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Sigh, the number of people here who think they understand antitrust law because they followed the news of the Microsoft case is sad. It kind of makes having a
by DannyBee 12y ago
Sigh, the number of people here who think they understand antitrust law because they followed the news of the Microsoft case is sad.
It kind of makes having a serious discussion about it really hard, because people don't understand the legal requirements for being a monopoly, various forms of antitrust harms, etc, and so end up simply disagreeing because they have a "wrong" view of what the law says.
I'd put together an "engineer's guide to not sound silly when arguing about antitrust law on the internet", but i'd get raked over the coals for my affiliation.
- mike_hearn 12y agoIn fairness to the great unwashed (which I guess includes me), anti trust law manages to seem quite vague and more importantly enforcement of it appears to be highly political and selective. It's impossible for people to learn all the laws they need to follow in depth these days, there are just far too many and they are all far too complicated and subjective, so people learn by example. When we look at anti-trust law there's really one big, comparable example in the tech sector, which is Microsoft. And there they were found guilty but then Bush got elected and nothing was done. And anyway the crux of the matter was bundling of a browser, but this is now standard for all operating systems. So it's very hard to figure out what people are meant to learn from all this. I guess there is also the Intel/AMD case that I remember. That one seemed more clear cut and obvious.