Word: bingaman
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What happened? In two words: Stanley Sporkin. In February the maverick federal judge rejected as inadequate the antitrust decree Gates had negotiated last summer with Assistant Attorney General Anne Bingaman, publically chastising the government's chief trustbuster for failing to curb what he viewed as Microsoft's abuse of a monopoly position. Both the government and Microsoft insist that one case had nothing to do with the other. But someone at Justice seemed to think they might be linked in the court of public opinion. The department assigned more lawyers to its investigation of the Intuit deal right after...
...stunning setback by suing to block the software giant's acquisition of Intuit Inc., maker of the predominant personal finance software Quicken. It would have been the largest software merger ever and would also have given Microsoft a formidable lead in the emerging market of online personal finance transactions.Anne Bingaman, Justice's antitrust chief, said allowing the deal "would likely result in higher prices for consumers who want to buy personal finance software and would cause those buyers to miss out on the huge benefits from innovation." Newly-minted conventional wisdom, notesTIME technology editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who says Bingaman...
...sweeps up the shattered pieces of the Microsoft settlement, Bingaman must be wondering whether she's been promising more than she can deliver. The wife of Senator Jeff Bingaman, a three-term Democrat from New Mexico, Bingaman was once a plaintiff's lawyer who could claim a record-making $1 billion judgment against a foreign uranium cartel. By the end of last year, she had initiated more than 33 civil antitrust cases, compared with an average of 10 a year for her Republican predecessors. But the legal theory of antitrust has been changing. In federal courts, where Republican-appointed judges...
...that tricky environment, Bingaman has allowed some mergers, especially in areas, such as telecommunications, where the White House happens to favor combinations that promise to create more jobs. When she does move against what she sees as monopolistic practices, a favored tactic has been to scare companies with the threat of lengthy suits. By huffing and puffing, she got AT&T to sign a consent decree promising to keep the McCaw Cellular phone company a separate subsidiary, which allowed McCaw customers to pick their own long-distance carriers. But when Bingaman has actually gone to court, the results have...
Justice department lawyers should have known Stanley Sporkin wouldn't just rubber-stamp the Microsoft settlement. When antitrust chief Anne Bingaman urged the bearish federal judge to approve it, Sporkin growled back: "Will the government give me a pen to sign, or can I use my own? I've got to have some role here...