Day: November 1, 2002

Dan, Et Al — I Told You So

Remember back to June 2001 when the Appeals Court in the Microsoft case reversed and remanded Judge Jackson’s proposed penalties against Microsoft? At that time, people who should have known better (Dan Gillmor comes to mind) went around grasping at straws that this was somehow a loss for Microsoft.

Of course, here the more sensible view prevailed,

As for the remedies, they’re headed toward Microsoft but what are the odds this case will ever go before another judge? Very, very low. With the Appeals Court making a breakup impossible, Microsoft now has the leverage it needs to reach an advantageous settlement. This is a prospect the Justice Department is going to be very amenable to since it seems clear that John Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration don’t want this case.

This whole thing will almost conclude with a slap-on-the-wrist-fine and some meaningless agreement in which Microsoft promises not to enter into exclusionary deals with ISPs and to stop threatening competitors like Intel who want to enter into deals with Microsoft’s competitors.

Of course there was a settlement that amounted to a slap on the wrist, and today a judge upheld that settlement agreement with only minor changes.

The interesting thing about Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is how far she went in agreeing with critics of the entire lawsuit. Groups that were out there claiming that this was a classic abuse of antitrust to benefit MS competitors were derided as sycophantic spokespersons for MS who didn’t have a clue, but here’s Judge Kollar-Kotelly strongly criticizing the states and others for just this problem. Here’s what she wrote about Sun’s Scott McNealy’s claim that Microsoft’s failure to include a JVM was evidence of monopolistic behavior,

The incompatibility of Microsoft’s JVM is a non-issue…Mr. Green’s testimony is revealed as little more than an attempt to advance Sun-compliant Java technologies through this proceeding.

Dave Winer doesn’t get it either, insisting that the decision is bad because it harms Microsoft’s competitors. But antitrust was never intended to help a company’s competitors, and to suggest that it should do so is a complete perversion of what little justification there is for antitrust laws in the first place.

Source:

Rivals come up short in decision. Declan McCullagh, CNET.Com, November 1, 2002.

African Nations Squeezing Congo

The United Nations didn’t make any friends in releasing a report accusing highly placed political and military officials in the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe of setting up criminal cartels to exploit mineral and gem resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe withdrew their armed forces from the DR Congo as part of an agreement to bring a halt to that country’s civil war. But the United Nations report maintains that the military officials who were using their armies to strip DR Congo of precious minerals and gems have simply set up deeply entrenched criminal organizations to accomplish the same thing in their absence.

According to the report,

Three distinct criminal groups linked to the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe and the Government of the DRC have benefited from overlapping micro-conflicts [and] will not disband voluntarily even as the foreign military forces continue their withdrawals.

. . .

The looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves has been replaced with organised systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and diversion of state funds conducted by groups that closely resemble criminal organizations.

The report cites 54 specific individuals and recommends a variety of actions be taken against them, such as freezing their assets and barring them for travel, if they do not cease such activities within a few months.

Of course the real problem is less that these individuals are willing to pay large bribes and use other means to gain access to the DR Congo’s wealth, but rather that the DR Congo government is so weak and corrupt that this appears to be the normal, accepted way of doing business in that country.

The reaction of the African nations was predictable — the report was all lies. After all, who ever heard of official corruption on the African continent?

Source:

Focus on UN Panel report on the plunder of the Congo. UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, October 21, 2002.

Africa fury at U.N. looting report. Reuters, October 22, 2002.

States set up cartels to plunder Congo UN. Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, Business Day (Johannesburg), October 22, 2002.

First Quantum denies U.N. accusations on Congo. Reuters, October 22, 2002.