Justice Dept. Defends Microsoft Against Google

Frosty Piss writes "The Seattle PI reports that Google has complained to US antitrust officials about the hard-drive searching tool built into Windows Vista, saying that it stymies Google's similar search program. The complaint, lodged late last year, was revealed Saturday by The New York Times in a story about the Bush administration's handling of Microsoft antitrust issues. The real story, though, is not the Google complaint itself, but how the Justice Department is failing to enforce the Microsoft anti-trust decree. According to the story, Thomas Barnett, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of antitrust issues, sent a memo last month to state attorneys general across the nation, seeking to persuade them to reject Google's complaint."

Thomas O. Barnett

[Serious Callers Only]

From the article :

The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

Seems strange that they'd hire someone from a law firm associated with Microsoft for the Justice Dept. and then put him in a position to comment on an MS case.

Re:google is EVIL!

[speaker of the truth]

If other OSes can ship it then so can Microsoft.

Correction: If other OS publishers who've been convicted of abusing their monopoly can do it, then so can Microsoft.

For convicted monopolists, there are different rules then for non-convicted monopolists and everyone else. This is partly because you can't throw a monopoly into jail, and partly to keep the market fair and free (if you want a totally free market then we have to get rid of copyright laws, therefore most companies don't want a completely free market and as such rules coming into the market must exist).

So no, just because others can do it doesn't mean Microsoft should be able to do it. Microsoft made the choice to break the law and abuse its monopoly, and it was caught. Now it should suffer the consequences, which is having to work under rules that no-one else the market is followed to force.

Unfortunately this won't happen as the Bush administration is pro-Big Business and pro-monopoly abuses. This is why under the Democrats Microsoft was convicted and under the Republicans they have not been punished. The swap of power was quite unfortunately timed for software developers.

This is the same company that made a deal with Apple to have Safari's web search box locked into Google so you can't change the default or even add secondary search providers (as if that doesn't harm competing search engines on the Mac platform),

*sigh*

Its shit like this that really makes me want to leave Google. Does anyone know of any comparative services from companies that aren't as evil? I use:
* Gmail (so I'd like a web-based interface that's as rich as this)
* Google Personalized Homepage
* Google Docs

I might not switch, but I'm certainly considering it as more and more of Google's shit comes to light.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

All this shows it that Microsoft paid more for their politicians than Google did.

YES!

[mangu]

Hey, let's just disassemble the OS entirely piece by piece

You mean, like this? [ubuntu.com] I'm all for it.

and put it all back together with 3rd party

Like this? [kubuntu.org] Sounds good, let's do it!

Why are they not complaining about OSX?

[QunaLop]

I know they don't provide an indexer for osx, but the indexer in osx was conceived after ms's vista (longhorn i suppose)'s i think google is way off base to begin with, and not saying anything about osx really cuts the legs out of the argument imho.

Re:hmm

[keithjr]

You're not missing much. This is the argument that MS would use if this case were to ever come to fruition. It's the same way they dodged the Netscape suit: claim that the product being complained about is actually an integral part of the functionality of an operating system in today's computing model.

This worked with Netscape thanks to the sharp rise in internet use by the common user when IE started coming bundled with Windows. At that point, a web browser was indeed an intergral part of the OS and thus not criminal for the OS provider to provide one. This is the line of reasoning that can be leavied against Google: search functions are now necessary for day-to-day use.

But then again, it will never come to that, thanks to Microsoft's clever investments in government.