"Finally, and this is going to go against the grain of the hacker ethic prevalent among many of us HNers, I think it has to be said that being anticompetitive m

"Finally, and this is going to go against the grain of the hacker ethic prevalent among many of us HNers, I think it has to be said that being anticompetitive may be unethical but it is not illegal in the framework of US antitrust law unless the company uses a monopoly position to extend its dominance in other markets." Yes, anti-competetive behavior in an of itself isn't illegal, no one argued that to start with. But the bit about it not being illegal isn't strictly true. You got it backwards. Antitrust laws are about companies being anti-competitive, not simply monopolies. FTC has fined lots of companies for being anti-competitive.