Re: Microsoft's compelled speech, compelled marketing

I am very amused to see the Naderites on the warpath again. Better yet is
their claim that the Microsoft DoJ action is divorced from politics. This
is an excerpt from a message I posted to another list. Might be interesting.

-Declan

---

>     "Fundamentally, I think it's a legal issue," says
>Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications
>Industry Association. "But to say whenever the
>wealthiest man in America and one of the most powerful
>companies in America is challenged by a cabinet
>official, you can't say there's no political impact.
>You're in a political world at that level."

And if we look at the history of antitrust we see that the political world
is often the most important one:

-- Nixon intervened in an antitrust action against ITT in 1971 in exchange
for a bribe: a hefty contribution to the 1972 Republican convention. "I
don't know whether ITT is bad, good or indifferent," he said on April 19,
1971, the White House tapes reveal. "But there is not going to be any more
antitrust actions as long as I am in this chair...goddam it, we're going to
stop it."

-- Bush's assistant attorney general derailed a criminal investigation of
Georgia Power. This after the U.S. attorney in Atlanta had issued more than
five hundred subpoenas and two hundred witnesses were called to testify
before the grand jury. Why? Months earlier, the company's CEO raised
millions of dollars for the Republicans in 1988.

-- AT&T and its manufacturing subsidary were engaged in a
billion-dollar-a-year price fixing scheme, the Justice Department claimed
in a complaint filed in January 1949. AT&T persuaded a slew of high Defense
Department officials to oppose the action on national security grounds. The
Defense Secretary himself opposed it because of the "Korean emergency."
They forced the DoJ to settle the case without getting what it wanted: AT&T
to sell Western Electric.

-- Teddy Roosevelt (who Jamie might recall was widely reported to be a
"trust buster") headed off a DoJ antitrust investigation of the electrical
industry. Roosevelt wrote: "I feel very strongly that the less activity
there is during the presidential election, unless it is necessary, the
better it will be."

Former NY Times and Newseek reporter David Burnham writes in his book about
the Justice Department: "The record is clear. Political campaign
contributions, personal bribes and other direct and indirect favors have
frequently influenced important Justice Department disions about the
enforcement of law... Virtually every administration has demanded that the
Justice Department bend the law..."

-Declan

At 09:04 PM 11/25/97 -0500, Glenn Hauman wrote:
>At 12:40 PM -0500 11/25/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
>Hold it-- are you suggesting that the DOJ is being restrained in going
>after Microsoft? By who?
>

The secret MS hack which disables OS's running under .gov domains when the 
right signal is given :-) :-)



------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig@otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

Information is a dense, colorless, odorless material readily transmitted
across empty space and arbitrary boundaries by shaking charged particles.

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On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, David Honig wrote:

[...]

> At 09:04 PM 11/25/97 -0500, Glenn Hauman wrote:

> >Hold it-- are you suggesting that the DOJ is being restrained in going
> >after Microsoft? By who?
> >
> 
> The secret MS hack which disables OS's running under .gov domains when the 
> right signal is given :-) :-)

There is a secret hack that crashes MS OS's?  Um,  is there one that
actuly makes them work?


- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett.  I do not reply to munged addresses.

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In <3.0.5.32.19971126091941.007d5df0@206.40.207.40>, on 11/26/97 
   at 12:19 PM, David Honig <honig@otc.net> said:

>At 09:04 PM 11/25/97 -0500, Glenn Hauman wrote:
>>At 12:40 PM -0500 11/25/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>
>>Hold it-- are you suggesting that the DOJ is being restrained in going
>>after Microsoft? By who?
>>

>The secret MS hack which disables OS's running under .gov domains when
>the  right signal is given :-) :-)

Well that now explains why systems running M$ OS's have to be rebooted
several times a day. And I thought it was because they wouldn't know QA if
it bit them in the ass.

Tha dam hackers have the code and are fucking with everyones system!!

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 
> I am very amused to see the Naderites on the warpath again. Better yet is
> their claim that the Microsoft DoJ action is divorced from politics. 
   Declan, what exactly is that "claim" that you refer to?  Are you
referring to my note on AM-INFO that DOJ filed against Microsoft without
consulting the White House?  (Something that has been reported in the
press..  WSJ?).  Or is there something else you are referring to.  I
don't think I would say any antitrust action is "divorced" from
politics, including this one.  

  Jamie



This
> is an excerpt from a message I posted to another list. Might be interesting.
> 
> -Declan
> 
> ---
> 
> >     "Fundamentally, I think it's a legal issue," says
> >Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications
> >Industry Association. "But to say whenever the
> >wealthiest man in America and one of the most powerful
> >companies in America is challenged by a cabinet
> >official, you can't say there's no political impact.
> >You're in a political world at that level."
> 
> And if we look at the history of antitrust we see that the political world
> is often the most important one:
> 
> -- Nixon intervened in an antitrust action against ITT in 1971 in exchange
> for a bribe: a hefty contribution to the 1972 Republican convention. "I
> don't know whether ITT is bad, good or indifferent," he said on April 19,
> 1971, the White House tapes reveal. "But there is not going to be any more
> antitrust actions as long as I am in this chair...goddam it, we're going to
> stop it."
> 
> -- Bush's assistant attorney general derailed a criminal investigation of
> Georgia Power. This after the U.S. attorney in Atlanta had issued more than
> five hundred subpoenas and two hundred witnesses were called to testify
> before the grand jury. Why? Months earlier, the company's CEO raised
> millions of dollars for the Republicans in 1988.
> 
> -- AT&T and its manufacturing subsidary were engaged in a
> billion-dollar-a-year price fixing scheme, the Justice Department claimed
> in a complaint filed in January 1949. AT&T persuaded a slew of high Defense
> Department officials to oppose the action on national security grounds. The
> Defense Secretary himself opposed it because of the "Korean emergency."
> They forced the DoJ to settle the case without getting what it wanted: AT&T
> to sell Western Electric.
> 
> -- Teddy Roosevelt (who Jamie might recall was widely reported to be a
> "trust buster") headed off a DoJ antitrust investigation of the electrical
> industry. Roosevelt wrote: "I feel very strongly that the less activity
> there is during the presidential election, unless it is necessary, the
> better it will be."
> 
> Former NY Times and Newseek reporter David Burnham writes in his book about
> the Justice Department: "The record is clear. Political campaign
> contributions, personal bribes and other direct and indirect favors have
> frequently influenced important Justice Department disions about the
> enforcement of law... Virtually every administration has demanded that the
> Justice Department bend the law..."
> 
> -Declan

