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MS Lobbies to Cut DOJ Antitrust Budget
Forward The Light Br sent us a washington post article that talks about (no I'm not kidding) Microsoft Lobbying the Government to cut funding to the DOJs Antitrust department. I'm pretty amazed by this one.
Probably not the chain reaction they wanted.
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So long as the "authors" can remain unbiased (rare on Slashdot) and leave the bias to the comments and posts, I think a medium like that would be a great way to disseminate information about candidates and legislation.
We desperately need a place where people can go to get ALL of the information about election candidates (instead of just the biased advertising we see on TV) in one easy place. Nobody watches debates anymore because they tend to be long-winded and full of BS and evasion. Have standardized templates for describing candidates as unbiased as is possible.
Likewise with upcoming legislation. On Slashdot whenever we see an "alert" about some evil piece of legislation, it's usually the result of somebody reading a biased/uninformed take on the legislation, reporting it to Slashdot, which then takes it and posts an "article" with at least as much bias as the original report. Only in the comments do we see people say, "Uhh, this isn't as bad as you guys seem to make it out to be. Why don't you read the legislation first?" Ideally, a site like this would eliminate such confusion by providing a clear, concise plain-english description of the legislation. Phrases like "big brother" would be forbidden. Let the subsequent threads of comments be the bias.
Have the site pay for itself via non-political advertising.
I've been playing with this idea for a while, but nobody seems to think it's worth pursuing.. Unfortunately something like this is very difficult to just "start up" due to the fact that it would need to cover a lot of stuff in as much depth as possible (which means we'd need legal and political experts behind us in some fashion (NOT for the purpose of editorializing or making predictions, but for understanding what it is we're seeing, etc.)).
This is exactly the reason that our government should make lobbying illegal. The are many special interest groups and companies who are buying influence in our government, and it's not uncommon at all.
What amazes me is that we as a country allow this to happen everyday, and for issues that are far more important than Anti-trust suits...
Just call it "The buying of America", and Bill is the richest kid on the block...makes ya shudder don't it?
Shaken
The government has seen whores before, so this Washington senator shouldn't get too far. Besides, it's just another case of Microsoft believing that, and behaving like, they outrank the government, the law, and the American people.t or ticket, and totally ignore anything else including party lines to do so, and let other people take care of the other valid concerns of politics. Indeed, I'm almost _forced_ to because of how much money is being spent corrupting the government and my representatives. I'm a vermonter, and I think Bernie Sanders is sound, but I have concerns that Jeffords is getting corrupted. At any rate, I'm definitely going to be a one-issue voter currently- everything else falls by the wayside compared to the destruction of the economy and the country by tech trusts. That's my privilege, and if it stops being such a threat I can think of other issues and pay attention to them a bit more.
We've seen all this before. Hell, at one point it was the President acting like this! (Read up on Watergate!) It just doesn't fly, the Senate and the House of Representatives are there for a reason. It's like a jury- the idea is, if there is anybody who cannot tolerate the 'tyranny of the majority', they get a veto and then the country has to muddle through with a compromise to look after the best interests of _all_ the people, not just those with the loudest voices. In this case, I know there are a couple senators etc. who aren't whores for _this_ special interest, and I personally am quite happy to vote a straight don't-let-corporate-monopolies-wreck-the-tech-sec
Aw crap, you're right. I guess I'll give up after all. ;-)
Look, I don't care how systemic the problems are. They are there and they are systemic because we, the people have almost totally abrogated our social responsibility . I see no value whatsoever in sitting on our duffs whining about it (I don't mean to abuse you personally, although it seems like it).
You can make a difference. It is still a democracy. That the task is difficult is no reason not to undertake it. Hell, you heave a brick out a window and hit ten people who will readily take on an easy job. Take on the hard job!
By thunder, I'm going to my precinct caucuses this year, come hell or high water. If we all did the same the system would change literally overnight. The popular will cannot be overwhelmed by all the money and power in the world because IT IS OUR POWER. They do, at the end of the day, need the votes.
These "implacable forces" hold sway because disillusionen citizens have given up on our democracy.
"Deep in our craven souls we know that Democracy is a dying giant, a relic breathing its last. I don't mean that America is finished as a world power, America is the wealthiest; the most powerful country in the world; and I don't mean the Communists are going to take over the world, the Communists are even deader than we are. No, what's finished is the notion that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every single individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's every single solitary one of you out there listening to me now who's finished. The entire world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren't. We are nation of 200 million deodorized, transistorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted creatures, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replacable as piston rods."
