Microsoft, Justice Dept to meet

NEW YORK: Microsoft Corp, the Justice Department and state officials will

meet this week in a first step toward settlement negotiations in the

three-year-old antitrust lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online

edition on Monday.

Citing people close to the case, the newspaper said the meeting would be

their first face-to-face encounter since a unanimous federal appeals court found

last month that Microsoft was a monopolist and had violated antitrust law.

The meeting was expected to focus largely on procedural issues, the sources

said. Three prior efforts to settle the landmark case have failed, and on the

eve of this meeting both the company and the government were taking a hard line,

the newspaper said. The newspaper reported that Microsoft was aggressively

pursuing a litigation strategy, despite the unanimous appellate ruling, and was

quietly preparing a possible appeal to the Supreme Court, the people close to

the case said.

This could strengthen its hand in any future talks, as well as buy time for

an October launch of Windows XP, a powerful new version of its operating-system

software, the newspaper said. The meeting was expected to take place at the

Justice Department's main offices in Washington, D.C., the newspaper said.

Participants were likely to include US antitrust chief Charles James, Iowa

attorney general Tom Miller, and Microsoft lawyers from the Wall Street firm of

Sullivan & Cromwell. The paper said participants remained far apart and were

likely to work only on basic issues in this first session, with no draft

settlement language of any kind.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.