Antitrust

President Bush promoted his newly released federal budget Tuesday at a company that recently settled a class-action lawsuit over alleged price-fixing and antitrust violations. Bush used his visit to Micron Technology Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer, to argue that Congress should look to private sector companies as examples of responsible budgeting. His spending plan for next year forecasts a balanced federal budget by 2012.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday settled a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of Iowans who bought the company's programs between 1994 and 2006. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The lawsuit sought more than $330 million from Microsoft for allegedly engaging in monopolistic and anti-competitive conduct that caused customers to pay more for software than they would have if there had been competition. Redmond, Wash.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered global steel giant Mittal Steel Co. to sell its Sparrows Point mill near Baltimore to settle antitrust issues raised by the Dutch company's recent merger with Luxembourg-based Arcelor. The proposed consent decree would allow Mittal to keep a Weirton, W.Va., mill that had volunteered to be sold to preserve competition for tin-plated steel, used primarily for food and aerosol cans.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a $79-million antitrust award against lumber producer Weyerhaeuser Co. in a ruling that will help shield companies from claims that they illegally tried to drive a competitor out of business. The justices unanimously said a jury used the wrong standard in concluding that Weyerhaeuser monopolized the Pacific Northwest market for finished alder, a hardwood used in furniture.

The European Union escalated its trans-Atlantic fight with Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, threatening multimillion-dollar fines against the software maker over claims it was asking rivals to pay too much for information that would help their products work with Windows. In response, Microsoft charged that the treatment it received from the EU was unprecedented and harmed Europe's efforts to become a thriving high-tech economy.

Intel Corp.'s loss of e-mail records in an antitrust case filed by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. must be investigated by the court, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. Intel told U.S. District Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr. in a letter Monday that "some document-retention lapses" had occurred because of "inadvertent mistakes" in its litigation-related e-mail preservation procedures. "It appears on the surface to be a human lapse," the judge said at a hearing in Wilmington, Del.

Under threat of new multimillion-dollar fines, Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that it had signed up its first licensee for a program to help servers work with the Windows operating platform. The European Commission had threatened the software giant with new daily fines of $4 million last week, alleging that it ignored a March 2004 antitrust order that said Microsoft overcharged rivals for "complete and accurate" documentation.

Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor maker, won a judge's ruling that narrowed an antitrust lawsuit brought by computer buyers to cover only claims tied to U.S. sales. More than 70 consumers claimed in a consolidated lawsuit started in 2005 that they bought computers with Intel processors at inflated prices because the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company coerced manufacturers to buy its chips instead of cheaper alternatives.

Intel Corp. Chairman Craig R. Barrett and Chief Executive Paul S. Otellini may have lost e-mail relevant to antitrust claims brought by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a lawyer for AMD told a court official. The Intel officers apparently were unaware that procedures weren't in place to preserve the correspondence, the lawyer told Vincent J. Poppiti, a special master appointed to investigate the missing e-mail.

Microsoft Corp. faces a probe into a complaint by an anonymous company that it is in violation of terms of a 2001 antitrust settlement with the U.S. government, a Department of Justice attorney said during a court hearing Tuesday. Aaron D. Hoag, a trial attorney for the Justice Department's antitrust division, told a federal judge in Washington that an unnamed software maker complained that Microsoft was violating terms of the agreement.