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 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 Gates. 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? How the courts view the world's richest man--his net worth is now upwards of $50 billion--more than what antitrust ideology they adopt will probably determine the outcome of what could be a landmark case.
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. "Somebody asked if it made sense investing in Netscape, and I said it didn't make any sense," Gates said, in a clip from his August 1998 deposition. 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." On another key point, video Gates declared that he was "not involved" in setting up a meeting with Netscape to work out an alleged deal to divide up the browser market. But Gates the e-mailer was soon caught saying, "I think there is a very powerful deal we can make with Netscape. I would really like to see something like this happen!"
It was a bang-up way to start a trial. Microsoft's outside-the-courthouse spin team peddled the view that Boies' opening statement was based on "loose and unreliable rhetoric and snippets that were not in any reliable context." But court watchers were already arguing whether Gates' statements were actually perjurious or merely Clintonesque. Some saw an even more sinister subtext to Boies' opening statement and the incorporeal, larger-than-life double-tongued creature he described as luring unwitting followers to his crusade for world domination. Could the U.S. government really be suggesting that Gates is evil incarnate?