EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

A Big Whine From Big Oil

With gas at $4 a gallon, oil at $100 a barrel and profits at near-record levels, it is hard to feel sympathy for the oil industry. Yet sympathy is what the C.E.O.’s of the five biggest companies asked for when they appeared Thursday before a Senate hearing on a Democratic proposal to eliminate about $2 billion in tax breaks for the Big Five.

Exxon’s Rex Tillerson called the proposal “misinformed and discriminatory.” ConocoPhillips’s James Mulva, in a letter, called the idea “un-American” because it would supposedly cost American jobs, raise consumer prices and discourage investment — a position he reasserted during the hearings.

The other three companies at the witness table, BP America, Shell and Chevron, raised similar complaints. How absurd are their claims? Utterly absurd.

Take investment. In 2005, with oil nearing $60 a barrel, Mr. Mulva and other top executives told a Senate committee that the companies did not need the tax breaks to keep exploring for oil. Congress left them in place. Now that the Senate seems serious about getting rid of them, he and his colleagues have changed their tune — even though their companies obviously need them even less at $100 a barrel.

Or take prices at the pump. In a memorandum to Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said that eliminating the tax benefits would have virtually no effect on the price of gasoline. The impact on industry profits — the Big Five earned a robust $35 billion in the first quarter of this year alone — would be trivial.

The report also addressed one more industry claim: that ending the tax breaks for the oil companies alone would be discriminatory. Most of the breaks — deductions for well depletion, intangible drilling costs and the like — are unique to the industry. The exception is a deduction for domestic production, designed to encourage all manufacturing companies to invest in this country. But as the research service pointed out, industry is not going to stop drilling on American territory as long as the oil is there and yielding big dollars.

These subsidies are clearly unnecessary, and returning $2 billion to the Treasury would be a good thing. But more than anything, one has to wonder why the oil companies are fighting so hard for a comparatively small amount of cash, at least for them. The only explanation we can come up with is that they have always gotten what they wanted and expect to do so now, so why not?

The House is certainly tripping over itself to do the industry’s bidding. Last week, it passed two more irresponsible bills accelerating drilling permits and authorizing leasing in long-protected waters of the north and central Atlantic coasts, the Southern California coast and Alaska, including Bristol Bay. It is as if the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico had never happened.

It is imperative that the Senate block the House’s drilling and leasing plans, and that President Obama veto them if the Senate caves. And both the Senate and the president should keep pressing to eliminate the tax breaks. Three-fourths of Americans responding to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they want to end them.

Obviously, $4-a-gallon gas has something to do with this. But there is also an elemental matter of fairness here. As Mr. Obama put it in his radio address a week ago, when the oil companies are making huge profits and people are suffering and deficits are growing, “these tax giveaways aren’t right. They aren’t smart. And we need to end them.”

Did the Microsoft Case Change the World?

Remember when Microsoft ruled the PC industry? In the 1990s, its Windows operating system became so dominant that government trust-busters took it to court. They spent four years and millions of dollars making the case that Microsoft was unduly using its power to wipe out rivals in the Web browser business and other domains.

The settlement to that case, which put limits on Microsoft’s behavior and imposed a decade of government oversight on the company, expired last Thursday. Almost nobody noticed. Given the furious pace of innovation by companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, an inevitable question springs to mind: Did the biggest high-tech legal action of the 20th century make any difference, or was it a waste of money and time?

Critics of the settlement, and there are many, argue that the Microsoft case did little to change technological development; it was Google, the Internet and bad business decisions that put an end to the dominance of Microsoft. The conditions imposed by the court, to stop forcing consumers to use Internet Explorer and preventing rival software from operating properly on Windows, had little relevance to the future path of innovation.

This seems too narrow a reading of history. It is, of course, impossible to say what would have happened had the Justice Department and 19 state attorneys general not taken Microsoft to court in 1998. But beyond specific conditions imposed on the company, the case did seem to alter Microsoft’s behavior, taming its ruthless drive.

Government oversight not only swayed Microsoft to pull its punches, it sent a signal to other innovators that it was O.K. to work on technologies that Microsoft was interested in — something they might never have done before. Had Internet Explorer become as dominant as Windows, Microsoft could have held more sway over the development of new services on the Web.

Today, Microsoft is way behind the curve. New innovators, like Google and Facebook, have emerged with big power over their respective markets. Yet the precedent of Microsoft’s antitrust case poses an important question about the future: Should we worry about dominant information technology companies, or can we simply wait for the next big thing to bump them aside?

Microsoft thinks we should worry. Last June, it filed a letter about Google with the Federal Communications Commission. It said: “When a single entity achieves dominance and thereby becomes a gatekeeper, there is an inherent risk that it may have both the incentive and ability to place its own interests above consumers’ interests in access to a broad and diverse range of content, services and viewpoints.”

Regulators agree. The European Commission is deciding whether Google abused its search dominance, and American authorities are considering an investigation. We support these efforts. Innovation needs competition.

The Secrecy Tax

Who are the fat-cat five? Political money bundlers are wondering now that the Internal Revenue Service has put five unnamed donors on notice that it is looking at the checks they write to nonprofit groups that are increasingly funneling money directly to political campaign troughs.

The news is properly disturbing to campaign fund-raisers who anticipate a bonanza election year. Strategists in both parties aim to feature nonprofits because the innocuously named groups make it easy for deep-pocket donors to give in secrecy to causes operating as hard-ball partisans, even as they claim to be independent. The Federal Election Commission should be policing some honest disclosure here, but it has abdicated its responsibility.

So it is commendable that the tax agency has the will to enforce existing law, particularly if it puts some caution in the minds of donors preparing to flood the next elections with secret money. The tax rate they should be paying for their multimillion-dollar gifts is 35 percent on anything over $13,000 a year. Quite a premium in the pay-to-play casino.

No one is saying which political bankrollers might have received the tax notice — whether David Koch on the Republican side, George Soros for the Democrats, or whomever. The I.R.S. stresses that this is not part of some larger plan to look at runaway donations. Collecting unpaid taxes is the goal.

Failure to pay, of course, adds insult to injury for ordinary taxpayers who wind up subsidizing the partisan moguls’ political clout — a clout that unendowed voters do not enjoy. That is reason enough to enforce the law.

Strolling Coney Island the Hard Way

Not since Charles Feltman was credited with inventing the hot dog 140 years ago has Coney Island had to adjust to such radical change as the “concrete compromise” that’s about to alter its signature boardwalk along the Atlantic beachfront.

Feltman merely applied a bun as a clever way to do away with plates and silverware for sausage eaters. But city officials proposed last year to replace worn-out boardwalk stretches with concrete causeway slabs — no more of the hardwood boards that generations of New Yorkers have strolled as an integral pleasure of a day at the beach.

Concrete was cheaper and more durable and better for the patrol cars and park trucks sharing the boardwalk with sun-baked pedestrians, the city sales pitch went.

Instantly, protesters gathered. “This is violating the one piece of solitude in a city that’s already a concrete jungle!” declaimed Mike Greco, founder of Friends of the Boardwalk. In their fury, some accused “Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg” of favoring trees over beachgoers consigned to slippery, scalding concrete.

Prodded by Coney Island community board members, the concrete compromise began to take shape, replete with ersatz hardwood in the form of composite planks striated to resemble wood. The current deal is for a concrete demi-causeway 12 feet wide flanked by two 19-foot-wide walkways of genuine splinter-free imitation wood. Purists remain dissatisfied. They complain a faux boardwalk is no boardwalk worth walking.