Bill Gates and the Senate Judiciary Committee - 6 March 1998

Last Tuesday morning, into a Senate committee hearing room, there walked a young man, younger looking than his 42 years, on account of his baby-fat round face, rather squeaky college-boy voice and general air of an applicant for a Rhodes scholarship, say, who'd never had to submit to an interview before a committee of full-grown men.

This young man was, for the first time in his life, and quite likely he hopes it'll be the last, was facing one of the Senate's most powerful committees, the Senate judiciary committee. It has to approve all the president's nominations of Supreme Court justices, all federal judges, all American ambassadors and it has the final say on whether any articles of impeachment, voted by the House against such, even a president of the United States, shall be passed on to the whole Senate to decide whether or not he shall stand trial.

The hearing room was packed, not expecting fireworks or any dramatic outcome from this first hearing on this subject, which on the face of it sounds deceptively boring – monopoly. The hearing room was packed, the members of the public who got seated first had been the lucky ones who led the long, curling snake line of people who'd waited in the outer halls since before dawn. Several celebrities of various kinds were turned away.

One man, who had no official business there, and you'd have guessed had better things to do, was Senator Trent Lott, leader of the opposition, the leading Republican in the Senate. All these gaping, craning people were there, it was plain, not because of a burning interest in the odd topic of business monopoly, they were there to be able to tell their children and grandchildren that, yes, on Tuesday 3 March 1998, they had sat in a room in Washington, the nation's capital, and seen with their own eyes the richest man in the world.

Would that be, piped up a six-year-old schoolboy, a millionaire? Millionaires, multi-millionaires, why son, such people creep under this man's huge legs to find themselves dishonourable graves. This man is a mega-billionaire. As one reporter put it, as Mr Gates sat there, his net worth kept ticking up from 46 billions with every passing minute.

William H Gates, known to us all as Bill Gates, whose unassuming way of life polishes up the simple magic of his being. He travels coach class on airplanes, he doesn't go to nightclubs, he goes to bed early. He wears, most of the time, a sports shirt and sweater with a crew neck.

He did put on a suit for his Washington appearance, greyish, loose-fitting, not because that's the style, the cutting edge, fashion-forward, as they say, but because he'd be wearing a hangdog loose suit if the fashion was skin-tight trousers and belted jacket.

He's an easygoing, hang-loose fella, they say, the very opposite of what most people used to call a tycoon, a no-nonsense go-getter, and is now called an in-your-face, take-no-prisoners type.

Not young Bill Gates. I must say no rich, let alone fabulously rich, man I ever saw puts on a more natural act as an unassuming bank clerk or the modest 15-handicap guy whose name you keep forgetting. And yet, at this Senate committee hearing, he heard himself described as the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.

Who said that? The chairman of a California software company which maintains that Mr Gates's monopoly of the software business is so overwhelming that he virtually strangles all competition. Those two words, monopoly and competition, is what this extraordinary Senate hearing was about.

It's been so long since a congressional committee held an open public hearing on monopoly in business that one newsman excitedly reported on Wednesday the spectacle of the nation's most powerful businessman deferentially answering the senators' questions was a moment unique in history. "No legendary business leader has ever defended himself before Congress".

To respond simply – rubbish. We may charitably assume that this was a very young reporter. Now I don't expect anybody alive ever saw the mighty John D Rockefeller or the cunning railroad tycoons, Harriman and Hill or the mighty Morgan cringe before committees investigating, under the whip of President Teddy Roosevelt's indignation, the locktight monopoly at one time these men held over the oil of America, the steel of America, the railroads of America and several other trusts.

I myself go back most vividly a little later to the son of the lordly Pierpont Morgan, who tried to defy Teddy Roosevelt and lost, to the son, JP with the unforgettable bulbous red nose. I remember his being bluntly quizzed by a Senate investigation into the armaments business and being made out to be a heartless weapons manufacturer, making unholy huge profits to send young men to their death.

The large and florid Mr Morgan was sharply questioned by the legal counsel to the commission and when this young man decided to grill old JP, JP's red nose went to purple and the young interrogator, name of Alger Hiss, later went to gaol on quite other grounds.

Way back in the 1930s, I thought covering some of those Senate hearings into all sorts of things – banking, customs, farm subsidies, the condition of coal miners, racketeering – that the institution of the open public congressional hearing was a very healthy institution, a vigorous expression of democracy.

I can think of a whole raft of tycoons in the automobile industry, mining, the head of US steel, banking, tobacco, whose friends and family would dearly wish it were true that Mr Gates's appearance was a novelty.

Grilling big shots is part of the business of Senate committees, not only in business but in any public service. Nominees for the Supreme Court – I've seen at least four of a president's choices turned down by that same judiciary committee.

And how about the grilling, frying and sautéing of the president's top advisers and aides, remember Ehrlichman, Haldeman, John Dean, remember Richard Nixon?

This extraordinary meeting had as its purpose, as all congressional hearings do, the need, if need be, to seek new laws, in this case, new anti-trust laws. You could say that the real genesis of the hearing is the fact that last October, the Department of Justice filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft, Mr Gates's company, for violating a 1995 agreement with the government "in that Microsoft forced makers of personal computers to load Microsoft's own Explorer programme for browsing the internet's world wide web as a condition of licensing its (Microsoft's) operating system".

There were two of Mr Gates's rivals alongside him, who claimed that their companies couldn't sell their software because time and again the intending buyer would say that their contract for their personal computer stipulated they must install Microsoft's software.

At one point the angry head of a rival company swivelled round and faced the audience, a very rare trick. How many of you use personal computers? About three-quarters of all present raised their hands. How many of you have a computer that is not fitted with Microsoft's Explorer? Not a hand was raised. That, said the aggrieved rival, is a monopoly..

If there was one simple question that ached to be answered throughout a hurricane of computer jargon, it was, "Mr Gates, do you run a monopoly?" The question was put in many forms by the committee chairman, Senator Hatch.

It was put in many forms because Mr Gates evaded it in many forms. Senator Hatch is an old hand on this committee and he knows how to take his time with a recalcitrant witness but his determination to get something like a straight answer was possibly sharpened by the fact that in Senator Hatch's state of Utah, there is a software company that is a conspicuous complainer about Mr Gates's giantism.

In the end, after three hours of playing the artful dodger, Mr Gates conceded that yes, his company did, er, restrict the ability of its internet partners to deal with its rivals. Senator Hatch let his head droop in relief over his three-inch collar. Well, he said, you've been somewhat hard to nail down.

Mr Gates smiled and was soon free to go home. He is, by the way, notorious for a hot temper but he was smiley cool at this hearing and that's because, an old employee of his said, because he knows what trouble he's in.

Enough, Senator Hatch believes, that there's no present need for new laws. Simply rouse from the grave the 1890 splendid, but comatose, Sherman Anti-Trust Law, which after a brisk, punishing short life under Teddy Roosevelt, was forgotten about and during the Second War President Roosevelt practically told the great oil and steel and rubber corporations to forget the anti-trust laws.

"Combine all your resources for America and the free world", was the unsung cry and since then, whatever happened to the Sherman Law? It has become almost a joke among two generations of budding monopolists. However, it seems Congress has been aroused. The cry from the grave of the Sherman Law is when we dead awaken, watch out.

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