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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ibexx who wrote (5730)	4/9/1998 8:57:00 AM
From: James Fink	Respond to of 74651

April 9, 1998 States Ready Antitrust Move Over Microsoft Browser Case By JOHN R. WILKE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WASHINGTON -- Several states are preparing to take their own antitrust action against Microsoft Corp., state officials and industry executives said. The move signals a sharp rise in antitrust enforcement by the states. About a dozen state attorneys general are actively involved in the effort, pooling their resources and often working in parallel with federal antitrust officials. In the Microsoft investigation, officials said Wednesday they plan to take action with or without the Justice Department. A draft complaint is circulating among 11 states and could be filed by the end of the month before U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who handled the Justice Department's suit against the Redmond, Wash., software giant last year. While the states have been working closely with the Justice Department on Microsoft for the past year and continue to do so, some officials say they fear the department won't follow through with plans to file an antitrust suit against the software company. They also worry that the remedies federal officials will seek won't go far enough to address Microsoft's dominance of personal-computer software. If that happens, these states want to be ready to take action themselves, officials said. As reported in The Wall Street Journal Monday, Justice Department investigators believe they have enough evidence for a new case against Microsoft, but Mr. Klein and Attorney General Janet Reno haven't made a decision on whether to proceed (Justice Department Mulls New Charges vs. Microsoft, April 6.) States involved in the Microsoft inquiry include Ohio, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, people close to the inquiry said. Other states these people said are involved couldn't be confirmed late Wednesday. A Microsoft spokesman said, "We hope the states still have an open mind on these issues -- we only received their initial request for documents in February and we are still in the process of compiling and providing the thousands of pages requested. "We are cooperating in every way we can, and we are confident that once they review the facts they will agree that Microsoft is completely within the law," he said. States have become increasingly active in antitrust issues in recent years and have even asserted their authority in merger enforcement, which had been exclusively a federal jurisdiction. State officials cite a 1990 Supreme Court decision giving them the right to intervene in a California grocery-store merger case even though the FTC had approved the deal. These officials say the last time states were this active in antitrust was in the 1980s, when more than a dozen led by New York moved to counter what they saw as a lack of enforcement action during the Reagan administration.