(FORTUNE Magazine) – Washington has a new favorite sport--Microsoft bashing--and the Justice Department isn't the only group in town that's playing. A new and secretive coalition of companies and lobbyists, called (for the moment) the Council for a Competitive Electronic Marketplace, has been quietly plotting against the software giant. A recent meeting at the offices of Powell Tate, a public relations firm headed by former White House press secretary Jody Powell, drew a couple of dozen anti-Microsofters, participants say.

What are they up to? Nobody is saying publicly; the fear of Bill Gates is too pervasive for anyone to blab. But this is what's known. The coalition has been formed to convince lawmakers and the public that Microsoft is on the wrong side, especially in the battle of the browsers. Its first pitch: Microsoft's Internet Explorer must be unhitched from its Windows operating system--for the good of the nation.

Arguments aside, the fight boils down to everybody against Microsoft. Backers of the nascent effort include Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and Sabre Group, an information services firm for the travel industry. These and other companies worry that Microsoft will monopolize not only the industry but also the Washington influence machine; Gates has hired at least nine lobbying and law firms with offices in the capital, including the law firm in which his father is a name partner, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds.

So the anti-Gates forces have hired their own big names, including Bob Dole, now of the law firm Verner Liipfert Bernhard McPherson & Hand. On the same day as the Powell gathering, Dole met in his own office with another group of would-be Microsoft slayers.

--Jeffrey H. Birnbaum