Slashdot Mirror
Missed Opportunities in U.S. v. Microsoft
Chin is currently an associate professor teaching antitrust and intellectual property law at the University of North Carolina. According to his faculty biography, Chin also earned a doctorate in computer science in 1991 as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. After a few years of teaching math and CS, he picked up a J.D. at Yale Law School, and eventually ended up working behind the scenes on the Microsoft case.
Chin's article raises some new points about the Microsoft case that don't seem to have been considered by any of the parties, courts or commentators during the trial, such as the fact that the Windows and Internet Explorer software products actually consist of legal rights and technological capabilities, not lines of code. A longer piece by Chin is being published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology."
The government wasted its best opportunity to avoid this result three years ago, when the incoming Bush Justice Department, in a stunning reversal, decided to drop its "tying" claim. Still, the road not taken -- pressing Microsoft to offer a neutral choice of Web browsers for use with Windows -- started to look a lot more appealing this summer, when Internet Explorer's security flaws made national headlines.
Well at least now the DOJ has a lot more pressing matters at hand... Like getting the recent ruling against the Patriot Act overturned so those evil fucking terrorists can't get away and those sneaky American citizens can't hide their financial records from them.
I always felt that if the government continued to pursue their case against MSFT they would only pay for it in higher licensing fees later. Choose your battles... Money from the terrorists and the citizens or money from MSFT?
I'm not about to contest the verdict - that a monopoly existed and so on. That's done. But I think the whole thing smacked of a hurried witch hunt decided from the beginning. Back then Microsoft was pretty much apolitical and their legal team was about a fifth of what it is today. Since that case they've wised up to lobbying and campaign contributions as a way to "play" the system, just like any other big corporation in this country.
Ah well.
If Judge Jackson had kept his mouth shut just a little longer, we'd be living in a considerably different world today.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
From the article:
Internet Explorer will continue its chokehold on the World Wide Web.
That's a joke. IE is losing marketshare at an amazing rate. Link. All kinds of technical and non-technical sources are recomending a shift-away from Internet Explorer.
But switching can be difficult. Windows users who want to access a document on the Web are sometimes required to use Internet Explorer, flaws and all, even if they have chosen a different product for that purpose.
That's right. A web-publisher can put any conditions he/she wants on viewing the content in the question. You can be asked to pay money, watch an advert, or use certain software.
By tilting Windows users toward Internet Explorer in this and other ways over the past nine years, Microsoft has ensured that many consumers are using a less secure browser than they would if offered a neutral choice, and prevented other software companies from competing for these customers on the merits.
That's untrue. MS pre-selecting IE does not preclude others from competing. That's a blatantly untrue statement. It makes it more difficult. That's a big difference.
The Clinton Justice Department proved all of these facts at trial. Yet the lower courts did not move to restore freedom of competition in the market for Web browsers, because they found Microsoft's appeal for freedom more compelling.
MS's argument all along was that it's market share was at risk, and that any moment, a competitor could grap the reigns and win back the web. They argued that the barriers to entry - regardless of what they did - were very low. Low and behold, the best browser on the market is free, open source, and multi-platform. On top of that, other browsers like Opera are low-cost and multi-platform (and also superior).
One such innovation was in writing the shared blocks of code that support both operating system and Web browsing functions in Windows. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Microsoft was right. Using this method of integration is very common place now. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What if MS loses market share and Konqueror becomes the dominant browser. Will makers of file-manager utilities sue the developers and because their product cannot compete with products that tie into the rendering engine?
By a software product does not consist of code. If it did, you would own the Windows code on your computer and could sell copies of that code with impunity.
You license the code, as you goes on to point out. But regardless of the license, the heart of software is code, not IP.
The courts have missed a golden opportunity to affirm the freedom to compete in the information age.
The courts did nothing to MS. So ask yourself. Is there more or less competition than there was in the 90's? How is that possible if MS was able to do what the government allege? If MS had an illegal monopoly on operating systems for x86 computers, how come there are more now than at anytime in history? How come users have dozens more choices than ever? And if MS leveraged the operating system lock up browsers, how come we have more choice now than ever for browsers? How come on x86 alone there are at least 4 major choices for quality web-browsing?
