Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has been urging the Justice Department and courts to take a hard line with Microsoft Corp over its monopolistic practices and anti-competitive behavior. On Monday December 13, Nader published a paper in the Legal Times, jointly written with Jamie Love of the Consumer Project on Technology. Microsoft can’t be trusted, they argued. One should not predict that Microsoft will carry out any settlement in good faith… When the judge ordered Microsoft to offer OEMs a version of Windows that did not include the company’s Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft served up an outdated 1995 version of Windows that wouldn’t even work with modern PC hardware. If Microsoft was willing to insult a federal judge in the middle of an antitrust proceeding, it’s likely to be pretty bold after it enters into a consent degree.
Nader and Love proposed four remedies. First, reform OEM licensing to enable OEMs to say stand firm in the face of pressure from Microsoft. Second, break up the company. In many respects, this is the obvious option, they write. Microsoft itself has made it clear that it will resist change without strong economic incentives. Separating the operating system and applications into different companies would remove Microsoft’s incentive to make alternative products crash. Ideally, they say, the court would divest Internet Explorer into a third company, alongside Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
Third, Nader and Love insist that Microsoft must fix problems with interoperability. Some have proposed opening up the Windows source code, they observe. While we think it useful to require such disclosures, they aren’t enough. They cite the precedent of IBM, which from August 1, 1984 was forced to publish extensive information about the interfaces to its System/370 computers. The IBM Undertaking sets a benchmark for evaluating the remedies currently proposed in the Microsoft case, Love and Nader contend. Fourth and finally, the writers say that Microsoft should be required to port its Office application suite to alternative platforms like Linux and BeOS.
