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Microsoft's legal battles continue 
Tuesday, November 06 2001
by Matthew Clark


Despite the settlement between Microsoft and US Department of Justice, the
European Commission said it would press on with its investigation of the company.




In August, the Commission said that it was investigating whether the company's
decision to embed Media Player in its Windows operating system was damaging
potential competitors. Additionally, the Commission said at the time that it was
investigating whether Windows 2000 was designed to work better with Microsoft
servers than with rival servers. 

On Monday the European Commission said the investigation is still in preliminary
stages, and was "ongoing." Nevertheless the organisation admitted that it was
too early to say if the settlement in the US would impact its separate
investigation. "There might be certain features in the US settlement which
might or might not have an impact on the Commission's own investigation involving
Microsoft," said a spokesperson for the European Commission according to a
Reuters report. 

While legal experts are mixed in terms of what they expect the Commission to do,
the organisation does have a history of moving forward with anti-trust
investigations that may have been cleared by officials in the US. Earlier this
year the EC rejected General Electric's proposed acquisition of Honeywell in a
decision that was widely criticised in the US. 



Furthermore, some experts in the US and in Europe have said that the EC's
investigation does have some notable differences to the investigation in US. 



Additionally the 18 US States that joined in the legal action against Microsoft
have not yet signed on to the deal that was reached by the company and the
Department of Justice on Friday. 



While it remains unclear what many of the States will do at this point,
Massachusetts has already said it would not sign on to the settlement. The
State's attorney general said on Sunday that his State would not sign on to the
proposed deal, because it does not protect competing software makers. 

"Microsoft will use this agreement to crush competition," Massachusetts
attorney general Thomas F. Reilly said Sunday. According to an AP report, he said
the deal between the company and the US Department of Justice would not be
approved by the Massachusetts without "major changes." Reilly also said that
he did not expect those changes to occur before Tuesday's deadline. 

The State attorney general said that if Massachusetts could get a group of States
together to continue the fight against the maker of Windows it could consider
continuing the litigation. California, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Kansas,
Maryland, Florida, Massachusetts, West Virginia and the District of Columbia at
this point are all understood to be opposed to the settlement reached last week.
It is expected that these States will tell US District Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly on Tuesday that they will not support the agreement without
changes to its language. 



It is believed that officials from some of the States thought to be in opposition
of the pact, including California, Connecticut and Iowa, had met with mediators
to try to reach some agreement on harsher penalties for Microsoft, according to
the Wall Street Journal. 

It is understood that Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, New York and Utah are
leaning toward approval of the now controversial agreement. The positions of
Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and Minnesota remain unclear. 





Still more troubles arose for Microsoft last week when long time rival Sun
Microsystems said it was considering a lawsuit against the software maker because
it believed that the deal with the US federal government would not protect
competitors. 



While legal action does not appear imminent at this point, it remains a
possibility for the creator of Java. Sun already has some ammunition for a
potential civil anti-trust lawsuit because a US Court of Appeals ruled in June
that Microsoft held a monopoly and violated anti-trust laws in its efforts to
suppress Sun's Java programming language.