The government was wrong. MS had a large marketshare, but short of patenting everything in sight, it is impossible to have a monopoly on intellectual property like software.
You cannot corner the supply side of software!
According to Microsoft, antitrust law should never require changes to the design of software products, because this will chill the freedom of programmers to innovate. One such innovation was in writing the shared blocks of code that support both operating system and Web browsing functions in Windows. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
I wondered throughout the original trial, and later, why there were no security experts called by the DoJ to testify to the security problems inherent in this integration?
The integration was clearly done at a very late stage in the design and in such a way that they had to use "guess and hope" to figure out whether a document was originally a local document called up by a component like Windows Explorer, or a remote document called up by Internet Explorer or Outlook. If they had left the web access as part of the web applications, and just used the HTML control to render HTML, then a huge percentage... probably a majority... of the worms and viruses and spyware spread by remote attacks on Windows via web or email would not have been possible.
But they already had IE, and they needed to come up with a reason to bundle IE with the desktop despite their agreement with the DoJ from the previous case, so they made pretty much the whole thing into an embedded component and set us up the bomb.
Now that the apeal time has passed... do we expect MS to start up new and improved underhanded dealings?
If they did, it would be a hard sell for the government to bring another case against the giant. "Yeah, we got crap last time and spent a bazillion dollars on the prosecution, but this time will be better!"
MS makes a contract that numb nuts like Dell and HP sign that states OEMs can't add any software similiar to what MS makes on the PC. Thus, we get stuck with Windows. Want Linux? Only available on servers? Want no OS? Hard to get at times. Best thing to do is make your own PC or have someone else make it for you and don't support OEMs that offer no choice.
There are things they could have targeted for antitrust, but that they picked Netscape was completely stupid. Microsoft was completely in the right to bundle a browser.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's not those in power that have to notice; it's the sheep that continue to elect them.
This has to be false. How can you sue someone for switching OS's?
I did a quick search on google and turned up nothing...but you never know.
what?
It could be because Microsoft requires you to use Internet Explorer to use Windows Updates. Yes, you could manually download them, but the average user cannot remember a password let alone which updates they already downloaded and installed.
It could be because Microsoft made Internet Explorer and Explorer to be joined at the hip so that you cannot remove one from the other. So anytime you are looking at your own harddrive you are running parts of IE. This also in effect has created one of the biggest security holes ever by putting part of the protected OS exposed to the world through IE.
It could be because Microsoft ignored world standards and pushed proprietary code onto the web causing the other browsers to be unable to display pages that use them.
It could be because Microsoft designed their web servers to respond to IE before other browsers, thus making their browser to appear faster.
Sometimes, unfortunately, people mod things in a negative manner because they do not agree with it. I have had many of my posts modded down because the mod did not agree with my post...i.e. receiving flamebait when it was obviously not a flame...oh well here comes another negative mod point my way---luckily I am in Excellent status :)
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Hey, we can't blame the dems for a lack for healthcare or education reform. Most of the last 12 years, the Republican party has been in control of Congress, which is the law writing body of these here United States.
On a related note, I really don't understand people's aversion to global healthcare. It removes the burden from companies to provide health insurance, thereby freeing up funds for R&D and more employment. It removes the chances of people without healthcare being treated by hospitals, which is what drives up health costs (Hospitals are required to treat people, whether they have insurance or not - who do you think shoulders that burden? The hospitals themselves, and thus the rest of us from higher fees). It would make the general health of the country more important to the government, and thus provide more reasons to have strict pollution and environment laws that would make people healthier and less likely to go to the hospital, which would drive down healthcare costs over the long run. It would probably end up as a zero sum game with regards to taxes, because the extra taxes you'd pay for government insurance would be offset by the money you'd stop paying at work for health insurance. It's just a no-brainer...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
That's always been my gripe from the time the first antitrust stuff started. They should have in one way or another split the OS division from everything else. It wouldn't have had to even be anything as drastic as actually forming separate companies--just set up a Chinese wall between divisions. The Office & other divisions cannot use any APIs or code not published to the rest of the world. That would have fixed a major portion of the uneven playing field.
Vote Quimby.
Notepad is not like IE at all:
1) I don't have to install notepad, I have a choice there.
2) I've never seen a single exploit around Notepad, there is practically an exploit a week with IE.
