States group wants to extend Microsoft antitrust oversight
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Group, led by California, tells federal judge it plans to try to extend oversight until 2012; judge says she needs more time to think about it.
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Five more states have joined others in asking a federal court to extend the judgment of the antitrust suit against Microsoft.
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InfoWorld - The European Commission has again criticized Microsoft&#39;s response to a 2004 antitrust ruling, opening up the possibility of further fines for the company. The regulator said that the software giant proposes overcharging for vital interoperability information needed by rival software makers to allow their products work properly with the Windows operating system.
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Microsoft&#39;s compliance with a&#160;U.S. antitrust settlement&#160;will remain under court supervision for another two years, in part because the company delayed producing documentation required by the court, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia extended the court&#39;s supervision through Nov. 12, 2009, writing that the 2002 settlement had not fully taken effect. Several U.S. states involved in the case had sought a five-year extension, despite opposition from the Department of Justice.As part of the settlement, Microsoft is required to document information on communication protocols, making it easier for other software manufacturers to create products that work well with the Windows OS.The documentation has been a sticking point between the company and the government. Microsoft has been ordered to rewrite the documentation, which was supposed to have been complete by February 2003, to make it clearer.In her ruling, Kollar-Kotelly blamed Microsoft. &quot;Although the technical documentation project is complex and novel, it is clear, at least to the Court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay,&quot; she wrote.But she also wrote that the company had been &quot;overwhelmingly cooperative&quot; in the years after the antitrust settlement, and that this latest extension should not be viewed as a sanction.Microsoft will continue to comply with the antitrust ruling and has built its latest operating system, Vista, to comply with the rules, the company said.&quot;We are gratified that the court recognized our extensive efforts to work cooperatively with the large number of government agencies involved,&quot; said Brad Smith, Microsoft&#39;s general counsel and senior vice president.&#160;
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Procedural move would give judge more time to decide whether it's necessary to impose on Redmond a lengthier watchdog period, as recently advocated by a number of state prosecutors.
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A group of states led by California said in a court filing yesterday that ending oversight of Microsoft's business practices in November would not allow enough time to consider the antitrust implications of Windows Vista.
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(InfoWorld) - A group of state plaintiffs in the U.S. Microsoft antitrust case will ask for a five-year extension of a large portion of the 2002 judgment against the company, the group's lawyer said Tuesday. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia -- known as the "California group" -- want an extension of most of the middleware portions of the judgment, said Stephen Houck, a lawyer for the group. Microsoft still retains a huge lead in the operating system and Web browser markets, he said. "Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold over the two products ... that nearly all consumers use," Houck said during an antitrust compliance hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Very little has happened in five years ... in those markets." The California group of states -- the larger of two groups of states that sued Microsoft for antitrust violations -- will ask for an extension of all the middleware portions of the antitrust judgement, except for a section that governs the royalties Microsoft can charge PC manufacturers for the Windows operating system. Most of the antitrust judgment was scheduled to expire in November. Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule said the company would need time to respond to Houck's proposal. Microsoft first heard of the plan to ask for an extension on Friday, he said, and the California group plans to file a formal extension request with the court in mid-October. Rule seemed to suggest Microsoft would fight the five-year extension. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly declined to impose a 10-year judgment in 2002, he said. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," Rule added. "We think it's clear that the decree has done its job." Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company will respond in more detail after it has seen the extension request. "We're a bit surprised that a few states are now requestingÂ an extension of the consent decree because they indicated just last month that they're not too fond of it," Evans said. In August 2006, Microsoft already agreed to an extension of the section of the judgment requiring it to make its communications protocols available to other software vendors. Microsoft's efforts to fix technical documentation for the protocols have run into several delays. Houck on Tuesday asked Kollar-Kotelly to extend the communications protocol section of the judgment until 2012. The California group does not "have any confidence" Microsoft will continue to improve the communications protocol program without oversight, Houck said. An independent auditor's report just issued questions whether Microsoft has released all the protocols mandated in the judgment, he added. The California group's extension proposal comes afterÂ the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York group of states filed briefs last month saying the antitrust judgment has done its job. