The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) is an USA technology lobby group. ACT was founded in 1998 in response to the Microsoft antitrust case. Its chief goals are
- to limit government involvement in technology (such as antitrust actions or free software / open source software requirements); and
- to support strong intellectual property rights in software.
Currently, ACT is lobbying strongly against the Massachusetts endorsement of the OpenDocument standards. ACT is a member of Americans for Technology Leadership, a larger coalition that advocates against government regulation of technology. It is sometimes claimed to be a front organization for Microsoft, though it has other large, independent members such as eBay, Oracle, Orbitz and VeriSign. On March 9, 2006, the President of ACT, Jonathan Zuck wrote an article which was published on news.com, criticising the Free Software Foundation's plan to fight Digital Rights Management (DRM) with the new version 3.0 of the GNU General Public License [1].
