America Online Inc’s $4.3bn purchase of Netscape Communications Corp has been cleared by the Department of Justice on antitrust grounds, as was AOL’s strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. The deal is expected to be approved at the Netscape shareholders meeting on March 17. The acquisition will have some sort of antitrust after-life however, as it will be brought up again in the rebuttal stage of the Microsoft antitrust trial next month, including the possibility of AOL CEO Steve Case being called to the witness stand. Microsoft will try once again to prove that the deal changes the competitive landscape in the browser market and thus makes the DoJ’s case against it irrelevant.
