The New York Times has an article today by Stephen Labaton on Microsoft's antitrust angel in the Bush administration Justice Department:

Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google. [ . . . ]

In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decret that monitors Microsoft's behavior. [ . . . ]

The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

The details of Google's aren't particularly interesting. Like Netscape's complaint, they are remarkable mainly in that any outside company was able to temporarily establish any sort of commercial enterprise by hooking into Microsoft's operating systems monopoly. Microsoft is uniquely able to manipulate its interfaces, product packaging, and OEM contracts to exploit network effects, both to promote its own ancillary businesses and to undermine potential competitors.

Before Bush took office, Microsoft had been convicted of breaking antitrust law, but the remedy was under appeal. Microsoft evidently had little trouble finding the new regime's bag men: Ashcroft soon settled the case on terms very favorable to Microsoft. I don't know that the Bush administration has prosecuted any antitrust cases in the last six years. Hiring people like Barnett, whose background is defending companies, like Microsoft, against antitrust cases, is one sure way to get nothing done.

One thing this underscores is that the Bush administration isn't really all that much about promoting capitalism and free markets per se; their preference is to make the rich richer, even where that means protecting monopolies that ultimately rip everyone else off -- even the hallowed rich. Where an earlier generation of progressives realized that constricting competition hurt the economy as a whole, not least to keeping new entrepreneurs out of the market, the current view is to honor each other's scams -- all the better to safeguard one's own. In large part, this is the difference between a growing, bustling, innovative economy, such as the US had during the socalled progressive era, and the stagnant oligarchy we are becoming.

Even before Bush, antitrust enforcement was extremely spotty -- something much more likely to happen when competing powers, like Netscape and Microsoft, collide, than as a result of anyone looking out for the public interest. This is one of many cases where just rolling back to pre-Bush standards won't go nearly far enough. We should not just enforce existing antitrust laws; we need to start positively promoting competition -- taxing companies progressively according to their size, restricting consolidation, putting limits on intellectual property, subsidizing open research, making more investment funds available to new entrepreneurs, and eliminating the advantages companies seek in political favoritism.

Microsoft's antitrust case offers many lessons here. Their repetitive breaking of antitrust law is only one part of a much bigger problem, which relates to why we a private company to control such basic infrastructure as operating systems without fully disclosing the source code. On the other hand, it would be easy enough to fix the Microsoft problem by just switching to open source software alternatives. That this hasn't happened suggests more evidence of the collapse of clear thinking that appears to be increasingly endemic in America -- another way we are already experiencing the coming dark ages.