There is so much misremembering of the Microsoft antitrust case, especially by people who didn’t follow it closely at the time, and you’re very right to remind

There is so much misremembering of the Microsoft antitrust case, especially by people who didn’t follow it closely at the time, and you’re very right to remind everyone that the core issue was asking the government to intervene to maintain the viability of $40 closed source browser licenses. MSFT “lost” the case but the remedies amounted to a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile the market in its broadest sense innovated in ways that no court or legislator could have reasonably predicted in the late 90s. Not just innovation in terms of superior technology, but in intellectual property (open source), culture (the web standards movement amongst devs), and organization (W3C getting its act together). Beyond browsers Microsoft’s expected dominance on internet server business ran up against Linux, which like gecko and webkit, won out not because some Kommissar deemed it worthy, but because competitors to Microsoft were incentivized to think way outside of the box. If App Store policies truly are as untenable as half of the people posting in this thread believe them to be, then the desire to solve the problem by bringing the coercive power of the state to redistribute some revenue seems more like a lack of imagination than anything else.