Jodi Kantor is a Slate editorial assistant.
Day 53 of the trial: My computer.
When I walk into the courtroom at 9:30 a.m., Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is questioning a nervous and deferential defendant–not a Microsoft employee but a reedy teenager who looks no older than 16. I have arrived early, it turns out, and U.S. vs. Microsoft hasn’t been called yet. Jackson is ruling on the status of the defendant, a felon and an addict, who awaits sentencing on a handgun possession charge. Standing in the sea of computer equipment brought in for the Microsoft trial, the defendant’s counsel pleads with Jackson to send her client to a halfway house instead of jail. The enormous pink judge handles the defendant graciously, even tenderly, and grants the motion.
I look around the courtroom for reaction. But there is only one spectator: a kindly looking man in a cheap suit with a permanently inquisitive look on his face. We make eye contact and nod in mutual acknowledgment … of the ugliness of the kid’s situation? At the kindness of the judge? At how odd the defendant’s slight figure looks amid all the blank monitor screens?
At 10 am, the buzz at the door becomes a roar, and a crowd enters and separates into three phalanxes: Microsoft, Department of Justice, and press. The man in the cheap suit chats gregariously with the three best-dressed reporters and then marches into the government camp. I realize that he is lead U.S. counsel David Boies–interrogator par excellence, darling of the press corps, and the best reason why the government may win something in this case.
But not today. Microsoft’s defense is in its fifth week and at its strongest point. Boies has been tripping up witnesses all week, but he’s trying to prove what is universally acknowledged to be the weakest part of the government’s case: that Microsoft’s contracts with content providers inhibited competition among browsers and that it bundled its browser with its operating system specifically to stymie competition.
To counter the charges, Microsoft’s lawyers spend the day explaining and simulating a variety of common computing experiences: surfing the Web, downloading browsers, setting up access to the Internet. (The chamber looks more like a software-testing lab than a court of law. Disembodied monitors of all shapes and sizes are scattered throughout the room. I count one for the judge, two at the witness box, one for each set of counsel, one for spectators, and one for press, as well as a few more for clerks and court reporters.) The monitors flicker suddenly and spontaneously with life and then play prerecorded mock-ups of familiar Windows activities.
The displays are awkward. We’re planted in front of computer screens, but as viewers not users–we sit passively as the engineers and the lawyers have all the fun. Even though the tapes were made by Microsoft, they fail to capture the constant process of perusal and reaction that every computer user experiences. At first, I find my fingers itching for a keyboard, and my wrist twitching for a mouse. I want to change the ugly colors on the desktop! I want to check my e-mail! But after a few minutes, the lack of sensation and participation makes it feels dull–like watching movie stars have sex on film.
Actually, let me correct that: It’s like watching movie stars have sex on film, but they’re doing it in my own familiar bed. Like many Americans, I spend a good chunk of my waking hours clicking and scrolling through Windows. Its icons and architecture are as familiar to me as the contours of my own home. (And not just because I write for a Microsoft-owned magazine–this is only my third week at Slate, and I had a civilian relationship with Windows long before Microsoft’s printers ever cut a check with my name on it.) It’s hard to conceive of my trusty laptop screen–where my own thoughts, preferences, and choice of browsers (Netscape) reside–as the dark heart of Microsoft’s perfidious monopoly.
At every turn, Boies insinuates that Microsoft’s links and cues to its own products preclude users from choosing others. But this seems forced to me: I have long found Microsoft’s built-in product pitches more annoying than nefarious (like the dreaded shimmying paper clip, they can be dismissed with a click of the mouse). The government’s deterministic arguments take no account of what it’s actually like to use a computer. Bill Gates may be a vicious businessman who strong-armed his competitors into submission. But when I logged on to my computer this morning, I was doing the driving all by myself.
Click here for MSNBC’s full coverage of trial developments.
