Business complains incessantly about a litigation explosion, and rightly so. Not mentioned is the fact that business itself is a prime contributor with lawsuits brought to sabotage a competitor in the marketplace. Last week came AOL Time Warner's long-threatened lawsuit against Microsoft over the browser wars of the ancient 1990s, the loser of which, Netscape, was later acquired by AOL. All media companies are struggling with a bad ad market, and AOL has been whacked lately for failing to keep the promise of its 2000 merger with Time Warner. Maybe AOL hopes to boost its lagging stock price by dangling in front of handicappers the prospect of a big settlement, but we don't see it.

What we do see is that when companies become preoccupied with prosecuting their rivalries in courts and through politics, it's usually a sell signal. And AOL's case is not as lead-pipe as its media spin suggests. Microsoft's sin amounts to making a better browser than Netscape's and giving it away free. Not even the Justice Department managed to prevail with a claim that Microsoft was a browser monopolist. AOL will have to argue to a judge that Microsoft should have stayed out of the browser market so Netscape could soak consumers for an inferior product. Somebody is also bound to point out that Netscape's biggest problem lately hasn't been Microsoft but AOL's management. AOL could have promoted Netscape's browser to millions of AOL subscribers but chose to let the company atrophy instead. Now Netscape's market share has fallen to single digits.