[Am-info] Re: Auditing the Public Response

[Mitch Stone]

On Saturday, February 9, 2002, at 05:24 AM, Geoffrey wrote:

> I would expect that they have come to conclusion that the 7,000 responses 
> in question have been summarized to be no more then some form of "reject 
> the settlement, because I hate Microsoft."  Yes, the 7,000 responses 
> probably varied widely in their content, but if they did not contain any 
> valid reasoning for rejecting AND they were laced with 'Bill Gates sucks'
>  innuendos, then their summary could well be accurate enough.  And, it 
> would not surprise me if they did receive 7,000 such responses.

I'm wondering if the "Microsoft was prosecuted for being a successful 
company" responses were also filtered out as irrelevant to the Tunney 
hearing, in the DoJ's estimable opinion. This viewpoint summarizes at 
least half of the objections to the antitrust case I've heard voiced over 
the years, and without a doubt, constituted a large proportion of the 
filed pro-Microsoft comments. On any given day, about half of the rest of 
the objectors to the case are philosophically opposed to all or most 
antitrust laws. So I also wonder if the DoJ filtered out as not pertinent 
to the Tunney Act the comments of those who argued that the laws they are 
charged to uphold should not exist.

I'd have to guess they were not, and that if all of the respondents who 
failed to direct their comments to the proposed settlement itself were 
removed, perhaps less than a quarter overall backed the proposed 
settlement. And a large proportion of those were probably orchestrated by 
Microsoft and its front organizations. The real numbers are probably 
really 3:1 or 4:1 against.

   Mitch Stone
   mitch@accidentalexpert.com