Like miniskirts, tube tops, and wide ties, politics also has its fashions.
Economists didn't care much for the Sherman Act – the basis of US antitrust law – when it took effect over 100 years ago, but the muckrakers soon changed all that. In the late 1960s, government antitrust cases became as popular as hula hoops, and a White House task force even suggested breaking up big firms – whether they were monopolies or not.
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After President Reagan took over, the idea that big-is-bad faded from memory as quickly as brown suits and reruns of Welcome Back Kotter. The number of US Justice Department antitrust lawsuits soon dropped.
But today, antitrust bureaucrats are enjoying fatter budgets, higher prestige, and a renewed raison d'etre. The cause for their celebration: The computer industry, and especially Microsoft.
Trial reports have been splashed across the pages of news magazines – Time ran a feature with cartoons of DOJ attorneys sparring in a boxing ring with their adversaries – and have made folk heroes and villains of officials like DOJ antitrust enforcer Joel Klein and his phalanx of lawyers.
It should be no surprise that they show no signs of giving up.
Intel has already been the target of a federal lawsuit. It escaped the nightmare of extended courtroom battles by settling hours before the case was set to go to trial.
But so far, Bill Gates hasn't proved willing to do the same, and US Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has practically declared him a recidivist bully who's probably not very nice to stray animals – not to mention a ruthless monopolist, too.
That ruling, if upheld on appeal, will be the first time Microsoft has ever been legally declared to have a monopoly.
And that means trouble for the company from not just the Justice Department, but many other would-be antitrust litigants, too.
In July, Microsoft won a jury trial in a suit brought by Bristol Technology Inc. The eight-member jury said that the software colossus did not violate US antitrust law.
But would the suit have gone the other way if Bristol lawyers had Jackson's 207-page condemnation of Microsoft to use as evidence of malicious intent?
After all, Jackson's preliminary ruling on 5 November has already emboldened other plaintiffs. On Tuesday, a prominent Ohio attorney who has been busy suing the tobacco industry filed a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft. It claims MS overcharged consumers for Windows.
Other recent suits have been filed in Alabama, Louisiana, and California.
Instead of fighting to bring better – or at least less buggy – products to market, it's starting to look as though MS executives instead will be focused on a swarm of annoying but persistent legal gadflies buzzing around Redmond.
Some experts point at the US v. IBM case, which lasted over a decade, as evidence that antitrust assaults can distract a company's leadership. The computer giant faltered in the early 1980s and missed a good portion of the PC revolution.
Another possibility that seems likely to happen over the next decade is that governments will become increasingly interested in the tech industry. New US bureaucracies could arise, or the jurisdiction of the FCC or FTC – both of which perform some antitrust enforcement – could be extended. European regulators might be even more aggressive.
The result, if history is any indication? Instead of vying against each other in the marketplace with better products, customer support, or marketing campaigns, companies will instead have to fight the slow-moving trench warfare customary inside regulatory agencies.
That means hiring lobbyists and writing more checks to politicians. It also means starting groups mirrored on the National Association of Broadcasters or the US Telecom Association.
It's already happening. By all accounts, Microsoft's political giving jumped soon after the DOJ resumed its antitrust action in late 1997. The company began to hire more lobbyists, too, and moved its DC political office from suburban Maryland to downtown Washington.
DC's political class sure isn't complaining about the additional cash flowing into the city, especially since competitors like Sun and America Online may feel compelled to match Microsoft.
But few people would say this is a compelling – or even, truth be told, interesting – way for the PC revolution to end. Who wants the memory of a fiercely competitive computer industry to go the way of bell bottoms?