That quote (as best I can remember it, I'm writing from memory here) is from Paddy Chayefsky's magnificent screenplay for the movie "Network" (a movie I urge you all to see, by the way).
I think that nightmare vision of America is here and real. But I don't have to accept it. Nihilistic despair has no room in my life. I choose to live deliberately. I'm going to my precinct caucus and I'm going to fight for a new software patent law and I'll probably fail. Where were you when I needed you?
This is a problem with our democracy, not just a problem with MS. Most residents of Washington state are aware that Senator Slade Gorton eats out of the hand of not just Microsoft, but also Boeing and Weyerhaueser, the next two largest local companies. Politicians who perhaps are already inclined towards helping business can easily be swayed with strategic "contributions". Microsoft clearly forsees a future in which it has emerged from the current anti-trust battle and continues to practice dubious business tactics. They wish to avoid a repeat of the current finagle. This offers us an interesting insight into their corporate mentality - evidently BillG doesn't believe he is going to lose the DoJ case. Not in the long run, at any rate. The dismaying part is that they are correct. You can own Congress. As I once heard someone say, "A congressman is the best long-term investment of all". Soft money has to go. Disclosure is poor at the moment, but even full disclosure would be ridiculously ineffective. The whole point of representative democracy is that I don't have to monitor every legislative detail that comes down the pike. What then are the chances that I will want to monitor every financial detail? Politicians will "fully disclose" their contributions buried somewhere in the back pages of the classifieds, and nobody will ever read them. The Supreme Court has several times ruled that money is speech. They are right, but they take it to illogical extremes. A contribution to the campaign of my favorite politician is indeed a means of indicating my support for him or her. But does a person with ten times as much disposable cash as myself really have ten times as much to say? Far from it. Let's put some teeth into limits on campaign contributions. Ban soft money and PACs. Microsoft can only do this because the corrupt infrastructure allows it.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
They are a perfect example of how perverted the US is these this.
As a dutch person I was shocked to read this:
"But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about $51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget."
If this happens in Italy or South America you call it corruption. I don't think there's another word for it. MS is just using the system, they didn't create it. The whole DOJ case was lobbied for by other parties like SUN and IBM. Nobody is talking about that. Needless to say those parties benefited from the DOJ case by taking market share back from MS.
It's disgusting what you can get away with if you have money in the US. As a comparison, if a dutch politician would accept "gifts" like this and it would get into the media, he could start looking for another job.
What amazes me most is that in the current campaigns for the US presidency, the candidates are actually using the amount of bribing money they received to prove how suitable they are for the job. Judging from this George Bush seems to be the most corrupt/best candidate of all.
Jilles
I was talking to my fiancee yesterday and the conversation happened to turn to Bill Gates. The thought came into my mind that everyday, no matter what we do, Bill Gates somehow has something to do with it. If we go to the grocery store, the checkout line is probably running some of his software. If we watch TV, MS probably owns part of the station. He owns so much that there isn't any thing he can't make money off of.
What brought this up was the fact that we were talking about the South Park movie and how they picked on him in one particular scene. My fiancee wondered if he took offense to such a scene. Then, it crossed my mind that MS, or some subsidary of theirs, probably owns shares in the studio that made the film. I'm sure they probably used his software in the making of the movie. So, even if they pick on him, he's still making money off of it and loving it.
I wonder if this is healthy for America. Should we give a person the opportunity to control our daily lives? No way! Should we do everything that we can to stop him? Of course! The Linux movement really needs to take on this philosophy. But there is no way that the US could ever file an antitrust suit against Linux because it is free. That would be like them trying to sue God for being the sole provider of life, but making it free.
I've got to go now, my MS Coffee Maker is buzzing. It's either done or locked up now.
Brad Johnson
Advisory Editor
Brad Johnson
In other news...
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The illness in American Democracy is not Microsoft. It is not even big money. It is not even the absurd (IMHO) Supreme Court decision that money is speech. The illness is me. The illness is you. The illness is the fact that you didn't go to your precinct caucusses, did you? (Neither did I, I'm not getting holier-than-thou here).
The sickness is the way regard the government as "them" and the people as "us." I've got news for you folks. The government is "us." Why have "evil special interests" taken over the government and made lapdogs of legislators? Because we were not there.
This government is ours. It is structured to do what we want it to do. But we are not there saying what we want!
