The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it will not seek to break Microsoft Corp. in two during the next phase of the software maker’s landmark antitrust case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in late June had overturned a lower court’s order by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Microsoft be broken into two companies as a remedy for anticompetitive practices. At the same time, it upheld the lower court’s conclusion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the market for computer operating systems and maintains that monopoly power by anticompetitive means in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.
DOJ Says Microsoft Should Not Break Up
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
They promote free markets where it is in the interest of the US. But everywhere the US owns a “free market destroying monopoly” they do exactly what they officially despise. US politicians are all talking Bullshit all the time. It is truly time for them to civilize and socialize. IMO US politicians are a disgrace for mankind.
I honestly can not say that this is unexpected…. Everybody has been expecting this since Bush became president. It’s a logical choice from his perspective, now the US economy has problems, you need to protect what makes money. And Windows makes a lot of money for the US. Most software is developed in the US, even most software we use in Europe. Linux is much more a world thing where the money is made more in the country where it is sold (mostley services).
Funny, here in Europe, a lot of politci are prosecuted for taking moeny from companies. Here it’s corruption. In the US that’s legal..
At the risk of sounding like an idiot (I must admit I have plenty of practice) this is a good thing. Breaking Microsoft would have done nothing but make them impervious to further lawsuit and both halves would have come out stronger than the whole. Take a look at most forced splits – the new entities end up more powerful and more in control than ever.
Personally I think this is a Good Thing(tm).
> Funny, here in Europe, a lot of politci are prosecuted for taking moeny from companies. Here it’s corruption. In the US that’s legal..
What you call corruption in Europe, in the US we call it lobbying
If Microsoft was split we would have never gotten rid of Windows.
Anti-trist law is 100% BS anyway
Man! The market just seems so darn ripe for an alternative OS. When I hear about slow PC sales, HP & Compaq merging w/layoffs, Gateway laying people off, etc. I just can’t help but assume that it’s because there’s really not much choice out there.
When friends/family tell me they want to get a new computer and ask advice on what to get, I really don’t have anything to tell them. OSX or Wintel. I couldn’t swallow either and ended up getting a SPARC w/ Solaris 8. I’m not even all \emph{that} impressed w/ Solaris (but the Java support rocks).
Now that it looks like there won’t be a breakup, M$ can still be a viable target for other antitrust lawsuits. The door is open for another “BeOS” to just swoop in and mop up (and possibly take us away from the Intel architecture).
In Europe monopolies are also legal and are not looked down upon… so I doubt any politicians are going to get busted for any wrong doing other than taking money from their own governments!
M$ is filth.
They lie and buy their way out of anything.
Steve Balmer is an idiot (dance monkey boy) and Bill Gates has lost the plot.
I can only prey that the downfall of M$ will be the XBox and XP.
The non-split is good, keep them together, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
All politicians are corrupt or corruptable – it’s only a matter of money – the honest one’s get killed.
If only M$ was a non US company. I`m sure the US would put up trade sanction that would hurt any country so bad that they would split the country up in a hundred companies in no time.
Just look at the trouble the US makes over africa`s bananas “monopoly” on the european markets. They even go against small fish like very poor african nations which only means of survival are the natural products they own.
Africans believe the US to be their father-country. Because it must be bacuse it`s screwing their mothercountry all the time.
People are dying by the millions in africa because of Aids. The US does everything to stop cheap medicin from being sold there because it was invented by a US company which should get loads of royalties from it. I DON`T believe millions should die just because of a freaking copyright protection.
1) M$ would only become stronger if it were broken in two parts.
2) Africa has such a high rate of disease, especially HIV/AIDs, due to poor education/prevention programs. There is no cure for AIDS, the cocktail drugs only increase the lifespan of the patient.
“There is no cure for AIDS, the cocktail drugs only increase the lifespan of the patient.”
Modern antiviral therapy for HIV/AIDS is *extremely* effective if the patient does not yet have clinical AIDS (in other words, he/she isinfected with the virus but still has a well-functioning immune system). It is the norm for the virus to become completely undetectable with modern therapy. Long term data are lacking, of course, but it is likely that a near-normal life expectancy can be acheived albeit with a complex, lifelong medical regimen.
You have a good point, however – Africa has great deficits in far more basic needs, such as food, sanitary living conditions, stable government – HIV is a big problem but there are plenty of other major problems as well.
If the DOJ is going to investigate new potential monopolistic practices by MS, the bootloader license that MS pushes on the big PC vendors should be “discovered”… there is some info about this issue in which JLG (BeOS) was interviewed as a potential witness but the DOJ was only interested in pursuing the browser “tying” issue at the time. I don’t recall the details, but it seems the MS’s bootloader license (a “Trade Secret”?) excludes the vendors from allowing the bootloader to boot any OS other than an MS, and possibly disallows any other bootloader from being installed that could boot an MSOS. Eugenia, perhaps you know of the links to this story?
I think this is what you’re looking for, Tim:
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt20010824s0001/
Well, if I understand correctly, if they did get broken up that woulden’t really do much to solve the OS monoply. It would just give compeitors (Like Gobe and Sun)to Microsoft’s other software (such as Microsoft Office, etc) a tiny bit more market share… so oh well, it stinks that they aren’t getting broken up but it would not of helped alternitives to Windoze much.