Having lost in its effort to take the Microsoft antitrust case directly to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is now fighting to ensure the case gets a speedy appeals review. In court papers filed Oct. 3, the DOJ, joined by the 19 states involved in the case, urged the U.S. District Court of Appeals to reject Microsoft's proposed briefing schedule and move “expeditiously” on appeal.
Microsoft asked for 60 days to file its appeal and another 30 days to file a response to the government's arguments after they are filed. The government is seeking to reduce the time period to 30 days for each of the deadlines, and it commits to responding within 30 days of Microsoft's response to its arguments.
The parties are also arguing over the lengths of the briefs, with Microsoft wanting to file a 56,000-word brief, and the government seeking to limit the principal briefs to 24,000 words each. (The normal appeals brief guidelines call for a limit of 14,000 words for principal briefs and 7,000 words for reply briefs.)
The goal of the government is to get appeals court review completed by fall 2001, in time for the next session of the Supreme Court. Microsoft hopes that the process will take long enough that an appeal cannot be heard until the 2002 session of the Supreme Court.
