Legal News

With Microsoft and Antitrust, Shoe Now on Other Foot

By Ashby Jones

We blog Wall Street Journal stories all the time, of course. But the front-pager out Monday on Google and Microsoft is really something special. It’s got it all the ingredients: high-flying companies, big personalities, hints of subterfuge, and a little Shakespearean turnabout is fair play-ness to it.

The gist of it is this: Back in the late 1990s, Microsoft was everyone’s favorite antitrust target, especially on the question of whether the company had improperly tied its Internet Explorer browser to its ubiquitous operating system, Windows.

But these days, the target has shifted away from Microsoft and to Google. The interesting twist: Microsoft just might be behind the ramped up attacks.

The lead anecdote’s a good one:

Seeking $335,000 in unpaid advertising bills, Google Inc. filed suit against a small Internet site in Ohio in October. The complaint was so routine it was just two sentences long.

Google never expected the response it got. Last month, the small Internet site countered with a 24-page antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search-engine giant of a litany of monopolistic abuses.

But what really caught Google’s attention was the Internet site’s legal counsel: It was (Cadwalader’s) Charles “Rick” Rule, long the chief outside counsel on competition issues for Google archrival Microsoft Corp.

According to the story, Rule also represents another small Internet firm that has brought an antitrust suit against Google. And in Europe, the European Commission has opened a preliminary antitrust inquiry into Google following complaints about the search giant that came from, among others, a Microsoft subsidiary in Germany.

To Google, the pattern is clear: It contends Microsoft is embarking on a proxy war against it through various apparently unrelated cases. Microsoft, on the other hand, calls that nonsense. It says it neither initiated nor is funding the small Internet firms’ antitrust lawsuits. The plaintiffs and their legal counsel also deny that Microsoft orchestrated the actions. The Internet firms say they chose Cadwalader and Rule on their own.

Microsoft does say that a growing number of consumers, companies and governments have concerns about Google’s marketplace dominance, especially as it forays into other fields and technologies.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, expects Google will have to keep navigating a legal and regulatory minefield. “If everyone starts piling on, Google might have to change its basic business.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 01, 2010 (boomark / email).