3) Notepad is not tightly integrated with the OS as a whole.
4) I can uninstall Notepad, easily, without compromising any other facet of system health.
Really is it a choice to be able to install an alternate browser when you can't uninstall the buggy one, or forgo installing it in the first place? Not really.
Is Microsoft doing anyone a favor by continuing to propogate this nightmare? Not really.
Bottom line, the original decision to integrate the OS and browser so tighly is ludicrous from any reasonable viewpoint. This is not in doubt, as a quick check of the number of serious exploits which have resulted from this decision will bear out. So continuing to adhere to this poor design decision makes the product better how?
Of late Microsoft will try anything to ensure the contiuning dominance of their OS, anything except making the product worthy of dominance.
So Microsoft's culpability is manifest, the one thing I partially agree with you on though is the culpability of the consumer. Not, however, for failing to install an alternate browser, but for failing to exercise the same due diligence they would with other comparable purchases.
Lastly, the Microsoft apologists have the greatest culpability of all. By diluting the core issue, the irresponsible design decision and it's continuing propogation, with such fluff as your post, you are giving Microsoft absolution for their sins.
My question to you sir, is when are you going to proscribe some pennance before granting absolution?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
To be honest, I don't think Bush or Kerry will do as good a job as I'd like. I guess when it comes time for me to vote, I'll have to vote for which one will screw up the least and I think I've already made up my mind who I think that will be.
So, you're voting for Kerry or for a third party candidate?
I'm a conservative, especially in fiscal matters, and I think that Tax and Spend is better than Spend and Make Our Children Pay the Piper.
You say that Democrats believe in HUGE government. Well, judging by actions, not words, the President and the Republicans in Congress believe in a government so huge that it outstrips the most liberal politician's wet dreams by orders of magnitude.
I read once that during the Clinton era, it took all of the tax money generated east of the Mississippi River just to pay the paychecks of the National Governmental employees. The rest was left for social programs.
We had a balanced budget under Clinton. He might have lied under oath, but you can't fault his fiscal policies.
I also can't believe that so many people still fail to understand the "Fool in the Shower" economic theory and attribute economic trends solely to the President in office.
Bush is the first President to cut taxes during a major war. AFAIK (BINS), he's the first to preside over a "jobless" recovery. He promised that the tax cut would lead to job growth, but that promise hasn't materialized.
I'm not going to vote Republican again until the group in control of the GOP starts to actually reflect good old conservative values in their actions, instead of merely using them as wedge issues for political gain, all the while acting contrary to those values.
Currently I'm ashamed of the majority of people in my party, who seem to have forgotten our principles and values, and who place party loyalty higher than loyalty to our country.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The problem is most people who also use winxp/etc are on dialup (probably unlike most people here). I don't know about the rest of you but, when I was on dialup, updating my box running winxp was such a hassle i never did it (and i never got worms either because I was never online for long enough). As more and more people subscribe to high speed internet solutions we will see more automated patching, etc because people will be online most of the time, ms/winxp will start making this the default windows update action. But as for now this isn't the case.
What most people here don't understand is that the majority of americans barely even know how to use a computer, and could care less about patching or updating when all they do is dial up and look at email for about 15mins and then disconnect.
most of the world don't even have computers or never have even seen one. They don't even have enough to eat and could care less.
-
Malpractice insurance is a result of the greedy Americans who file for damages. There are those who have legitimate cases, and they ought to be rewarded, but there are a ton of frivolous malpractice suits as well. Health costs come down to the greedy American looking for a big payoff with minimum work.
This may not be as true as we think. Another assumption is that malpractice insurance companies' willingness to settle has led to the rates going up astronomically but studies haven't found correlations between the number of settled cases and guilty verdicts (with awards) in a state and the cost of the insurance. In some cases states with low payouts have much higher rates than states with much higher payouts.I'd say it's a combination of factors and that greed from the insurance companies is a big part of it too. Probably the only people in the healthcare fields really making money are the insurers (malpractice at least) and the pharmecutical companies.
-
The other reason why expenses are so high is the barrier to entry into the market. Many patents on pharmaceuticals run out by the time the company has met federal requirements. This seriously reduces the amount of profit that the company can gain off of their work before knock-off pharm companies start producing the same medicine.