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report from the DOJ and New York group, which includes five states. But Houck disputed that assessment on Tuesday. At the time of the judgment, a handful of PC vendors were preinstalling a competing Web browser on PCs, he said. Today, no major ones are, he said. In addition, the communications protocol program was supposed to be finished early in the judgment's life, and its delays have kept software vendors from fully using the program, Houck said. "The whole thing ... doesn't have an opportunity to work as the court intended," he said. "It's very clear that the product markets at issue in this case have not moved rapidly at all." Kollar-Kotelly said she would delay final reports on the judgment while she considers the California group's request. Microsoft and the plaintiffs were scheduled to meet with her Nov. 6 to discuss the final reports, but she will now consider the extension request on that date. Before Houck made his request, the judge said she was opposed to extending the judgment without a good reason. It was hard to predict the impact the judgment would have, she added. "The final chapter of the final judgment has not been written," Kollar-Kotelly said. The California group wants Kollar-Kotelly to extend all of section 3 of the judgment except for section 3B, dealing with manufacturer royalties. The extended provision would include: *Â A prohibition against Microsoft retaliating against PC vendors for including competing software on PCs; *Â A prohibition against Microsoft restricting PC vendors from putting competing middleware in the start menu or making them defaults; *Â A requirement that Microsoft give APIs for its middleware to PC vendors and independent software vendors.
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Latest chapter of antitrust case has U.S. government and software giant requesting an extension on 2002 settlement.
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A group of state attorneys general said on Thursday that the consent decree that settled the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft Corp has failed to reduce the company's monopoly, disagreeing with the assessment of U.S. antitrust officials.
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The top antitrust official at the U.S. Justice Department last month backed Microsoft Corp. &lt;MSFT.O&gt; by urging state prosecutors to reject a confidential complaint filed by Google Inc. &lt;GOOG.O&gt;, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
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The U.S. Department of Justice said it will not seek to extend the restrictions placed on Microsoft&#39;s business practices following its antitrust settlement with the U.S. government in 2002.Many of the restrictions are due to expire Nov. 12, and last week several&#160;U.S. states filed motions&#160;in favor of extending them for a further five years. Four of those states -- New York, Maryland, Louisiana and Florida -- had previously said they opposed an extension.The DOJ had also opposed the extension, and on Friday it made it clear that it would not be making a turnabout like the four U.S. states.&quot;The United States will not file a motion to extend its Final Judgment as it does not believe that the standard for such an extension has been met,&quot; the DOJ said in a court filing with the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia.The restrictions were part of the 2002 &quot;consent decree&quot; that settled the U.S. government&#39;s case against Microsoft. They prohibit Microsoft from retaliating against PC makers that install its competitors&#39; software, or licensing its software to them on unequal terms.Another requirement -- that Microsoft license its APIs (application programming interfaces) to let rival products interoperate with Windows -- has already been extended for two years.The DOJ didn&#39;t explain its decision Friday. In August it said it felt the&#160;judgment had been successful&#160;in preventing Microsoft from continuing its exclusionary behavior.The&#160;states who favor an extension&#160;disagree. They say operating systems haven&#39;t evolved as quickly as people thought they would in 2002, and that Microsoft could still use the dominance of Internet Explorer to choke competitors in the emerging Web 2.0 world.A status hearing that will likely address extending the restrictions is scheduled for Nov. 6 with District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.The other states pushing for an extension are California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.Separately, last month the&#160;DOJ raised hackles in Europe&#160;by criticizing the European Union&#39;s decision to reject Microsoft&#39;s appeal of its antitrust decision there.&#160;
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PARIS - IT industry watchers and legal observers were skeptical Wednesday of the significance of a ruling by a European court that MicrosoftÂ must comply with antitrust remedies imposed by the European Commission. Analysts doubted the power of the remedies to achieve their stated goal of boosting competition in two key software markets: workgroup servers and media players.
