【明報專訊】On one side was the most powerful government on earth and, on the other, the world's biggest software company. On 19 October 1998 the two ran into each other head-on.

The case

Microsoft first attracted the US government's attention in 1991, when the Federal Trade Commission (聯邦貿易委員會) started investigating whether the company was abusing its monopoly (壟斷) on the PC operating system (作業系統) market.

On 27 October 1997 the US Department of Justice (美國司法部, DOJ) filed a complaint against Microsoft, accusing the company of violating a 1994 consent decree (法令) that forbade Microsoft from bundling (綑綁) its other products with Windows (though the decree allowed it to integrate additional features into the operating system). The DOJ claimed that Microsoft not only gave away Internet Explorer, a web browser, but also bundled it with Windows - at the expense of its competitors like Netscape.

On 18 May 1998 the DOJ, together with 20 state attorneys general (州檢察官), filed an antitrust (反壟斷) suit against Microsoft. The trial began on 19 October that year, when the court heard opening arguments.

All eyes were on Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (微軟創辦人蓋茨), when he testified in a videotaped deposition (證辭). He denied that he had intended to keep Intel out of the software business. But his testimony was described as "evasive" (閃爍其詞), and Businessweek reported that "early rounds of his deposition showed him offering obfuscatory (混淆的) answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle".

The ruling

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact (事實認定) on 5 November 1999. He found that Microsoft had held monopoly power and used it to harm consumers, its rivals and other companies, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, RealNetworks and Linux.

On 3 April 2000 Judge Jackson handed down his ruling, calling Microsoft an "abusive monopoly". He subsequently ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two companies. Only one of them would be allowed to produce operation systems.

The appeal

Microsoft promptly appealed against the ruling. The case was sent directly to the US Supreme Court (最高法院), which refused to hear it and sent it to a federal appeals court.

On 28 June 2001 the court overturned Judge Jackson's ruling and reversed the breakup order. As a result, the DOJ announced that it no longer sought to break up Microsoft. It would instead seek a quick remedy in the antitrust case. It reached an agreement with Microsoft on 2 November 2001.

The settlement

Microsoft drafted a settlement, which was accepted by Judge Kollar-Kotelly on 1 November 2002. The agreement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces (應用程式界面, APIs) with other companies, allowing them to develop products that worked with Windows. Microsoft also agreed that a panel of independent monitors be established that would oversee its conduct and review its accounts. On 30 June 2004, the judges of the US appeals court unanimously approved the settlement.

But Microsoft quickly got into another trouble. The same year the European Union brought antitrust legal action against the company, which would result in its paying 497 million euros in fines.