Demonizing Gates

To keep his case against Microsoft simple, Justice's antitrust czar Joel Klein has painted chairman Bill Gates as the Big Brother of cyberspace

Antitrust is one of the most labyrinthine fields of law, relying on nuanced readings of complex statutes and analogies to dusty cases about oil refineries and railroad gauges. But 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...

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