Not that the headline would tip you off or anything...

[link|http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/08/ED148465.DTL&type=printable|State AGs sabotaging Microsoft settlement]

IT'S DEJA VU all over again: a handful of state attorneys general, California's Bill Lockyer among them, are attempting to sabotage a settlement of the Microsoft antitrust case. Just why the attorneys general are once more bucking efforts by the Justice Department and nine states to move on is anyone's guess. What is clear enough, though, is that it will not serve anyone's interest -- except perhaps, Microsoft's commercial rivals -- to force this case back into the courts.

A year ago February, Thomas Penfield Jackson, the trial court judge, appointed a distinguished jurist, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, to mediate a settlement. With draconian penalties looming, Microsoft accepted demands by the Justice Department that included tough, continuing regulation of the company's marketing tactics. But the hard-line state Attorneys general -- notably those from California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa -- vetoed the deal, leading the frustrated mediator to point out in public that the "states do not have the resources to do more than free ride on federal antitrust litigation, complicating its resolution."

[...]

Hmm...Microsoft's commercial rivals....wait a minute, isn't that everybody? And that $35 million price tag, compared to what some have given as hundreds of billions of dollars of negative impacts from Microsoft, strikes me as eminently reasonable, and a damned good ROI.

My complaint on the piece: it's clearly Op-Ed, but is not presented as such. I've contacted SFGate editorial staff regarding this.