The Justice Department's antitrust czar has painted Bill Gates as the Big Brother of cyberspace

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DECIDED TO MAKE things simple on the first day of its sweeping antitrust suit against Microsoft: it dispensed with the case law and put Bill Gates front and center. A disembodied, larger-than-life Gates hovered over Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's courtroom on a 10-ft.-tall computerized video monitor during much of government lawyer David Boies' opening statement. The thrust of Boies' argument: the fidgety, spectral man-in-the-monitor was coolly dissembling about his plans to dominate the world technology market.

U.S. v. Microsoft was supposed to be an epic ideological showdown--perhaps the greatest since the government broke up John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust in 1911. The Department of Justice antitrust chief, Joel Klein, would argue the liberal position that government must intervene when a monopolist abuses its position of dominance in the market. And Microsoft would make the libertarian case that markets work best when they operate freely. But a week into the trial, the real battle seems to be between two warring views of the world's richest man. Is he the brilliant innovator who has brought the wonders of the information age to millions of satisfied customers? Or is he the rapacious capitalist leveraging his software monopoly to crush competitors?

In his opening statement, Boies tried to give the court a glimpse of the darker Gates. At Boies' signal, Gates appeared on the courtroom video monitors denying the government's crucial charge that Microsoft tried to buy off Netscape, its archrival in the Internet browser business. But a moment later, the video monitors were displaying a seemingly contradictory 1995 e-mail, in which Gates wrote of Netscape, "We could give them money as part of the deal, buy a piece of them or something."

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has reacted indignantly to the government's "personal attacks on a visionary and innovator." John Warden, delivering Microsoft's opening statement, contended that Gates and his company had done nothing but engage in the hard-driving competition that is the essence of the free market. Microsoft is not a monopoly, he argued, because there are few "barriers to entry" stopping would-be competitors from jumping in. "There are no factories to build, no mineral deposits to locate." All it takes to make software, he said, is "human brains and the capital to support those human brains."

To keep the trial moving briskly--the hope is to wrap up in six to eight weeks, compared with the 13 years the ibm antitrust trial dragged on--Judge Jackson has limited each side to 12 witnesses. Gates is not on either side's witness list, but the government has announced that it plans to play eight hours of Gates' 20-hour video deposition. Eight hours of video Gates may seem a lot, but Justice is clearly betting that the devil will be in the details.

Questions

1. Why is the Justice Department suing Microsoft? How has the company responded?

2. What two warring views of Bill Gates have been presented in the Microsoft trial?

Answers

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