Corporate & Securities Law

Microsoft Antitrust Decree Extended

By David Fischer

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly extended the antitrust decree until November 2009.  According to Bloomberg:

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington yesterday extended an antitrust decree governing the conduct of the world’s largest software maker until November 2009. The judge agreed with a group of states that said Microsoft withheld important information on communications links from its competitors.

Kollar-Kotelly said in her ruling that she might extend the court supervision beyond 2009 depending on the company’s compliance. “The door remains open for the court to reassess the need for continued oversight,” she said.

…

The court decree enforcing the settlement was due to expire last year. In extending it through 2009, Kollar-Kotelly said she based her decision “upon the extreme and unforeseen delay in the availability of complete, accurate and usable technical documentation” from Microsoft. The delay “prevented the final judgments from achieving their principal objectives,” she said.

…

“The extension should not be viewed as a sanction against Microsoft,” Kollar-Kotelly said. She commended Microsoft “for its willingness to address issues as they arose” and said, “In many respects, Microsoft’s conduct has been a model for parties engaged in complex and protracted litigation.”

Still, “the fact remains that more than five years after the final judgments were entered, the technical documentation” is “still not available to licensees” in a usable form, the judge wrote.

…

In her 78-page opinion, the judge agreed with the states’ argument that the failure to give companies technical data meant that “the various provisions” of the decree “have not yet been given the opportunity to operate together as a comprehensive remedy.”

“The court cannot know” what impact the documentation “will have on the market once it is finally available,” Kollar- Kotelly wrote.

The judge said the increase from 10 Microsoft employees originally assigned to produce the technical data in 2006 to the 320 engineers and program managers involved last year shows the “insufficiency of resources” the company had devoted to the project.

Microsoft said 41 companies have licensed the protocols and 13 of them are selling software products developed with them.

The Opinion is available online.

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).