Microsoft Wants Antitrust Case Thrown Out

Microsoft Corp. is looking to leverage an appeals court victory from June in an effort to have the federal and state antitrust suits facing the software giant dismissed.

The company is claiming that an injunction overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on June 23 undermines the government’s charges of anti-competitive behavior, according to a report from Bloomberg news.

In that significant legal victory for Microsoft a three-judge panel overturned a preliminary injunction that prevented the company from requiring PC manufacturers using its Windows 95 operating system to also include the Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft maintained that the ruling supported its insistence that Internet Explorer is an integrated component of the Windows 95 operating system.

The company now wants U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to block the government’s efforts to prevent the company from combining Explorer and Windows 98 unless it also includes Netscape Communications Corp.’s browser, Bloomberg reported.

“We believe the central elements of the government’s claims
have been refuted by the factual record and the recent appeals
court decision upholding Microsoft’s decision to develop operating systems that work well with the Internet,” William Neukom, Microsoft’s senior vice president for law and corporate affairs, was quoted as saying.

The news follows an order from Judge Jackson last week that instructed Microsoft to make both its chairman Bill Gates and its Windows source code available for the antitrust suit.

Microsoft lawyers had originally asked to limit the U.S. government to no more than eight hours of deposition with Gates.