Microsoft paid ally named E.U. ambassador
A longtime Microsoft ally whose organization has been on the software maker's payroll is now President Bush's pick to be the U.S. representative to the European Union.
Bush this week named C. Boyden Gray, a Washington lawyer, to the post -- which comes as the European antitrust bureaucracy is embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with Microsoft (including a 497 million euro fine). Gray's nomination, which has the rank of ambassador, requires Senate confirmation.
Gray is co-chairman of the group Citizens for a Sound Economy, which advocates broadly free-market positions with a focus on taxes and government regulation. CSE and other similarly-minded groups received cash from Microsoft during its long-running antitrust war with the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general.
In 1999, Gray wrote a letter to each of the state attorneys general telling them to back off: "Microsoft is a leader because they did it the old-fashioned way. They built a company from the ground up, not through mergers and acquisitions, but through ideas and valuable products combined with clever marketing and aggressive sales."
C. Boyden Gray
Gray also worked on a legal brief filed on Microsoft's behalf in November 2000. It argued against breaking up Microsoft, saying U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision "will stifle growth, innovation, and competition in the technology industry; the remedy imposed will harm consumers and throw the industry into confusion about the new rules restricting competition."
A year later, Gray organized a conference call to deny allegations of Microsoft wrongdoing. One participant on the call said: "By creating a PR war, by trying to do lobbying in Congress, by trying to get products prevented from being shipped, these are all efforts to prevent Microsoft from entering the marketplace."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
