Microsoft will commit to following the principles of its 2002 antitrust settlement with the U.S. government beyond its end in late 2007, and in some cases, the company will expand upon those requirements, a Microsoft executive said Wednesday.
Microsoft has a responsibility to encourage both innovation and competition in the IT industry, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel, during a speech in Washington, D.C. The company will expand the operating-system antitrust settlement by releasing all of its software APIs (application programming interfaces), for programs such as Microsoft Office, and not just middleware APIs as required in the November 2002 settlement in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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