Tim,

After reading your article, I was not so much reminded of WWII as the Cold War. Particularly, a former head of security for the DDR, East Germany, who appeared recently on the History Channel. These days he catalogs the atrocities of the DDR, but before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was his job to keep the DDR's citizens from escaping to the West. He realizes now that he was an enemy of freedom, but he recalled that back then, he thought they were the good guys.

You state that "[MS] clearly has a monopoly on client-side operating systems...." I am going to challenge that. A monopoly is an entity that controls the supply of a commodity or service. Microsoft is clearly not that, since there are many alternatives to using Microsoft applications and operating systems.

You may say, "But Microsoft has X% of the consumer desktop" (with some very large X). But that's the consumer, not the supply. Consumers, with lots of viable choices and the freedom to choose, have overwhelmingly chosen Microsoft. Then along comes Judge Jackson saying these consumers are making the wrong decision, and they need to be stopped.

If Microsoft has violated laws, they should be punished as prescribed by those laws. But that is not what's going on here. Microsoft is indeed rapacious, and their tactics violate our sense of ethics and fair play. It is an unimaginably strong company that is not shy about using its power to crush competition. But that is against the law only if Microsoft is truly a monopoly. Mislabeling Microsoft a monopoly so that its actions become illegal is simply preying on public ignorance. And giving the government the power to punish actions that are not against the law is to give it arbitrary authority, and thus I am reminded of the Cold War, and our fight against arbitrary authority.

I too would like to see Microsoft get taken down a few notches, but by real competition. Not by legal action on the part of sour-grapes opponents and short sighted judicature.

Stanford K. Easley

Stanford,

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not going to argue with you about whether or not Microsoft is a monopoly. Judge Jackson is a far better authority on that than I, and he has declared it so. I'm sure that there will be an appeal, and we'll eventually get more legal opinions on the subject.

I do think that Microsoft has an effective monopoly, and the point of the whole suit is that consumers haven't been given the freedom to choose. Instead, Microsoft has consistently worked to prohibit consumer choice. What's more, they have used the monopoly that they have for one class of product to prohibit consumer choice in other related areas that they desire to own.

What I find really offputting are Microsoft protestations that this is about the government trying to tell Microsoft how to design their software. Whether or not they put IE into the OS has never seemed like the issue to me--it's that they followed that up with business arrangements that prohibited resellers from substituting other products that they liked better.

This would be acceptable if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly position. Tough, but acceptable, because in the end, the resellers wouldn't have had to bow down. They could have legitimately made the choice to substitute Netscape. But when this meant that they were effectively out of the business of selling PCs, that is the effect of the "monopoly" Judge Jackson was talking about.

--Tim

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