Word: antitrusters
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Microsoft's highly repetitive and relentlessly on-message weather report was its way of saying it was delighted, delighted, delighted with last week's appeals-court ruling partly reversing the antitrust verdict against it. The decision clearly sent a burst of sunshine Microsoft's way. Gates & Co. won on the most critical issue: the court unanimously reversed the trial court's order splitting Microsoft in two. And it upbraided Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, a Microsoft nemesis, for his comments to the media and booted him off the case...
...engaged in illegal anticompetitive acts. The court sent the case back to the trial court for new hearings that could result in substantial remedies against Microsoft--even, although it's now unlikely, another breakup order. Perhaps most troubling: the ruling could pave the way for a flood of private antitrust lawsuits...
...President Bush also expressed concern. His own antitrust regulators at the Justice Department let the G.E.-Honeywell marriage - a very neatly matched one-stop-shopping combination of jetliner engines and jetliner avionics that scared G.E.'s European competitors - slide through with only minor alterations. Then head euro-trustbuster Mario Monti and his commission had to go and mess it all up for reasons that struck American backers of American business interests (like Rockefeller and Bush) as a little too, well, nationalistic...
...What all that means for the U.S., from Washington to Wall Street, is that in globalized antitrust regulation the higher bar is the only bar. A merger of Connecticut-based GE and New Jersey-based Honeywell qualified for Euro-scrutiny because the combined revenues of the two companies exceed the EU's circuit-breakers of $4.3 billion in global sales and $215 million in EU sales...
...Honeywell qualified by a country mile, and so will a lot of other U.S. mergers. E.U. and U.S. antitrust officials work closely together, and for most of the '90s, if American companies could get a deal past their own government, they could get it past the EU. (The last big merger spiked by the EU, WorldCom-Sprint, was denied by the U.S. a day later.) Now, Bush's hands may be off the gates, but Monti's are still on. Which suddenly makes Europe a very imposing gatekeeper...