Micro$lop now needs " DEAD PEOPLE " support, watch out:
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Nation & World : Thursday, August 23, 2001
Microsoft lobbying campaign backfires;
even dead people write in support of firm
By Joseph Menn and Edmund Sanders
Los Angeles Times
Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk
of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to
go easy on Microsoft for its conduct as a monopoly.
The pleas, along with more than 100 others from Utah residents, are part of
a carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign by the software giant that may
be backfiring. Microsoft sought to create the impression of a surging
grass-roots movement, aimed largely at the attorneys general of some of the
18 states that have joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft.
The Microsoft campaign goes to great lengths to create an impression that
the letters are spontaneous expressions from ordinary people. Letters sent in
the last month are on personalized stationery using different wording, color
and typefaces, details that distinguish Microsoft's efforts from lobbying
tactics that go on in politics every day.
State law-enforcement officials became suspicious after noticing that the
same sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses
appeared invalid.
"It's an obvious corporate attempt to manipulate citizen input," said Rick
Cantrell, community-relations director for the Utah attorney general.
"You can just tell these were engineered. When there's a real groundswell,
people walk in, they fax, they call. We get handwritten letters."
Microsoft officials, whose aggressive lobbying tactics in the antitrust battle
have raised eyebrows in the past, said they simply are responding to the
lobbying efforts of competitors.
"There's been a political campaign waged against Microsoft for a number of
years by well-funded, special-interest companies like AOL, Oracle, Sun
Microsystems and their trade associations," said Microsoft spokesman
Vivek Varma. "It's not surprising that companies and organizations that
support Microsoft are mobilizing to counter that lobby."
Indeed, Microsoft's competitors have helped craft some of the legal strategy
against the company, and they actively lobby. Oracle, for one, was criticized
for hiring a private investigator that combed through a pro-Microsoft group's
trash. But those companies say they haven't tried to drum up activism by the
public.
Microsoft referred questions about the new campaign to the company
running it, Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), which gets some
money from Microsoft, but won't say how much. ATL was founded in 1999
as a spinoff of the Association for Competitive Technology, another
pro-Microsoft group.
In their calls, people working for ATL say they are conducting a poll about
the Microsoft case. If people express support for Microsoft, they are sent
letters to sign, along with handstamped, pre-addressed envelopes to their
state attorney general, to President Bush, and to their members of Congress.
Asked about the relationship between the telephone calls and subsequent
letters, ATL Executive Director Jim Prendergast said those who agreed the
prosecution was misguided were merely given suggestions about what to use
in drafting their own letters.
Asked why some phrases were identical, Prendergast then conceded that
the letters were written by his operation. "We'd write the letter and then
send it to them," Prendergast said. "That's fairly common practice."
It's not clear how many states Microsoft is targeting with the campaign, or
how much the company is spending.
The letter-writing exercise is part of a larger Microsoft plan to sway
Congress and encourage prosecutors to pursue a settlement in advance of a
court hearing on how the Redmond company should be punished for illegally
maintaining its monopoly on computer operating systems.
The maker of Windows and other software also has stepped up campaign
donations, becoming the fifth-largest "soft-money" donor to the national
Republican and Democratic parties in 1999-2000.
To assist it in the grass-roots campaign, Microsoft turned to two of the
nation's top political-advocacy groups: Boston-based Dewey Square
Group, co-founded by Al Gore campaigner Michael Whouley, and
Phoenix-based DCI/New Media, led by Republican strategist Tom
Synhorst. DCI has worked for both the tobacco industry and the National
Rifle Association.
The first crop of letters began rolling into state offices in the spring.
Quietly distributed by another Microsoft-supported group, Citizens Against
Government Waste, those letters were identical except for the signature.
Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch said he got about 300 of those.
"It's sleazy," Hatch said. "This is not a company that appears to be bothered
by ethical boundaries."
Hatch responded with his own mailings to the senders, explaining his
position.
Some of the recipients wrote back by hand, apologizing for passing along
the Microsoft-inspired letters. "I sure was misled," one wrote. "It's time for
you to get out there & kick butt."
Utah officials found two of the pre-fab letters bore the typed names of dead
people. Those names had been crossed out by family members who signed
for them. And another letter came from "Tuscon, Utah," a city that doesn't
exist.
In recent weeks, Microsoft's strategy has been refined to engineer more
individualized letters to state officials and the Bush administration. Iowa
Attorney General Tom Miller's office, for example, has received more than
50 anti-lawsuit letters in the past month from state residents.
No two letters are identical, but the giveaway lies in the phrasing. Four of
the Iowa letters include this sentence: "Strong competition and innovation
have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry."
Three others use exactly these words: "If the future is going to be as
successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from
excess regulation."
Some residents who fielded the ATL's calls believed the states themselves
were soliciting their views, according to the attorneys general of Minnesota,
Illinois and Utah.
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
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