The Microsoft Trial: 1998-2001

The 1998 decision to prosecute Microsoft is perhaps best seen as a major escalation of the U.S. government's regulatory engagement with the company which had begun in 1990 when the FTC launched an investigation, into the company's business practices. As a result of that investigation, the Justice Department and Microsoft signed a consent decree in July 1994 by which the government agreed to drop its antitrust action; and Microsoft agreed to cease certain specific practices related primarily to the type of licensing agreements and royalty payment contracts that it had entered into with computer manufacturers. Microsoft, however, denied all charges of illegally exercising monopoly powers, and Bill Gates was successful in insisting that the agreement, which has been criticized as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. (Microsoft Corporation) having been vaguely worded, contained a clause that allowed the company to develop integrated products, "a condition which was to become a crucial element in Microsoft's vigorous rejection of the 1998 charges. In February 1995 Federal District Court judge Stanley Sporkin ruled the consent decree to be an "ineffective remedy" to constrain Microsoft, but he was overruled within months by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which reinstated the consent decree and replaced Judge Sporkin with Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson as the judge administering it.