Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:02:43 -0800 From: "Dave Walton" <dwalton@acm.org> To: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Judge: "Gates Was Main Culprit" Message-ID: <19991119050528.26040.qmail@modgud.nordicrecords.com>
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David Schwartz wrote:
> > All that really remains of substance is whether M$ acted
> > illegally to reserve its market status.
>
> Yes, but if lock in (and similar affects) are nonexistent, then
> it's impossible for Microsoft to have acted illegally to reserve its
> market status.
Monopoly leverage is illegal. If you are a monolopy, and attempt to
leverage your monopoly to restrict your competition, you are acting
illegally. So it is certainly not impossible, whether or not lock in
exists.
> It's like asking if I stole an apple to make it rain. If humans
> cannot affect whether it rains or not by individual action, then no
> matter what I did with an apple, I could not have stolen one to
> make it rain. And the fact that it is raining cannot be used as
> evidence to show that I stole the apple.
But remember... Leverage is not illegal. Monopoly leverage is. To
try to fit this to your analogy, imagine that apple theft is only a
crime while it is raining. Judge Jackson reached the conclusion
that it is raining in paragraph 33:
"In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in
the relevant market."
The remaining 379 paragraphs are spent examining the trail of
apple cores. The fact that it is raining does not prove you stole an
apple, but the fact that you stole apples while it was raining makes
you a criminal.
> Now, you might say, something like "Well, even if the
> antitrust laws are wrong and based upon false premises,
> nevertheless, they are law and so should be followed unless they
> are repealed. So even if Microsoft's actions did not affect its
> market share at all, it should still be punished for breaking the
> law."
Their actions DID affect their market share. In 1997, Microsoft
reached this conclusion (paragraph 168):
"It seems clear to me that it will be very hard to increase
browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be
more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use
IE instead of Navigator."
They leveraged their OS monopoly by bundling IE and forbidding
OEMs from replacing IE with Netscape on the desktop, among
other things. It is those actions that caused the market share
reversal between IE and Netscape.
> But this forgets entirely that an antitrust proceeding
> requires a positive showing of consumer harm.
>
> And not just any sort of harm -- Microsoft's release of
> NT4.0SP6 had a minor winsock bug. And that bug caused some
> consumer harm, of course. But this is not monopoly harm.
> Monopoly harm has to meet certain other standards, specifically,
> it has to be as the result of attempts at monopoly leverage and
> so on.
>
> So again, if there's no evidence that monopoly leverage can
> cause consumer harm (and there is none), the case against
> Microsoft collapses.
There is none? You're kidding, right?
Here's one example...
Intel was developed Native Signal Processing software with the
intention of making it freely available to consumers and OEMs.
Microsoft coerced Intel into abandoning that project, denying
consumers the benefits of Intel's work. As paragraph 101 says:
"Even as late as the end of 1998, though, Microsoft still had not
implemented key capabilities that Intel had been poised to offer
consumers in 1995."
Dave
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Walton dwalton@acm.org
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