Microsoft is marshalling a frontal assault in its antitrust battle, disclosing plans to bring Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer to testify at a remedy hearing and accusing AOL Time Warner and Oracle of helping to draft a harsh remedy proposal.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company fired a barrage of legal briefs Friday, some expected and others not by the court. But in all of them Microsoft made clear the only acceptable resolution to the nearly four-year-old antitrust trial is a settlement deal cut in November with the Justice Department and nine states. Nine other states and the District of Columbia rejected the deal and have returned to litigation.
A hearing about the Justice Department settlement is tentatively scheduled for the week of March 4, while a separate remedy hearing involving the nine non-settling states commences March 11. Both proceedings are moving on separate tracks that could merge in the coming months, a circumstance Microsoft hopes to prevent, say legal experts.
Lawyers representing Microsoft and the Justice Department appeared on Friday before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who indicated she might delay ruling on the settlement until after completing the remedy hearing. Microsoft"s worst-case scenario: Kollar-Kotelly rejects the settlement proposal and imposes some form of the harsher remedy demanded by the litigating states.
"You can be sure Microsoft will muster all its resources to try and prevent an outcome of that kind," said Rich Gray, a Silicon Valley-based attorney closely following the trial.
"The judge wants finality, and she is going to do her job to see if this settlement is in the public interest," he added. "She does not want to put her seal of approval of something that could get shredded at the appellate level. And she is also certainly aware that anything she does is going to be passed over in the court of public opinion. So she will proceed slowly, cautiously."
If the 30,000 comments received by the Justice Department about the settlement are a gauge of public sentiment, then the majority of people oppose the proposed deal by a 2-to-1 margin. About 15,000 comments were against the settlement, while 7,500 commenters favored the deal.
Sixty days of public comments concluded on Jan. 28 as mandated by the Tunney Act, a Nixon-era law that requires antitrust settlements be in the public interest.
But a Ipsos-Reid survey touted by Microsoft supporters found 70 percent of Americans felt the U.S. economy would benefit from the settlement; only 24 percent favored continued litigation. But Ipsos-Reid did not directly ask the 1,000 adults polled if they supported the settlement.