Word: antitrust
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...antitrust chief Joel Klein, the plan strikes a perfect balance: "Neither the heavy hand of ongoing government regulation nor the self-interest of an entrenched monopolist will decide what is in the best interest of consumers," he says. "Rather, consumers will be able to choose for themselves the products they want in a free and competitive marketplace." Counters Gates: "We don't believe the courts are going to uphold this kind of unprecedented and radical regulation of our activities...
...would a breakup prevent future Netscapes--whose browser Microsoft ran over--from being illegally squashed? "It's a gamble," says lawyer and economist Robert Litan, of the Brookings Institution, who once worked for the Justice Department's antitrust division. Litan, who believes the Feds should go even further, joined three fellow economists in a separate brief that called for Microsoft to be split into three competing pieces. The trouble with Klein's remedy, Litan argues, is that where once there was one monopoly there now could be two--the applications and Windows sides--with the possibility that they will find...
...that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson would think twice about crushing shareholders in deciding how to de-monopolize Microsoft. "He'll be more interested in restoring the marketplace to where it would have been" absent Microsoft's abusive behavior, says Jennifer Gray, an antitrust lawyer with Brown Raysman. In that view, any wealth that happens to be destroyed by a breakup or other remedy could be seen as just deserts for shareholders who should never have benefited from monopoly profits in the first place...
...this isn't just any company. Microsoft is widely held. It has 3 million individual shareholders, and the stock is held in 36% of all U.S. stock funds. It is one of the 10 largest positions in 31% of stock funds, according to Morningstar. The whole idea of the antitrust case is to protect consumers. Yet they own the stock...
...hours before the justice department recommended splitting Microsoft, TIME spoke to Joel Klein, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for antitrust, who spearheaded the landmark case against the software giant...