Instead, we participate in focus groups where the same researches who figure out why we buy one brand of toothpaste over another ask us a series of provocative questions and measure our emotional responses. They are not looking for what we think, they are after what we feel because they know a dirty little secret. People are not motivated by intellect, they are motivated by emotion.
This system allows our political discourse to descend from open discussion of matters of vital interest to us (like anti-trust and patent law, like tax policy and welfare reform) to grainy black-and-white advertisements showing a prison with a reveloving door and that scary black man! (I'm referring to the George Bush "Willie Horton" ad here, but both parties do this -- I'm not being partisan, I just think the Willie Horton ad was the most despicable example of this.)
Now, your intellect knows full well that if you vote for Dukakis, you wife will not autmatically be raped and murdered by a black man. But it, along with the rest of the scientific marketing research, designed to find your emotional hot buttons, creates an "emotional aura" around the candidate that is pervasive and insiduous, hard to identify and reason with, difficult to resist.
So what do we do? We aren't totally blind. We aren't robots. These ads don't MAKE us vote in a particular way in and of themselves, but they do make us digusted and fed up. We feel in our guts that this ISN'T democracy, so we turn off. The political diet is empty calories and we go looking elsewhere for nourishment.
I think this empty, mindless, constant appeal to emotion is why we stay away from the polls in droves.
Well-funded interests are all too happy to step in and take what they can from the carcass of our freedoms. What the hell? We don't want it.
We CAN stop this. While our government may seem to be totally out of control, and that we are powerless, our government still retains the FORM of democracy. Call your local library. Find out where your party caucus is held. Go. Talk. Question. Discuss. There will be organizers there for candidates. They will have a platform. They will have votes and positions. They will try to pressure you to keep your mouth shut. They will try to control the election of delegates. Don't let them. Speak up. Go. See how it works. It will make you mad, but don't knuckle under. Bring some friends. Insist on talking about what bothers you.
I've seen it here. Slashdotters have some definite opinions on real matters of law and commerce. Don't settle for the way things are. All the tools needed to take back our government are there. Make the next Congress an "open source" Congress (forgive me for such a weak and strained linkage, but I think the same kind of spirit that imbues open source/free software can be tapped to bring reality back to politics).
Think of it like exercise, or, yes, open source programming. I get paid to write software at work. I set aside a little time every week to work on my free software project. This year, I've decided to set aside a little time to work on my "software patent" idea. I'm going to my caucus and I'm going to get a vote on a platform plank. A platform that patents on software be limited to no more than 24 months. I know that many would like no patents on software, but other forces will want patents to stay just as they are. I'm going for a compromise.
Whatever it is that upsets you, go. Make your voice heard. Write your congretional delegation.
You must not wait for others to give you your freedom. You must take it for yourself. It is yours, but if you leave it lying on the ground, don't be surprised when someone (maybe Microsoft) picks it up and says, "hey, I could use this!"
It is you country. Take it.
Noble sentiment. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Unfortunately I think you're being a bit naive about the way democracy works in this country. The reason it fails is because the main avenues of control are corrupted. Observe:
/. is one such example - reporting of things the public (or one segment of it) wants to hear about, not what a corporation feels will market well. I.e., no Diana or Junior stories here.
i. Informationbr> Any good democracy requires a well-informed public. If the public is going to decide what's right and what's wrong, they need to know all the facts from an unbiased source. This is impossible in America, because media is a big business. The media outlets that will succeed best are those that are most corporate in nature. Everyone won't listen to NPR, because NPR is a poor marketer.
Therefore everyone will get the tainted information peddled by the bastard child of GE, NBC, and the bastard child of tabloid merchant Rupert Murdoch, Fox, and the bastard child of Disney, ABC, and the bastard child of Warner Brothers, Time/Newsweek/CNN. Reporting is not objective or interested in disseminating relevant information. Information flow is fundamentally flawed.
The internet has the power to change such things. Maybe
ii. Expertise
The public no longer has anywhere near the expertise necessary to know what's in their best interest. Even basic economic principles like flat-taxes have to be digested by commentators and explained to the masses to tell them what the effects are. Forget about complex issues like research biology funding/free speech and censorship/separation of church and state. The public is wholly unable to, for the most part, comprehend all the factors involved.
Before you go jumping in about how you disagree, recognize that you are a select minority and you're not representative of how most people think.
iii. Capitalism
Not to fault free markets in general, but when you have a society built on money, as ours is, it's inevitable that those with more money will control everything. I don't find it surprising that someone like GE can have such an influence on politics, or that health care reform is so difficult to move along, because damnit, we created the beast that's controlling us. We allow a free market to develop giant corporations with tons of resources and very strong vested interest. Isn't it inevitable that they attempt to exercise their considerable power to protect those vested interests? Certainly. Especially since capitalism is probably good at getting unscrupulous people on top. No one got rich feeding orphans.
