The
film Anti-trust clearly purports to be an exposé
of someone more ruthless than Bill Gates; interestingly, Sun
Microsystems and Linux were consulted for the movie. Directed
by Peter Howitt, the protagonist is Milo Hoffman (played by
Ryan Phillippe), who has followed up his graduation from Stanford
to make a computer software breakthrough along with his partner
Teddy Chin (played by Yee Jee Tso). (Stanford officials have
insisted that the university does not endorse the film; an
architecturally impressive building at the University of British
Columbia is used instead.) Gary Winston (played by Tim Robbins),
the head of N.U.R.V. (Never Underestimate Radical Vision),
is aware of the talents of the two, who are operating from
a garage; indeed, developments originating in a garage launched
Hewlett-Packard and other firms, and Winston fears that an
unaffiliated genius will put him out of business. Accordingly,
Winston asks the two to come to his corporate headquarters
somewhere south of Portland (the actual film location is Vancouver,
British Columbia), for a job interview. Milo is eager for
a big break to work alongside the great Gary Winston, who
has surpassed Bill Gates in innovative technology, but Teddy
refuses to go because Winston’s reputation is to buy up new
software, reverse engineer them, market an inferior product,
and make billions. Teddy believes that basic computer pipeline
inventions should be shared gratis, and he is disappointed
that Milo no longer subscribes to that philosophy because
of the Faustian lure of fame and money. Winston owns some
twenty communication satellites and is on the verge of completing
Synapse, which will enable communication between any two persons
on earth by audio or visual means as well as one-way messaging
from N.U.R.V. to the entire planet, but his anti-trust vulnerability
bedevils his corporate attorneys. (The film might have sought
to influence the proposed merger of Time-Warner and America
on Line, as the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department
of Justice allowed the merger in January 2001 with the stipulation
that AOL had to abandon exclusive control of instant messaging
so that other software vendors can provide the same product
through AOL, though currently the big software firms are desperately
trying to develop convergence technology, and the first to
do so may become the new giant of the industry.) Milo’s expertise
proves that he is capable of developing the one missing software
component that will complete Synapse—reduced download time,
with resulting clearer images. With his girlfriend Alice Poulson
(played by Claire Forlani), he relocates to a delightful house
near N.U.R.V. and meets the staff, including Lisa Calighan
(played by Rachael Leigh Cook). One day he learns that Teddy
has been murdered, presumably by a racist; on visiting the
scene of the crime, he becomes suspicious that Winston is
behind the foul play, seeking to wipe out competitors while
stealing their ideas, in the spirit of Winston’s philosophy
that in the computer business "You are either a 1 or a 0."
Milo realizes that N.U.R.V. has intelligence and surveillance
technologies that will reveal who killed Teddy and whether
Alice and Lisa are plants. He even learns that Anti-Trust
Division official Lyle Barton (played by Richard Roundtree)
has been bought by Winston. He then penetrates N.U.R.V.’s
security system and discovers that his hunches are correct.
Winston, however, suspects that Milo has knowledge about N.U.R.V.
that would expose culpability in various crimes, and that Alice may be ordered to kill him by cooking a dish with ground sesame
seeds, to which he is so allergic that he could become comatose. Always one chessmove ahead
of Winston, Milo eventually connects Synapse to expose the
connection between Teddy’s murder and Winston. Anti-trust,
in short, warns the public that the dangers of software monopoly
are real. The alternative, the open-source software movement
(spearheaded by the Linux and Gnome systems), is given favorable
treatment in the film. Indeed, one might ask how upstart AOL
could accumulate so much capital in such a short time that
it could buy out communication giant Time-Warner? The answer
provided inferentially by the film is that consumers are paying
heavily for the results of cut-throat competition and monopolistic
practices by some internet service providers and software
manufacturers. MH
I
want to comment on this film
