4 ms·
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. A few things happened. Sure MS wasn't broken up, but they were forced to be more cautious with how they levera
by AlexandrB 3y ago
> Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial.
A few things happened. Sure MS wasn't broken up, but they were forced to be more cautious with how they leveraged their desktop monopoly for several years. Arguably this gave Firefox, and later Chrome, a foot in the door that they otherwise wouldn't have had.
It's important not to fall into binary thinking. Breaking up a (near) monopoly is not the only measure of success in antitrust.
- callalex 3y agoThat attitude has already fallen apart though. There are a lot of offerings these days for cloud based file syncing, chat, gaming, email, document editing etc. etc. but you can’t even turn on and log into a Windows machine without being forced to make and use a Microsoft account for those things.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI mean, it's really easy to avoid all that if you don't use windows. I may be a bit confused on what point you're making.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> That attitude has already fallen apart though. Yes it has. I don't think any antitrust action could be "one and done" in a way that wouldn't allow future abuse of a monopoly position. "Ma Bell" was broken up, but its children have re-coalesed into monopoly-ish companies over time. That's why it's so annoying that US antitrust has been napping for the last 2 decades instead of continuing to monitor and ensure market fairness.