AOL Time Warner Files Anti-Trust Suit against MS

ChazeFroy writes "This article at the Washington Post says that AOL Time Warner has filed a suit against Microsoft seeking damages from anti-competitive practices over the Netscape browser." Can't say I'm surprised.

Comments

how does this compare...

[DrEmilioLazardo]

...with the lawsuit(s) that the states are still pursuing against Microsoft? I thought that part of the reason for the states v. MS was these type of problems (MS trying to squeeze out Netscape). And even though AOL has already had their input on the matter, I guess they still have the right to sue. Seems odd that they'd just now jump on the bandwagon, and that they could have been on it all along...

Re:how does this compare...

[ptrourke]

I thought that part of the reason for the states v. MS was these type of problems (MS trying to squeeze out Netscape). And even though AOL has already had their input on the matter, I guess they still have the right to sue. Seems odd that they'd just now jump on the bandwagon, and that they could have been on it all along.

Not odd at all.

1. The US and the states are acting in the public interest, not in Netscape's.
2. Despite this, if the US and the states had come up with a good remedy, that might have been enough for AOL/TW.
3. AOL/TW sits back and waits to see what happens, letting the US and the states spend all the money.
4. When they get the decision they want, but don't get the remedy they want, they bring suit in their own interests, using the existing judgment to reduce the amount of resources they have to dedicate to the suit, while putting themselves in the driver's seat with regard to the ultimate remedy.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Goliath vs. Goliath

[Ralph Wiggam]

This is like watching your two least favorite football teams play in the Superbowl. You know a lot is at stake, but you can't bring yourself to care.

I liked this quote: AOL executive John Buckley noted the court ruling and said, "This action is an attempt to get justice in this matter."

And by "justice", he means "money".

-B

Re:Goliath vs. Goliath

[blonde rser]

I don't mean to jump on you specifically but I see this analogy to law thrown around a lot and it makes me nervous. More and more people are looking at court battles as sporting competitions; consider the make up of both teams, weigh advantages and disadvantages of each, consider how similar you are with each, and hope the team you like more wins.

This is a fine for sports but in a court case only the laws at hand should be considered. Otherwise, in practise, only nice and likable people have access to the law. Or in other words being mean and unlikable becomes illegal because you will always lose in court.

Sure law is fundementally like this because it falls from man and some forms of sympathy are inevitable. But we don't have to encourage this behavior. Microsoft is dislikable but not because everything they do is illegal. And people tend to like to do illegal things to dislikable people; this is a major motivator for illegal activities, even among likable people. Therefore in some suits that Microsoft is involved in the law favors Microsoft, even if they are the dislikable party. In these cases I hope Microsoft wins because a society not tempered by blind justice is far more dangerous than Microsoft could ever hope to be.

Sure we can all continue to root for the popular and the likable but just hope that you never become unpopular, find yourself sued, and find people who root for the popular on the jury. I know I'm hoping this.

Re:Goliath vs. Goliath

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Otherwise, in practise, only nice and likable people have access to the law. Or in other words being mean and unlikable becomes illegal because you will always lose in court.

But surely in the case where the un-nice, unlikable bully actually has broken the law, it's OK to root for the people wallopping him. After all, the court said that Microsoft did engage in monopolistic behavior, the appellate court upheld that finding of fact, and AOL is suing for that breach. It seems to me that it's alright to root against MS on this, without having to say, "Nail Microsoft because I don't like them."

interesting but a little late...

[issachar]

The last paragraph is the most interesting...

"You can't literally put the market back in the competitive position it was in, so you'd have to think of a forward-looking remedy to help restore competition in the market as best as possible,"

Exactly what would this "forward looking remedy" be? I seriously doubt a stripped down version of Windows would fly. Customers just wouldn't buy it. Not without a serious price cut, in the >30% range, and can we seriously make the claim that 30% of the value of Windows is in IE?

I think this may be a case of too little, too late.

This is the silver lining

[gwernol]

(IANAL, of course). This is the silver lining to the disappointing outcome to the government's anti-trust case. While I would have preferred the anti-trust case to have resulted in a breakup of Microsoft or other strong measures against the company, it did at least hold that Microsoft was a monopoly.

This allows other companies large and small to launch their own suits against Microsoft and have a good shot at winning. This could end up costing Microsoft a huge amount of money and effectively curtailing their worst business practices.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Re:Hypocritical

[DrXym]

Of course non-AOL companies can buy pop-up ads on AOL. How else do they make money?? In fact if you run AOL or go to their website you'll see they've got hundreds of partners selling content & merchandise. This is no different than what happens if you visit MSN or Yahoo!

As for Netscape... how are they meant to compete when Microsoft (which owns the OS) ships IE with the OS and threatens manufacturers to dump Netscape's browser or face higher OEM costs and other punitive measures? You cannot compete in a market if your competitor has systematically destroyed it.

Huh?

[blueforce]

I don't friggin' get it.

AOL is the largest ISP in the world.
AOL has the most subscribers in the world.
AOL owns Netscape.
AOL bundles IE with it's software.

huh?

What are they gonna sue for? Stupidity?

