Category: Big Business

Tobacco companies have long contended that the only reason they advertise is not to encourage people to take up smoking (of course not!), but to promote brand recognition and name identification. Clearly that’s at least partially true, since Philip Morris has decided that the brand recognition and name identification that associated subsidiary companies like Kraft, Nabisco, and Miller with the largest cigarette manufacturer in the world was having a negative effect on sales. Hence their decision, pending shareholder approval, to change their name to “Altria.”

(Via Blather)

Even one of M$’ supporters in the trades finds the DoJ/M$ agreement “embarrassing.”

As someone generally considered to have been in Microsoft’s corner throughout the three years of this court battle, I find the proposed settlement more than a little embarrassing. If I didn’t like Judge Jackson’s break-up ruling, I like the proposed settlement only a little more. You nuke Netscape and abuse monopoly power and then lie about it in federal court–and this is what happens to you?

The author, ZDNet executive editor David Coursey, goes through his own laundry list of gaps and give-aways in the settlement agreement.

A final observation: A year ago, in endorsing Al Gore’s presidential candidacy, I warned my Republican friends that a vote for Bush was a vote for Microsoft. And while Attorney General John Ashcroft denies White House complicity, can there be any doubt the settlement would be vastly different if Democrats were in charge?

The irony here was that the Bush White House was more than happy to rattle sabers at the pharmaceutical industry in order to get a plentiful supply of cheap Cipro. Can you imagine Ashcroft threatening to ignore the patent/copyright protection that M$ has on its products? Me, neither. Not unless there were a lot more political heat about it.

Oh, that Ashcroft statement? Here it is, on 2 November:

The agreement “will put an end to Microsoft’s unlawful conduct and bring effective relief to the marketplace and ensure that consumers will have more choices in meeting their needs of computing and working with their computers,” he told a news conference.
Asked if the agreement constituted “selling out” by the government, Ashcroft replied, “That’s totally false.” He called it “a strong, historic settlement.”
[…] “A competitive software industry is vital to our economy, and effective antitrust enforcement is crucial to preserving competition in the constantly changing hi-tech arena,” Ashcroft said.

Given Ashcroft’s recent Orwellian assault on Constitutional due process, it’s not surprising that he might have Orwellian definitions for words like “competitive,” “effective,” and “enforcement.”

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.