-- 
James Packard Love
Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367 | Washington, DC 20036 
voice 202.387.8030  | fax 202.234.5176 
love@cptech.org | http://www.cptech.org

Declan,

All of your examples are of antitrust actions *stopped* by political pressure. Of course, monopolies tend to have lots of cash, & that buys influence -- but this is just one more reason to bust them: the disproportion in economic power within the industry corrupts the political system.

There are plenty of ways government fucks with commerce & harms competition. I've seen little evidence that monopoly-busting has done anything but promote competition -- on the rare occasions it succeeds. & the less-rare occasions when the threat influences behavior.

Unlike Lizard, I'm genuinely self-interested. I'd hate to see what would become of the computer industry if Microsoft had no fear of the DoJ.

Paul

P.S.
James & the Naderites ought to take a closer look at MS's Win98 strategy. IE4 is genuinely integrated into the OS, & new MS apps (e.g. Outlook 98) will share much of its code. This isn't bad in itself -- they launch quickly & run smoothly -- but it gives third-party developers a choice:

1) Also live off the IE4 code, making it nearly impossible to port your app to another OS.
2) Write independently & fight with the MS code for system resources. It can't be turned off.

It also makes running Navigator, in particular, ridiculous. You open a folder & bam! there's IE4. Netscape is right to focus on the backend.

P.P.S.
Despite all that, I don't support breaking up MS. The industry is too in flux. MS isn't able to assure victory.

Paul Spirito wrote:
 > Declan,
> 
> All of your examples are of antitrust actions *stopped* by political
> pressure. Of course, monopolies tend to have lots of cash, & that buys
> influence -- but this is just one more reason to bust them: the
> disproportion in economic power within the industry corrupts the
> political system.


    I have worked on several antitrust issues over the past several
years.  My first serious attempt to stop a a merger involved tbe Thomson
purchase of West Publishing, for $3.4 billion.  This involved 2 of the
three large legal publishers (West was number 1).  West publishing was a
privately owned firm.  The largest shareholders were the Opperman
family.  The Opperman family gave Clinton and other democratic party
funds more than $300k during the merger review, directly, and raised
more from third parties.  Vance Opperman had coffee with Clinton and
dinner with Gore during the review.  Earlier Vance had approached
Clinton at a fundraiser to intervene in a Reno antitrust investigation
of West (which was dropped).  The merger was approved, after a
compulsory license and some modest divestitures (we were quite unhappy
with the result).

   We opposed the Bell Atlantic/Nynex merger (we didn't do as much as we
should).  Bell Atlantic has so much capitol hill juice they were able to
hold up Klein's nomination, basically until the merger was approved.

   We opposed the Staples/Office Depot merger, and were quite active. 
This was before the FTC.  Staples launched a very large PR campaign,
with some hill lobbying, but the FTC held its ground, and the merger was
stopped.

   We opposed the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger.  Not only did the FTC
permit the merger without any strings (Numbers 1 and 3 in a 3 firm
market with huge entry barriers), but Bill Clinton personally lobbied
the EC to approve the merger, and sent a delegation to Brussels, which
included Joel Klein, the DOJ antitrust head, to argue against
divestiture of the McDonnell Douglas civilian airline business.

    I've worked on other mergers, including  mergers in the railroad
industry, the hospital industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, and I
have been involved in other antitrust issues, such as in attempts to get
the FCC to make cable systems unbundle set top boxes, and create cross
ownership rules between cellular and PCS, and cable and DBS.  In
virtually every case politics played a role.   Typically, the incumbent
firms, or the one that want to merger, have the most influence,
politically.

    Thus, I was surprised to hear Declan say that we thought politics
didn't play a role in antitrust actions against Microsoft.  There are
many areas where politics come into play.  Gore sent his daughter to
work for Microsoft during the DOJ investigation.  Microsoft has rallied
its troops, starting with the Washington state delegation, they have
also picked up players like Vin Weber to talk with Ginrich, and they are
involved in countless other attempts to influence the Congress and the
executive branch.  Microsoft's competitors have been active too. 
Senator Hatch is obviously concerned about what MS had done to Novell
and Wordperfect.  The stakes are high, and there is a lot going on. 
That doesn't mean politics is the whole ball game.  Public opinion is a
big factor, as is the opinion of experts or reasonably informed persons.

   It is generally difficult to get DOJ or the FTC to bring an antiturst
action against anyone.  The Microsoft case is very high profile, for
many reasons.  Now that DOJ is engaged, I would expect them to make
every effort to prevail on the narrow issue before the court.  Who knows
if DOJ will be interested in pursuing the broader issues about MS's use
of the OS to gain leverage in applicaitons markets.  There is a lot
still up in the air. 

  Jamie


-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
voice 202.387.8030; fax 202.234.5176
http://www.cptech.org  |  love@cptech.org