The Register has a number of articles on the Micro$oft/Dept. of Justice “settlement.” The bottom line? Micro$oft is now in a stronger position than it was before, because it has legal sanction to do a whole bunch of things that it was only able to do before because it was a monopoly.
I won’t quote extensively, but note that the Register finds any number of cases in which broad, nice-sounding phrases are then undone by various weasel-words, exceptions that Micro$oft can claim, and any number of other nasties.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that M$ wrote the agreement, with the collusion of the Bush Justice Dept.
Okay, I will quote one part, on the enforcement of all the bits that actually might call for enforcement.
A three strong Technical Committee to “assist in enforcement… and compliance” will be installed in Mordor itself, although we believe it is not intended for them to be in thrall to Bill – immediately, anyway. There’ll be one appointed by the Government, one by Microsoft, and the pair will then select a third. The members won’t have been recently employed by Microsoft or a competitor, and won’t have consulted or testified for them. Even without the two sides furiously vetoing each other’s nominations, this will surely make it fiendishly difficult to assemble a TC that actually knows about what it’s supposed to be supervising.
The TC will have access to source code, “subject to the terms of Microsoft’s standard source code Confidentiality Agreement” and its members will also “sign a confidentiality agreement prohibiting disclosure of any information obtained in the course of performing his or her duties… All information gathered by the TC in connection with this Final Judgment and any report and recommendations prepared by the TC shall be treated as Highly Confidential under the Protective Order in this case, and shall not be disclosed to any person other than Microsoft and the United States execept as allowed by the Protective Order entered in the Action or by further order of this Court.”
And just in case they don’t get the message from that: “No member of the TC shall make any public statements relating to the TC’s activities.” So they’re going in there, and we’re quite possibly never going to hear from them again. If they do have a beef, and the DoJ doesn’t agree it’s a beef, then nobody need ever know. If they’re hopeless, outnumbered and outflanked, we’re never going to know about that either.
I feel more secure already.