Two Paths Diverged
     In separate interviews with National Journal's Technology Daily, Hatch and Bennett spelled out their divergent attitudes on the role that antitrust is likely to play in the new economy, as well as other aspects of technology policy. Their differences demonstrate that present-day politics may be of little help in gauging the political stances of the information age.
     For Hatch, the Microsoft case is a matter of simple justice, one of many instances in which he sees himself as called upon to stand for the little guy.
     "I happen to think the world of Bill Gates," said Hatch, discussing the world's richest man, who appeared last year in blockbuster hearings of the Judiciary Committee. "He is phenomenal. He is a winning personality. He is someone I have respect for. But I don't believe he should exploit his monopoly power."
     "Sure, I'd like to have Bill Gates like me, but it is more important that I do what is right than to allow someone to run roughshod" over the industry, he said.
     Hatch conceded that he had been motivated by complaints from Novell and Word Perfect, two Provo, UT-based software operations that suffered greatly at the hands of Gates. Next to Microsoft's legendary about-face with IBM and the browser war with Netscape that is the subject of the Justice Department's antitrust suit, the company's most bruising battles came from contests in the early 1990s with Novell's networking software and with Word Perfect.

How The Issue Was Hatched
     Both companies — Word Perfect was acquired by Novell in 1994 only to be spun off to Canada-based Corel in 1997 — argued that Microsoft unfairly bundled rivals to their products with Windows NT, undercutting the market for Novell's NetWare and Microsoft Office suites, knocking the legs out from under the free-standing Word Perfect. Gates has argued that networking was a natural inclusion into the NT's heavy-duty operating system and that Word Perfect lost market shares because it was slow to include a graphical user interface.
     But those battles must be put in the context of industry officials seething with discontent, Hatch said.
     "They are only one of literally hundreds that feel they haven't been treated fairly," he said, citing Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Rob Glaser of Real Networks — a former Microsoft executive — each of whom came before the committee and "testified against Microsoft because they felt what they were doing was wrong."
     Should the company be found liable of antitrust violations in the trial, any remedy — including a settlement — would have profound public policy implications, Hatch said. But he also saw the ceaselessly bad press Microsoft has received as already having a redemptive affect upon the company, curbing some of its excesses, including its disrespect for the Department of Justice.
     "As the trial has shed light on the stranglehold that the company has had on the industry, many people say that trial and our Judiciary Committee actions that led to the trial have led Microsoft to tone down its behavior, and is a much better player," he said.
     For all Hatch's talk of Microsoft's lack of fairness in its treatment of competitors — implicitly analogizing its actions to the conventional view of robber barons of old — Bennett, the former CEO of Franklin Covey, speaks much more freely about the positive and systemic changes wrought by the information economy in which Microsoft plays a leading role.

Bennett's Bottom Line
     At the Joint Economic Committee's hearings that led to Bill Gates' second congressional testimony two weeks ago, Bennett gently chided his colleagues for speaking to technology executives as if they were a contemporary version of the big-three automobile manufacturers.
     "We are not talking about an industry, we are talking about a revolution that permeates the auto, steel, and farming industries," Bennett said. This is as much a fundamental change in the economy as the adjustment from an agricultural to the industrial economy."
     For Bennett, just as the change from the agrarian world to the industrial age occasioned new vehicles for managing the economy &$151; including the antitrust laws &$151; that apparatus may not be needed anymore.
     "The whole regulatory structure is based on the old paradigm. You go around town and you look at all the agencies now and they are all 60 years old," he said, ticking off the names of agencies including the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communication Commission. "They all reflect in their underlying legislative charter, as well as their inbred cultural habits and inertia of the bureaucracy, attitudes that come out of the industrial age."
     "I certainly think that there ought to be a comprehensive review" of the antitrust laws, Bennett said. "I would prefer that the review take place outside of the arena of a courtroom and the adversarial kind of finding presented."
     Asked specifically about Microsoft, Bennett said that once U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson renders his decision and all appeals are exhausted, "I would think that the president, whomever he or she might be, should call everyone in — legal and constitutional experts and economists, and ask, 'is it time to rewrite the antitrust laws?' The answer may well be no, but I don't think it is safe to assume in advance that the answer is going to be no."
     But the sorts of examples Bennett cites as evidence of the need for such a re-examination bear an affinity to those that Microsoft's lawyers offered in court.
     "When you are inventing products, you automatically have 100 percent market share in the brand new invention," he said. While inventions in the industrial age "always had to be part of something," information-age inventions such as financial derivatives are "products that didn't exist before that were created virtually out of somebody's mind. If you say, 'you can't have more than 'x' percent of the derivative market,' what do you say to the people who have just thought up a new kind of derivative that no one else has thought of, in which they have 100 percent of the market?"

The Last Word
     The dramatic expansions of communication and travel also make it harder for a single company to command the kind of monopoly that would call for antitrust action, Bennett said. By that reckoning, a ski slope in Park City, UT, with 60 percent of the Salt Lake City market is more rightly considered as having an "infinitesimally small" portion of the world-wide market for leisure-time dollars.
     For Bennett, the difference in approach stems from the simple matter of career choice.
     "[Hatch] went to law school and I didn't," he said with a straight face.
     "Lawyers are trained to think in terms of precedent and what have the courts said about this," he explained. "Entrepreneurs — and I am an entrepreneur — think in terms of what can I do that has never been done before. I think the first thing that Senator Hatch does is see what's on the books now and see if it applies, and my first instinct is to say, what is happening in the marketplace? I come at it much more from a clean sheet of paper."

—by Drew Clark