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Microsoft Corp., the world&#39;s largest software maker, asked a European Union court to suspend an order by antitrust regulators forcing it to disclose information on the inner workings of its Windows product to competitors.
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Blaming Microsoft for much of the failure of the 2002 antitrust consent degree between itself and state and federal regulators, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly threw on another two years of monitoring. And she might not be done yet.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general are concerned that Microsoft is revising deadlines that it agreed to as part of its antitrust settlement. At issue are changes that Microsoft says it needs to make in the schedule for releasing documentation related to Vista, according to a court document filed Tuesday. "Plaintiffs are concerned that Microsoft has not been able to meet its original schedule and are particularly troubled that at this late hour in the program, Microsoft is still discovering protocols that should have been included in the original documentation," the DOJ and the states said in a joint status report. "Plaintiffs are discussing this matter with Microsoft and will report to the court further at the status conference." The plaintiffs and Microsoft attorneys are due to meet with U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly next Tuesday for the status conference. Such conferences are held periodically so that the judge can assess whether Microsoft is complying with requirements of the 2003 antitrust order against the company. As part of the judgment, Microsoft is required to provide technical documentation for its software to help ISVs make their products interoperable with Microsoft's. On Feb. 15, Microsoft said that it needed to modify the schedule for documentation because protocols that must be documented were added to the Vista Server after the initial schedule for rewriting documentation was set or because those protocols were "inadvertently overlooked." For its part, Microsoft said in the status report filed Tuesday and made public Wednesday that it found it could "enhance" rewritten documentation of some existing protocols "by providing more detailed and comprehensive descriptions. This increased significantly the number of pages that Microsoft expected to produce in connection with the existing documentation." The number of pages of documentation Microsoft expects will be part of the rewrite project is "likely thousands of pages larger" than the company expected late last year. Under the revised schedule, Microsoft is expected to deliver documents related to Vista by April 3. It has already met three "milestones" that are part of the schedule and besides the Vista documentation has two other sets due May 11 and July 20 under the revised schedule. Microsoft said that the schedule, even since it was revised, is still aggressive. The antitrust case was tried in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which continues to oversee Microsoft compliance with requirements laid out in the judgment against the company.
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Nov. 10, 2004. Microsoft is extending the policy that currently protects some of its business customers from potential legal costs associated with intellectual-property disputes to all of its customers, including consumers.
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Several U.S. states are requesting a five-year&#160;extension&#160;of the&#160;antitrust judgment against Microsoft&#160;to ensure the company&#39;s continued compliance, according to a Tuesday court filing.Sections of the 2002 antitrust judgment are due to expire next month. A status hearing is scheduled for Nov. 6 with Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.In the filing, the states argue that Microsoft could use the continued dominance of its Internet Explorer browser to choke off other emerging middleware technologies from Google Inc. and Adobe System Inc. that work in close conjunction with Web browsers.The filing mentions Google Gears and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), technologies that allow for offline use of Internet-centric applications.&quot;Because Web-centric technologies are so dependent on Web browsers and servers for access to consumers, they are particularly susceptible to impediments that Microsoft could interpose were the final judgment were to expire now,&quot; the filing said.The states contend Microsoft could &quot;tilt the playing field&quot; to favor its new&#160;Silverlight multimedia technology, which competes with Adobe&#39;s Flash.The states also argued there have been continued problems with the program under which Microsoft licenses communication protocols to enable other vendors&#39; products to more smoothly work with ones from Microsoft.The technical documentation has been inadequate over the last five years, while Microsoft has continued to gain market share with its servers. Microsoft only recently delivered more rewritten documentation that is being evaluated, the filing said.The document was filed by California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.&#160;