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Hello clueless.

no need to be rude, especially when you're on such shaky ground yourself.

This is from 2010:

"On Thursday, June 30th, Microsoft, in collusion with Apple, Nokia and RIM bought Nortel's 6000 patents spanning Mobile and Wireless technologies for $4.5 Billion, beating Google, who began the bid in April with $900 million. While in the smelling distance of the booty, they started threatening every handset manufacturer in sight for licensing Android patents, asking for as much as $15 per phone, while simultaneously offering indemnity from patent lawsuits for Windows Mobile based phones."

The DoJ ok'd the sale in questionable circumstanes, despite clear doubts about the process. No doubt Microsoft learned from its earlier experiences:

"Dear Ms. Varney:
The American Antitrust Institute urges the Department (a) to commence an in-depth investigation of the proposed purchase of Nortel’s portfolio of more than 6,000 patents and patent applications, many of which may be vital to the future of mobile communications and computing devices, to Rockstar Bidco LP, a consortium consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, EMC, Sony and Ericsson...
We are respectfully troubled by the Department’s Early Termination of the HSR waiting period on this transaction two weeks ago, in sharp contrast to the Department’s announcement this past April of its intervention into the proposed purchase of Novell’s portfolio of approximately 882 patents and patent applications, many relating to mobile communications and computing devices, to CPTN Holding LLC, a consortium consisting of Apple, Microsoft, EMC and Oracle,

http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Nortel%20letter%20to%20DOJ.7.6.11.pdf

So there is no doubt at all that Microsoft, Apple and Nokia are colluding to kill Android. The only real question is what it cost them to get the US DoJ to allow it.

Apple has a monopoly on selling supported software for the iPhone. Not all monopolies are anticompetitive; it has yet to be decided if this is one which is. There has certainly been some grumbling, but going after Apple for it would almost certainly mean they'd have to reopen antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. If you haven't noticed, Microsoft got totally let off on the whole antitrust thing by Ashcroft himself; there is certainly some sort of collusion there. It is unimaginable that Bill Gates would have been permitted to simply be in control of those big stacks of money over at the Gates Foundation, though, which are invested for profit in the industries of those same players. Ashcroft claimed the settlement "[...]fully and completely addressed the anti-competitive conduct outlined by the Court of Appeals against Microsoft". That's his job, though; the guy running the process on behalf of the USDOJ was appointed by Bush just months earlier, and "it's certain that Bush and his aides questioned [him] in detail about his future intentions in the Microsoft litigation." The DOJ/Microsoft deal "...breaks a longstanding cooperative relationship that began during the Ford Administration in the mid-1970s" — clearly, the decision to essentially abort antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, which had been caught dead to rights and found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in nearly every market in which they were involved, was not made lightly. It was made deliberately.

Even if Apple has nine illegal monopolies, the DOJ cannot call them on their behavior unless they go back after Microsoft, and that is clearly not on their agenda.

Actually, I asked the AAI about this, and they were rather helpful.

I was told that the CA & MN settlements were the most favorable to consumers. Yes, California isn't the only state settling these. If you haven't already, you may well get a letter telling you that you're a party to these things. I'm in Arizona and I just got mine last week.

Now then, if you don't like the settlement (and I don't like the Arizona settlement), you have two options:

1) Opt-out. You get nothing, but you retain the right to sue Microsoft. This probably isn't that useful unless you're planning your own class-action lawsuit. I imagine that most of the agreements have a termination clause which says that if a few hundred thousand people opt-out, the agreement is nullified & they renegotiate (or something).

2) Object. Submit proof of your class membership along with a letter to the parties listed in the letter you should've gotten detailing why you think the settlement isn't "fair, reasonable and adequate." For example, I'm looking into opposing the Arizona settlement because it's inadequate--I don't think it's quite as good as the CA settlement (but I still have to finish my comparisons). Speaking of which, if any legal-types who know Arizona court rules & wouldn't mind helping me out are welcome to contact me -- mvenzke gmail com -- because the Arizona vouchers do seem rather crappy & calculated to funnel the money right back to Microsoft.

This is true and not true. IBM was ordered to divest itself of major components as well as to do other things. The US Government put restrictions on what it could or could not do. This is the only reason Compaq was able to reverse-engineer the PC and to create clones. Further, IBM fought (and lost to some degree) the clone wars. What really happened in the background was that IBM finally gave up trying to stop the proliferation of PCs and instead drastically dropped the price of leasing the rights to their BIOS information. By the time they had done this though, the other companies who had created their own BIOSs were gaining popularity and the rest is history. IBM shut down it's plants to create PCs and/or laptops and IBM does not even make its own micros or laptops today. They are made by other companies who just slap the IBM logo onto them. (Apple's PowerPC also comes to mind. Motorola used to make Apple's CPUS. Motorola's CPUS though were really IBM creations. But Motorola did the actual production of them.)

As for cheap hardware - that is a natural process of economy. The overhead inherent in a technologically advanced country will make, at some point, it more feasible to outsource things to other countries where the labor is cheaper. Since the labor is cheaper the items are produced at a cheaper rate. That rate, even with import duties, is still cheaper than it would have been to create the item in the original country. Which is why it is cheaper to have some place like India produce your software. Not exactly a great thing (since I was laid off for quite a while myself because of this effect) but I can understand why it is happening.

I really doubt that Democrats are that stupid to do that, especially to a company with a huge financial power.
I am not saying they threatned them. I am saying they rewarded their political donors. Bill Clinton and Al Gore both personally asked for contributions from Microsoft. Personally. That is fact. Sun and Netscape and AOL all gave money in the same cycle to the DNC and the reelection committee. MS did not. None. Not One Red Cent. Two months later the DOJ "kicked in MS's door" so to speak. I am not saying the case wasn't merited, just that at that time it was politcally motivated.

