Word: antitrust
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...going easy on either side of the Atlantic. "At the beginning, we weren't invited in the front door or the back door," says an executive with a competitor. (With legal actions still a possibility, many of those interviewed for this story insisted on anonymity.) In Washington, the antitrust division of Justice would wait until June 14 for the arrival of a new head--Charles James, Bush's nominee, who was considered to be probusiness. "The DOJ would not and did not meet with us," says John Briggs, who represented Rockwell, an American competitor of Honeywell. "There was just...
...jilted American suitor. Chris Bright, one of GE's lawyers in Brussels, says the Commission sent United Technologies away "to find the mud, and in the end, unfairly, the mud stuck." One more lesson: the slow confirmation process in Washington has a cost. Had James been confirmed as antitrust chief at the Justice Department by March, say, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic would have been able to discuss the merger at a high level--and maybe come to common conclusions. As it is, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has described the Commission's action as "off the wall...
Microsoft's critics, however, say it is significant that even the court's most conservative jurists signed on to the unanimous ruling that Microsoft violated the antitrust laws. "These guys came a long way from oral argument to the time they wrote the decision," says Michael Pettit, president of ProComp, an anti-Microsoft tech-industry alliance. Pettit says it's clear that even the judges who were most skeptical about antitrust law turned against Microsoft when they read the record and saw how the company had done business...
...hence the rest of the technology industry, to innovate and improve products without government meddling. The company has several new initiatives teed up, including Passport, a kind of Web-shopping manager, and Hailstorm, a subscription-based e-mail-alert Web service. One of Microsoft's main offenses in the antitrust case, the company points out, was giving away the Internet Explorer with Windows. "There weren't a lot of complaints from customers that they were getting a browser for free," says Jonathan Zuck, executive director of the pro-Microsoft Association for Competitive Technology...
...company that could be first in line: AOL Time Warner, the parent company of TIME. In recent talks about renewing AOL's spot on Windows XP, Microsoft sought indemnity from future antitrust claims. AOL refused, and the deal died. AOL might sue, claiming that Netscape, the Internet browser it now owns, was harmed by Microsoft's monopolistic behavior. Estimates of potential damage are in the billions of dollars. Other companies that could sue: Microsoft-loathing Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks and Oracle...