Whatever you may think of Microsoft, the decision last Friday by federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kottely to approve the company’s settlement with the Department of Justice was a much needed rebuke to the scorched-earth prosecutorial mindset of today’s state attorneys general — many of whom tried to block the settlement, holding out for draconian punishments and elaborate structural remedies.
In today’s prosecutorial, legislative and regulatory war on capitalism, the battle on this particular front was a victory for capitalism. But now to another battlefront in the same war — the attack on the securities industry led by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. We can only hope that some of Kollar-Kottely’s intellectual ammunition can be aimed at Spitzer, before he carpet-bombs the firms that are at the very center of free global capitalism.
Kollar-Kettely told the hold-out states attorneys general in the Microsoft case that it was unjust for them to drag in “all existing allegations