Second, I am not a republican. Take that back.

Third, dozens of promiment democrats sided with the republicans in appointing a special prosecutor. GW Bush will probably go down in history as the most corrupt president. Second will be Clinton. Both of these two bozos have been so massively corrupt as to be a joke. It's amazing really.

Finally, read this article. You will see the timing laid out in a clear way.

One more point about Bush and "favoring the wealthy". Essentially, you believe in class warfare. The idea that if one group wins another group loses. The republican (little r) ideal is summed easily by saying "a rising tide lifts all boats". Playing favorites with one group or another is unfair and unjust. Desiging policy to help one group or another is wrong. Policy in the US ideally should treat all equal. What the reality reflects is group politics, which your attitudes promote. Good policy does not micromanage or promote a single group or collection of groups.

Would this be a vioaltion of their anti-trust agreement? Seems like this could really put the hurt on Norton, etc.

Antitrust law does not forbid you to hurt your competitors.[*] All competition does that. In fact, that is what competition is. Given a fixed number of customers, any enterprise that tries to attract as many customers as possible necessarily hurts its competitors, who will either lose customers or not gain as many new ones as they would have otherwise. Thus, the competitors will be financially worse off than they would have been had if they had been able to lay their grubby little hands on those customers. Or at least they should be. Competition is supposed to punish inefficiencies and reward efficiency, thereby allocating scarce resources the best/most efficient way possible.

What antitrust law primarily seeks to protect is competition, not competitors. Now, it might admittedly be just a little bit hard to have the one (former) without the other (latter) and much of tension within antitrust law and the debate surrounding it centres on that particular problem: should antitrust regulate structure or behaviour?

In Alcoa[**] Justice Learned Hand stated that it was not the objective of antitrust law to punish efficient companies: in case a party has had a monopoly 'thrust upon it', its position was not unlawful. However, he went on to say:

'Nothing compelled [Alcoa] to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.'

This so-called Alcoa doctrine placed monopolies under a strict per se-rule: i.e., monopolies were prohibited as such. The issue became one of structure: does an enterprise occupy a position of monopoly (within a relevant market) or not. If yes, unless it can be proved that the company is a mere passive recipient of its monopoly position, it is unlawful.

The Alcoa doctrine was severly critized, notably by Robert Bork in his The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy At War With Itself. Justice Hand seemed to find Alcoa guilty of being nothing more than a better competitor; better at doing business; in fact, Alcoa was being punished for being more efficient. And as the criticism took hold, courts reverted back to an ante-Alcoa, U.S. Steel[#] rule of reason approach centring on the behaviour of monopolizing: simply put, intent + harm. This would appear to be the (established) law today.

Bork and the Chicago schoolers sometimes seem to go futher than that however: one sometimes gets the impression that to them, the existence of a monopoly shows nothing more and nothing less than superiority in the market place. In other words, a position of monopoly is evidence of superior efficiency; efficiency is a valid exculpatory defence as it contibutes to increased consumer welfare[##]. A lot of the defence of Microsoft's monopoly case seems to rest upon this premise. See, for instance, here and here; for a more sober view, see Posner's article Antitrust in the New Economy , in particular, perhaps, pages 8-9.

Neo-classical economic theory and its antitrust exponents (to which Bork and the Chicago-schoolers obviously belong) are not without critics however. See, for instance, this piece by Metzenbaum and Foer in which they write:

'Antitrust remedies, [Greenspan] says, tend not to be efficient. His attitude is, if we wait long enough, dominant companies (po

Remember that unlike theft - the grounds on which Napster, et al have been pursued - anti-trust is a civil, not crimanl action.

Yeah, Microsoft should be able to bundle a ham sandwich in there if it wants to.

IIRC from my undergrad days in econ, technically MS would not be covered by US anti-dumping laws, but by the anti-trust laws under a doctrine known as deep pockets. The idea is that you have enough cash stashed away that you can afford to drop your prices for a sufficiently long time to drive less well endowed competitors out of business and then raise prices to the monopoly level. Here is an example from the US airlines industry. Anti-dumping is a similar idea but under US law applies to foreign companies selling for less than production costs.

There are a couple of problems with both the deep pockets notion and anti-dumping laws. First, a large competitor may well have a lower cost of production than a smaller competitor and costs can be notoriously hard to measure. This can lead to charges that what is really happening is that the DOJ is bringing the case for political reasons, i.e. the protection of small business (the A&P grocery case is the classic example). The second problem is that cutting the price imposes a cost on the big competitor as well (e.g. $177 million quarterly loss for the MS game console) and so it isn't entirely clear that this is a rational strategy. Remember that both the large and small guys do best where their marginal revenue = their marginal cost (i.e. profit maximization) and this is not necessarily the same as maximizing market share as many Korean and Japanese firms have discovered in the past decade or so.

And for the parent who wrote:

The US puts taxes at will on any kind of product if they think their own industrie soffers from forreign laws... However: what is legal and what not, all over the world, is final descided by a US court.

The EU and the Japanese are at least as guilty of protection as the US (try selling Guatemalan bananas in the EU). Most of these disputes are now settled under GATT treaties by the WTO, not US courts. In fact, the US 1916 anti-dumping law has been held to violate the WTO and GATT treaty by the WTO. Under the rules, the US is required to bring its domestic laws into conformity with WTO and GATT rules as are all of the other signatories.

bullshit. Name 5 executives who were sentenced to jail time for violating antitrust laws.

How about 50? Though that's only from 1999-2000. Here's it broken down over the past decade by number of convictions and time spent in jail.

A little hasty, weren't we.