivial to include in that a method of deactivating Windows Search. As I mentioned in another post, they tacitly admit that GDS works fine by providing Sidebar plugins and other miscellaneous extras that are designed specifically for Vista.

Google's arguments here are disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst - I have a feeling they're trying to get Windows Search removed merely to cripple Windows searching and create a niche which doesn't currently exist for them in Vista.

You can find out how to turn it off

[Dude McDude]

by doing a Google search.

Just goes to show what I always say...

[F34nor]

Its cheeper to buy a congressman than to fix your business model.

Re:google is EVIL!

[Deviate_X]

This is not true. You can disable built in indexing by unchecking indexing of the indexing locations (i.e. Outlook or the Hardrives) or by disabling the indexer in windows services list.

Re:google is EVIL!

[Anonymous Coward]

from TFA :

Google has asked the court overseeing the antitrust decree to order Microsoft to redesign Vista to enable users to turn off its built-in desktop search program so that competing programs could function better, officials said. from the other article:

There is no simple way for PC users to turn off Windows Vista's built-in desktop search program. Google has asked the court overseeing Microsoft's antitrust compliance to require the company to let users turn off the built-in search program, the New York Times reported. Granted there are *ways* to do it but they arent necessarily simple for clueless users

Re:google is EVIL!

[Deviate_X]

There is already an API to the Service Control Manager API for google or anyone else to use.

Even If google is evil!

[3seas]

So what does google have to do with MS's search engine always running?

Even if google was evil, I'd still want to be able to turn off a search engine created by a proven anti-trust violator.

Wouldn't you?

Just because people claim google is evil is no reason to dismiss an act of a part that has been proven evil.

There must be a lot of MS supporters responding to the article, for who could miss the obviousnesss of this.

The party bringing out the fact that MS's search engine is always on is itself not an evil act. Unless you work for MS.

Re:Even If google is evil!

[figleaf]

You can easily turn it off. There are multiple ways to turn it off. Its Windows Service you can turn it off the control panel or the search options.
If you like like the command-prompt then type 'net stop "Windows Search"

This is what Microsoft normally does

[Animats]

Historically, Microsoft has moved widely needed functions into their operating system and thereby eliminated the market for alternatives. When they did that for disk compression, Stacker went out of business. When they did it for TCP/IP networking, Trumpet Winsock disappeared. When they did it for email, Eudora stopped being a viable business. When they did it for browsers, Netscape Inc. went from a dot-com success to collapse.

Right now, they're doing it for anti-virus tools, which threatens McAfee, and desktop search, which threatens Google. They'll probably win on both of those, because there's little incentive to install a competitor's tools if those come bundled with the operating system, and because those tools can be tightly integrated with the operating system.

silly fool, nothing to see here

[jollyreaper]

What you might not have heard is that Jack Abramoff, the crooked lobbyist who helped build Bush's crooked Republican Congress, got his start lobbying out of Bill Gates' father's law firm, Preston Gates. It would seem strange if Microsoft weren't getting the benefit of the crooked system it's helped train and build. Correlation does not equal causation. This is just one in a series of curious coincidences where the interests of the Bush administration and those who have backed them have coincided by mere happenstance. There is simply nothing more to it than that. Now if you will excuse me, there's a party operative at the door with a bundle of cash for me; coincidentally, mind you.