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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.
Damn, you submitted faster than I did. Anyway, here's the press release. I like the part about treble damages.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Can't.. decide! ... Who's more... evil!
Can we axe them both, and start over with Yahoo!?
Kevin Fox
Actually, you can't be tried on the same case twice in civil law
either. However, the difference between civil law and criminal law
is that in civil law, the plaintiff can be anyone, while in criminal law,
only the government can bring the case.
Who is bringing the suit does matter.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
[H}ow many viable magazines/cable channels/ISP/Movie Studios etc are there besides AOL TW...hmm, I don't have enough time to count.
The answer to your question is 5.
6 media conglomerates own just about every major media and entertainment product in the US.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
No, it's not arguable whether Microsoft's business practices were illegal. Microsoft has been found guilty in federal court of breaking federal anti-trust laws.
That's what this AOL suit is all about. In essence their suit is saying "You were found guilty of breaking anti-trust laws. Now we want to be compensated for our loss that resulted from your illegal actions."
A couple of years ago (more?) when this whole thing started, I was a staunch supporter of Netscape. I really wanted to see Microsoft lose this one.
.exe was in use.) I either had to have these programs on a CD, or I had to wait for Netscape to download (through command-line FTP, even!)
.Net, which is the future of Microsoft, instead of IE, which is the past.
Now, however, I worry about things like the following:
"A judge would still have the challenge of choosing a remedy that would restore competition to the Internet browser market. Netscape has only a sliver of the Internet browser market, compared to its dominance several years ago."
One of the "suggested" remedies is to force Microsoft to not include a browser with the OS. I have to question, though, whether this would really be best for the consumer.
Remember back in the day when Windows 95 first shipped? The first thing I did upon loading 95 was to install a web browser. Usually, this meant a tedious process whereby I would use FTP to connect to ftp.netscape.com and go through several directories until I found the correct binary. This was a time-consuming and tedious process. Without a web browser, I couldn't install many of the programs I typically used, including an FTP client and WinZip (used to unpack programs back before the self-extracting
So I question whether the "stripped-down" version of Windows is a real remedy, as it causes more inconvenience to consumers that way. Rather, I'd like to see Internet Explorer installed and a shortcut to install Netscape on the desktop, much like there are AOL shortcuts on most desktops now. That way, Netscape could be installed locally with little hassle, but there would still be a web browser in the OS for those who didn't care.
A few years ago, I was up in arms about this whole thing. Now, I don't care any more, and I have a feeling that the vast majority of users feel the same way. I like my IE6 with its Google toolbar and Web development tools ("view partial source", anyone?). I would have applauded this decision a while ago, but now I think that Microsoft should just pay AOL its due and move on. This lawsuit is about something that should have been settled years ago, and it's time to worry about
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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.
Makes perfect sense to me.
So...if AOLTW wins, but MS manages to fight it all the way to the Supremes, using their usual legal stalling tactics, such that AOLTW files for bankruptcy and dissolves just as it extracts so much money from MS that MS has to do likewise...
For once, there might be a silver lining to the cloud of huge legal bills.
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.
Much as I dislike them, the government's lawsuit against Microsoft has always looked a little too much like the government getting nervous with MS's cash reserves.
Uhh.... I'm nervous about MS's cash reserves. Actually... any corporation that giant (including AOLTW) should give us all pause about the amount of money they can throw at anything. I'd much rather the government have the money than MS, but I guess AOLTW will have to do (considering simply the justice-for-predatory-business-practices concept.) Until someone wakes up at the FCC that is.
Remember... Your tax money in the early 80's helped give rise to the ARPA/NSFNET. Your money blown on MS-DOS 3.3 helped give rise to Windows 3.
The gov't doesn't like entities it can't push around.
Citizens should be able to push the Government around, corporations should not.
And "free-market" (ie, battle-of-the-corner-Quik-E-Marts) concepts notwithstanding, Citzens alone can't do much to push around a trans-national corporation. Governments can.
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"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
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:
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.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
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.
Or you could read The Antitrust Terrible 10: Why the Most Reviled "Anti-competitive" Business Practices Can Benefit Consumers in the New Economy. Note that the 8th section in the PDF deals specifically with tying and bundling. Enjoy!
grep -ri 'should work'
Wow! How old is the crowd reading this? Doesn't anyone remember that Netscape used to have the best browser out there and that they actually charged money for it? Until M$ figured out the only way they could be top dog in the browser market was that they had to give it away for free and develop it using profits from Windows and Office, a company could actually SELL A BROWSER FOR MONEY!
Once a big chunk of their revenue stream was taken away, the quality of the browser really began to suffer. Tack on the fact that M$ had some licensing agreements with many PC OEM's requiring them to NOT SHIP Netscape on PC's as well as their weird proprietary tags (not that NS didn't have a few as well) and you have a recipe for NS' demise.
Hell! M$ even courted major entertainment sites and encouraged them to develop their sites so that they could ONLY be viewed with IE for Windows! I'm a Mac user and years ago I used only Netscape and I couldn't even access the star trek website. Totally unsupported for Netscape and the lack of Mac support was just rubbing salt in the wounds.
M$ needs to pay for this reckless disregard for consumer choice and if AOL/TW wants to use their own money to fight this battle, I'm fine with that. The US government , since Bush was appointed president, has shown that they no longer have the cojones to do what is right and just.
Pooty tweet