The judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial yesterday criticised the US government's proposals to break up the world's largest software company, suggesting the proposal was insufficient and risked creating two monopolies instead of one.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson also brushed aside Microsoft's attorneys' attempts to postpone arguments over a break-up.
In his first hearing on the break-up plans, Judge Jackson intervened repeatedly to question the government's claims that breaking Microsoft into two would "foment an explosion of innovation".
The Justice Department argues that the only way to restore competition in the computer industry and prevent Microsoft from repeating its illegal conduct is to split the company.
Microsoft would be separated into an operating systems business, controlling Windows, and an applications company controlling the Office package of business products and its Internet browsing software.
The government forecasts both companies will end up competing against each other in the market for operating software.
But Judge Jackson appeared to side with a friend-of-court brief filed by several outside economists, arguing that Microsoft should be split into four separate companies, including three Windows businesses.
"At least one `brief' has made the point that the effect of a bisection will simply create two separate monopolies, who may have no incentive to interfere with each other's profitability," he said.
"Tell me why they would compete? Tell me why they would inspire competition?"
When US government lawyers claimed their break-up plans were easier to administer, the judge said: "You talk of simplicity of implementation. It would appear that this is anything but simple to implement.
"It would require a great deal of planning and complication and I don't think they will be willing participants."
The judge examined the breakup proposals, leaving Microsoft to argue that break-up was unwarranted by the trial and unprecedented in law.
Microsoft said the break-up plans were punitive and went far beyond what it portrayed as the limited anti-competitive violations found by the judge.
Instead it has proposed a limited set of curbs to its business practices, which it says would protect its right to innovate as well as its intellectual property.
The government insisted yesterday that break-up was the only way to prevent future antitrust violations.
To underline its accusation, it released internal e-mail written by Mr Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and co-founder, aimed at the company's new rivals in the telephone and hand-held computing, or PDA, market.
Writing last July, he asked his software developers to change the way Microsoft products such as Outlook, its personal organiser, interacted with its rivals.
