Yesterday marked the beginning of a bitter showdown between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice to decide if the software giant is in contempt of court for the way it reacted to a Judge’s order to produce a version of Windows 95 without Internet Explorer. Microsoft attorneys locked horns with Judge Thomas Jackson and appeared to be getting on the wrong side of the judge on the first day of a two-day hearing. Jackson repeatedly questioned Microsoft’s focus on Justice’s filings throughout the case – Jackson told Microsoft’s attorney Richard Urowsky it is my language, and my language alone, which is at issue here, reported Bloomberg. Microsoft claimed Justice had been inconsistent in its demands from the software company, but Judge Jackson said that was not the issue in this case. The Department of Justice wants the judge to slap a $1m-a-day fine on the company if it is found to have not complied in good faith with his ruling. But though Microsoft has adapted a more diplomatic stance in its comments on the court case, it will not budge from its argument that the operating system and browser are now an integrated product which cannot be unbundled. This is despite Jackson’s argument last month that it had taken him just 90 seconds to remove IE using the Add/Remove utility built into Windows 95. Microsoft countered that that process left around 90% of the code on the computer and disabled it. The court battle will feature one expert witness from each side. Justice fielded Glenn Weadock, a Denver, Colorado computer consultant and specialist in office automation who has written a series of computer books. Yesterday he showed the court a video demonstrating four other ways of accessing the internet that were disabled once IE was removed using the utility. He also testified that along with cutting off access to the net, removing IE using the program left the rest of the computer functioning normally.
Microsoft is fielding David Cole, a vice president responsible for Internet Explorer development. He is expected to demonstrate the opposite when he testifies – namely that in order to comply with Judge Jackson’s order, it would have to strip every piece of IE code from the computer, which will disable other programs that share some of that code. After Judge Thomas Jackson has heard their arguments, he will rule if Microsoft is in contempt for the stripped down version of Windows 95 it offered up last month to comply with his order of December 11, which called for a version without Internet Explorer. The response by Microsoft is essentially a meaningless response, said assistant attorney general Joe Klein. All we’re concerned with is the abuse of market power. This is really about the fact that they are using market power in their operating system to essentially impair competition with respect to browsers. We think that’s significant and we think that the principal is very important. In a separate move, Microsoft is also appealing Jackson’s order, which is a preliminary injunction. Until the appeals court rules, the order applies.
