WASHINGTON - Arguing that the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case's final outcome will affect "virtually every computer user," the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court yesterday to decide the dispute in the coming court term.
It will save "at least one year" of time, the department contended, if the justices review the case themselves rather than letting a federal appeals court be the first to do so - as Microsoft proposed last month.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the judge in the antitrust case, ruled in June that Microsoft should be broken into two new, competing companies in order to remedy its repeated violations of antitrust law.
"The stakes in this case for the national economy are immense," government lawyers said in the new filing. If the Microsoft dispute does not qualify for a swift and direct review by the highest court itself, they added, "it is difficult to imagine what future case would."
Congress has provided a special procedure under which especially important government antitrust cases can go directly from the trial court to the Supreme Court, bypassing the usual route through an appeals court.
Jackson decided that the Microsoft case qualifies for that procedure. But federal law gives the Supreme Court the last word, allowing it to take on the case immediately or send it to the appeals court for a first look.
Microsoft, appealing the case in an attempt to overturn not only the order that would break it up but also the basic findings that it broke the law, argues that at this stage the case is too complex for the Supreme Court to decide without the benefit of some filtering by the appeals court.
Countering that argument yesterday, the Justice Department said, "The court's task here is not onerous."
Noting that the Supreme Court regularly decides complex cases, the department said "there is no reason to think that the court cannot resolve this case in a single term."
The justices' next term opens Oct. 2 and will continue for nine months.
If the justices pass the case back to the appeals court, the department argued, "then the timing of a final resolution will be beyond any single court's control."
It will take at least as much time for the appeals court to rule as it would the Supreme Court, and the case would then be "virtually certain" to go to the highest court, the department said.
The government's brief suggested that "Microsoft apparently sees value in delay," because Jackson has postponed all parts of his order to restructure Microsoft and to change its business behavior until the appeal is decided.
The rapidly changing high-tech industry, the department said, needs to know soon "how those companies will be affected by the remedies resulting from this case."
The 19 states - including Maryland - that sued Microsoft along with the Justice Department also asked the Supreme Court yesterday to review the case now.
