The fathers of consoles will never share the stage again (opens in new tab). Just days after Bobby Kotick accused Sony of "trying to sabotage" Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard in the pages of the Financial Times, Sony, in a recent filing with the Federal Trade Commission (opens in new tab) (via FTC) accused it of "outright harassment" (via Axios (open in new tab)).

This is not harassment as you or I understand it: Microsoft did not send Sony abusive emails. However, as part of the long-running and ongoing litigation between the two companies over the Activision acquisition, the Xbox maker has requested access to all sorts of normally undisclosed internal Sony documents to substantiate its claims. In its filings with the FTC, Sony claims that one particular request, a "performance review request to SEE's leadership," is so far outside the scope of the dispute that it amounts to "outright harassment" of Sony by Microsoft. Will someone please think about Sony's executives?

Sony noted that "even in employment cases, the court must make a specific showing of relevance before requiring production of personnel files," which it believes Microsoft has not done. Furthermore, he said that the lawsuit over Activision is not even an employment lawsuit, and that Microsoft "may be 'candidly' discussing the performance of SEA's game business (...). Where do they subpoena the "purported" documents?

The idea that one giant company would "harass" another giant company sounds faintly absurd to me, as if we were discussing people we fear and feel for, and not a massive, worldwide empire, but Sony's argument Convinced by the judge, Chief Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell said that Sony had "demonstrated good cause for the relief requested" and issued a proposed order quashing Document Request 13 regarding executive personnel actions.

In the same section, Chappell also ordered that Microsoft limit its document requests to the period between January 1, 2019 and January 17, 2023, and specifically that subpoenas from a select few executives, including familiar names like Jim Ryan and Harmen Hulst The order was to limit them to the "seven custodians," as the document referred to them, so as not to have to write out the names of the seven executives every time they came up.

At this point, one gets the sense that the companies involved, like the public at large, are almost fed up with this drawn-out process. If Sony isn't muttering about "harassment," Bobby Kotick is predicting economic doom for Britain (opens in new tab), or Microsoft's lawyers are accusing a venerable government agency of violating the US Constitution (opens in new tab). Perhaps we should wrap this up before we get into a fistfight in a supermarket parking lot.