Re:Barf me

[4of12]

Of course, it's always amusing watching free software advocates (who think software should be free/beer) whine about Microsoft giving away software for free.

Alright, you win.

I'll stop whining about Microsoft making IE strongly integrated by default in its operating systems (you know, the ones that come installed by default on 90+ percent of the PCs that you find in stores?)

In particular, if Microsoft started giving away free software such as AOL 7.0 or Red Hat 7.2 or the source code to IE as part of their magnanimous gestures, then I'd be prepared to eat crow.

I'm waiting.

*sigh* Same old line.

[Restil]

I won't disagree that Microsoft has performed their fair share of monopolistic anticompetitive activities. What less can you expect from your favorite corporate giant intent on dominating the industry.

But netscape had a running head start in the browser market, and for a while, Microsoft was constantly playing catchup. Had netscape kept Microsoft in that position, then browser integration would never have been a viable option, because people would have been upset with microsoft if netscape failed to perform properly, or if they didn't really want IE tightly integrated with their OS. The fact that Microsoft already had the market share of the browser market by the time the integration took place makes the whole issue a non-issue after all.

Netscape lost their market because they stumbled. They got so caught up on insane stock prices and trying to be the supreme leader in the computer industry that they completely neglected to do the exact things required to achieve those goals. And they got blindsided by Microsoft. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Of course Microsoft has/had an almost inexhaustable source of capital to work with. They can throw money at a problem forever. But Netscape wasn't exactly broke. They had plenty of working capital and they had friendly business relations with other significant corporations like Sun. They had every ability to set the standards and run with it. When early implementations of IE with ineffective java support were breaking, Netscape and friends should have made the push to drag those customers to their camp, while Microsoft was behind.

And they needed to KEEP RUNNING. But they didn't. They chose to stagnate. They let Microsoft catch up, and clean up their browser, along with adding the ability to properly render buggy code so they would be the "more compatible" browser when netscape would break on poorly written HTML code. They gave Microsoft the chance to play the "embrace and extend" game and were forced to switch into playing catchup themselves. And that's a game Microsoft can play forever.

So don't cry too much for Netscape. They had their chance. And they blew it. They've done wonderful things, and I really wished they would have remained on top. But those days are gone. Crying about it now won't help them.

-Restil

Re:*sigh* Same old line.

[iso]

Netscape lost their market because they stumbled. They got so caught up on insane stock prices and trying to be the supreme leader in the computer industry that they completely neglected to do the exact things required to achieve those goals. And they got blindsided by Microsoft. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

I'm no Netscape fan-boy, but how do you figure? If you had actually followed the events at the time, you'd know that the only reason Netscape "stumbled" was because Microsoft came along and put ten times more money into the development of IE while giving it away for free. Remember, Netscape was only free for non-commercial use (it was $30 otherwise).

Netscape was faced with a rival that had an order of magnitude more resources and cut off their major source of revenue for development. As a result their browser became a buggy mess as they didn't have the time to do the decent development there were doing before.

Let's be very frank here: Netscape died because they were forced out of business by anti-competitive business tactics of a monopoly power. Period. Netscape 4.x sucked because of this pressure, not in spite of it.

- j

Re:Hypocritical

[DrXym]

I think you'll find the web will become considerably more friendly towards Mozilla & Netscape 6.x when AOL uses the Gecko engine in its clients. AFAIK the Compuserve is going to switch over pretty soon now.

The definition of an OS is not the point.

[enkidu]

Just couldn't let this one go by:

Microsoft isn't being sued for including the desktop/start menu etc. They are being sued for leveraging their monopoly on the kernel+OS+desktop into other software tools. They do have the right to include their web browser. But as a monopoly, they don't have the right to:

• Forbid licensees from including other browsers or software [exclusion]
• Charge more for windows without IE than with it [anticompetitive pricing]
• Charge more for Windows or refuse to license because you want to add Netscape/Be/Linux onto the computer in addition to Windows [both]

In my opinion, Microsoft has broken many many laws, the most aggregious being the use of exclusive licensing agreements with manufactures to lock out alternative operating systems and products.

Heck Be (may it rest in peace) offered all PC manufacturers BeOS for free if they would include it on their shipping computers. Lots of companies were "interested". Microsoft prevented this from happening by threatening/extorting the manufacturers with their illegal "licensing agreement" and in the end only one, Hitachi, took them up. Even then, Hitachi was forced to hide the partition so you had to go through a labyrinth of steps to boot into Be.

I think if any of the PC manufacturers ever grew some balls (or got desperate enough) and sued Microsoft for predatory pricing/illegal practices, they would have the best chance of all of winning a shitload of damages. Unfortunately, Microsoft would be able to drive any big manufacturer completely out of business before they could win in court.

Maybe this is why AOL bought NSCP?

[aliebrah]

Did it occur to anyone that AOL possibly bought NSCP for no reason other than to have the avenue open to do exactly this -- file suit against Microsoft.

NSCP wouldn't have had the time or resources to do it, but AOL basically 'bought' a case for them to dump onto Microsoft. AOL on the other hand has the time and more than enough resources to make this a real PITA for Microsoft.