BOSTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- Massachusetts will not go along with the federal government's proposed settlement of the Microsoft Corp. antitrust suit without major changes, setting the stage for possible protracted litigation, reports said.
State Attorney General Tom Reilly said he plans to protest the settlement at a court hearing Tuesday in Washington.
"Massachusetts will not sign the proposed agreement between Microsoft and the (Department of Justice) without major changes," Reilly said. He added he doubted such changes would happen prior to the hearing before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Massachusetts is one of 18 states party to the suit filed against Microsoft more than three years ago by the Justice Department. The judge gave the states until Tuesday to decide whether to go along with the settlement announced Friday.
Reilly called for harsher penalties if Microsoft violates the deal and expressed hope he will be joined by other states, but added he did not know if that would happen.
"If we can get a core group of states, we can consider continuing litigation," Reilly said in Monday's Boston Herald.
The proposed 5-year federal consent decree imposes no penalties on Microsoft for previous anticompetitive practices, but does require the world's biggest software maker to provide programming interfaces with competitors' software, and bars it from discriminating against computer makers that favor competitors' software products.
"Microsoft is going to violate this agreement," Reilly said in Monday's Boston Globe. "That's their nature. Anyone that gets in their way, they crush them or they buy them."
Reilly said he believes Microsoft will be able to manipulate the tentative settlement to its advantage, and does not prevent Microsoft from bundling the Internet Explorer Web browser into its operating system, which he said would hurt competing software makers.
"The bundling issue was the essence of the lawsuit, and there's nothing to address it" in the tentative agreement, he said.
"There's no question in my mind that Microsoft will use this agreement to crush competition," Reilly said. "This agreement is not in the public interest."
After the proposed settlement was announced, Microsoft founder Bill Gates Jr. said he believed it was "a fair compromise on all sides" and "the right thing to do for our customers, the technology industry, and the economy."