The solution, of course, is put in controls on how much corporations can influence government, via controlling contributions, etc. Of course, since they're the puppetmasters right now, this is somewhat more difficult than saying "Let's change it."
iv. Individualism
Fundamentally American culture is selfish and egocentric. Few individuals are motivated by notions of higher societal good, as is quite common in other nations (like our close neighbor Canada). It's inevitable that in such a situation corruption develops. Until such a fundamental aspect of Americana changes, we'll always be fucked.
Solutions are not simple. They require big-time revolution and reform. Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that a government needs to be knocked down every twenty to fifty years to prevent stagnation. I think we're overdue for one of these.
SA
In the meanwhile, though, if the state is going to allow the creation of corporations like Microsoft, and support them by artificial intellectual property rights, I see no problem with antitrust laws that keep the state's creation from getting too far out of line.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
(Note how general this is -- he doesn't specifically state he wants DoJ off Microsoft's back; the timing simply happens to be coincidental, I guess. Yeah, right. This Rep Dan Miller smells pretty corrupt.)
Er, anyway... if this guy doesn't want regulation, that's fine. But trying to cut the funding (when DoJ just happens to be prosecuting MS) is the wrong way to do it. If he really believes what he is saying, he should introduce legislation to repeal antitrust laws.
Having laws without enforcement is a very bad thing, because they'll just get selectively enforced and used as a tool to suppress whoever doesn't play ball. If you don't want DoJ going after companies that break the law, then change the law, not DoJ. It isn't their fault.
And about this "devastating blow to the high-tech industry" bullshit... This whole case was caused by the blow that Microsoft delivered to the industry. Whenever anyone tells you that this is somehow "bad for the economy" remember that they really just mean "bad for MS stockholders".
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
>Microsoft Corp. lobbyists and allies are aggressively pressing Congress to
>reduce next year's proposed funding for the Justice Department's antitrust
>division, the giant software company's accuser in a storied court battle.
>Microsoft representatives have urged House and Senate members to cut
>President Clinton's proposed funding for the division by about $9 million
>this year.
Doesn't Microsoft about that in a day or something? $9 Million is about
10% of DOJ Budget!
>And nonprofit organizations that receive financial support from
>the company have also urged key congressional appropriators to limit
>spending for the division when they begin their final negotiations on the
>Justice Department budget, possibly as early as Monday.
>The nonprofit groups made their request in a letter last month after an
>all-expenses-paid trip to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash.,
>where they were entertained and briefed on an array of issues facing the
>company.
YEAH! What's up with the DOJ attacking these non-profit's source of revenue?
>But company officials said they want to send a strong message to the
>antitrust division.
Hello... DOJ? Bill is not happy with you.
>But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about
>$51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an
>outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget.
Surprise... surprise!
>Such an action would "express total dissatisfaction with the way Justice is
>handling the case against Microsoft," said a spokeswoman for Gorton.
>She added that Gorton, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations
>Committee, is "pretty confident he will be able to get [the Senate] number
>lowered closer to the House number."
How dare the DOJ mishandle the case with expert testimony, revealing interviews,
competant courtroom demonstrations, professionalism, and supported facts?
Microsoft with it's BILLIONS is NOT SUPPOSED TO LOSE! What a terrible
precedent it would be if that were true.
Bill will make you an offer you can't refuse. Not.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
There's a difference between lobbying for something and actually getting something done. All this means is that Microsoft is trying to convince congress to spend less money on the DOJ. It's their opinion, they certainly have the right to express it. If they've convinced certain organizations to lobby with them, then good for them. Those organizations have a right to their own opinion as well, and they have a right to tell congress about them.
Even you have the right to lobby your congressman about this issue, and if you really care about it, you should do it. People like to sit back and bitch about how the US government is dominated by special interests groups, but nobody makes sure that their opinions are heard as well. If the special interests groups are the only ones that want to take part in American politics, then they should be the ones shaping our policy. But guess what? special interests groups such as MS make up a small minority of the population. If everybody actually took part in politics, they wouldn't have much of an effect.
People who say that special interests play too big a role in our government but don't tell their congressman their views make about as much sense to me as people who don't vote because they don't like the government.