The nine demurring states in the Micro$oft anti-trust settlement have put together some intriguing proposals for a settlement. Intriguing enough that they’re probably all non-starters, according to the summary in the Register.
The salient difference between this document and the previous is that the States have made a reasonable attempt at identifying previous abuses, anticipating future ones and, step-by-step, explaining how the remedies they’re proposing would tackle them. It’s a pretty big problem, so inevitably they’ve come up with something that is wholly unpalatable to Microsoft, and that therefore could never have been achieved via a negotiated settlement.
The DoJ document, on the other hand, lists the relatively few concessions that could be achieved to form a negotiated settlement, then makes a futile and unconvincing attempt to explain why these will solve all the problems and tame The Beast. There is at least intellectual merit in the nine States having tossed this approach and devised something with internal logic and coherence instead.
[…] Ed Black of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) welcomed the proposal, while saying that additional remedies would also be appropriate. “Unlike the Justice Department’s capitulation to Microsoft, this is a serious effort to curb the illegal monopoly conduct of the company and restore competition to the software industry. Perhaps the most striking difference between the States’ proposed remedy and the Microsoft/DoJ settlement is that the States’ proposal was clearly drafted by prosecutors seeking to enforce the law, while the settlement was obviously crafted largely by Microsoft to provide a means of evading the law.”
Among the tidbits are a proposal to make Internet Explorer an open source utility, and to allow other companies to license the code to M$ Office to be ported to other computing platforms than Windows. There’s also the normal dreary stuff about preventing breakware, independent secure code reviews, etc.
Most notably, folks in the process who aren’t happy about it aren’t gagged by the settlement, either.
It’s almost certainly a non-starter, but it’s nice to see someone in the process actually looking for some remedies for the adjudged monopolistic practices of M$.
Microsoft would never go for it but… the goverment ought to just absorb it.