The sparks over America Online (AOL) Inc’s instant messaging service – AIM – offered a new twist to the Microsoft antitrust case on Thursday, in a day that otherwise seemed concerned with rubbing salt into old wounds. John Warden, Microsoft’s lead attorney, charged that AOL’s attempts to stop its proprietary messaging technology becoming an open IETF standard was an anti- competitive act. First, Warden asserted that the AIM service accounted for 95% of the instant messaging market in the US. Witness David Colburn claimed that he didn’t know the numbers. Then, Warden asked about the efforts by Microsoft and others to establish AIM technology as an open standard, which Colburn said was an attempt to get access to our market. Warden retorted, In other words, Microsoft and others proposing a standard would be able to compete with you? Colburn denied this, claiming that there were a lot of other messaging technologies. He listed Lotus Development Corp, Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp technologies among others. The Department of Justice’s lead attorney, David Boies, returned to the AIM issue in his cross- examination, asking if the service was a method of browser distribution. Colburn replied that it was not and that it was much more difficult to get them to switch to something through the AIM service than through AOL’s client services.