That would seem to be an easy fix, and one the FDA shouldn't object to. Just adjust the patent process so that the expiration date of the patent is based on when it is approved as long as the drug is being actively developed/tested. That would keep a company from patenting a drug and not acting on it for 20 years then suddenly deciding to act to extend the patent time. It would also give companies that actively research new drugs more time to profit from their research and more incentive to research new drugs.However, I don't think this is the real issue with drug costs. The pharmaceutical companies make huge profits, even factoring in their expenditures on R&D, so something's out of kilter. Again it's probably a variety of factors, but greed is probably a big player in them as well.
-
If the FDA eased off on the drug regulations, and maybe let the patent law for medicines change, then medical costs would be reduced. Things always get more expensive when the 800 pound gorilla of American government decides to get involved.
If that's all the FDA did we would like just see new medicines cost too much for longer periods until generics are finally allowed. I cannot foresee the pharmaceutical companies lowering their prices any time soon. The explanation will likely be "well sure it'll help in the long run, but all the stuff in the works now cost more under the old process so prices can't go down yet." Then they'll just forget about lowering the prices to match costs on drugs developed under the new rules.To give an example that's computer related, do you think Microsoft would lower the price on Windows Longhorn if the government lowered the cost to obtain patents and extended their duration? I sure don't.
Personally I wonder if a compulsary license type of plan would work to lower drug costs and reward companies who research new drugs. Just extend the patent time, but generics can be made before the patent expires. (Setting the time when other companies can produce the drug as a generic to the current patent expiration date should work.) Then the drug companies get let's say .005 cents for every generic pill made of their drugs until the new patent term expires. This would introduce a huge revenue stream essentially for free to the companies researching and developing drugs. It shouldn't effect the price of generics much, as it would only add one cent to every 200 pills.
It's called abuse of monopoly. If you own 90%-99% of a market, you can't use that market as a leverage into another one. Simple. Apple doesn't own 90-99% of the market, MS does.
Dumb car analogy: If Ford made 99% of all cars, it would be illegal for Ford to bundle its cars with a radio. Since Ford isn't a monopoly, Ford can do whatever it wants with them, including bundling with a shitty faulty radio and selling them without warranties (A bit illegal, but that won't really matter). Competition will make sure it won't sell many. That's all.
As for the second point, MS seems to love breaking laws.
I signed up to be a volunteer for the election on Nov. 2nd. I gave them a one-off email address 'web-vote@rangat.org'. No one else (prior to this posting) had that address. I got virus email from the sonoma-county.org IP block.
These are the people tasked with running an electronic election? Not my idea of a good time....
And don't get me started on the wanting volunteers to work 15 hour shifts on election day, from 6:00am to 9:00pm. WTF? How are they supposed to be coherent enough to do the right thing?
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
> Windows does everything people want it to and will run any software you buy,
Runs just about every virus too.
> so even if you showed everyone on the planet Linux, a good deal would continue to use Windows.
I dunno. I've had quite a few successful opportunities to introduce people to Linux. And, I've had 8 out of 10 go for it.
I see smiles on their faces when they come back to have me build another computer to install Linux on. Whereas, the Windows people keep coming back, with frowns on their faces, to have the viruses and malware removed OR to have windows restored and the system patched yet again. (Many of these folks end up Linux users.)
Rock on!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
the case is totally irrelevant today. Too much time has passed. Nutscrape is almost gone
Microsoft is violating the consent decree in other ways today.
Microsoft is still engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.
Firefox is the linear descendent of Netscape, so how can Netscape be totally gone *and* IE losing market share to it?
Except it's not losing as much market share as people think, and it's only fear that's keeping it going. I see no reason to assume that Microsoft can't come up with a palliative that restores people's confidence in IE and reverse the trend... they've done wonders with fake security improvements before.
Renewed competition in the OS? Mac OS X and Linux between them have a smaller market share than Mac OS did when the trial started.
All the office suites that actually had a different design to Microsoft's have gone... and not because Office is a better design (it's not, oh god it's not) but because Microsoft pumped the upgrade treadmill and their monopoly leverage for all it was worth: the only survivors are basically clones so there's negligable extra consumer choice, and again there's fewer of them than when the trial started.
The only reason Microsoft is behaving the way it is, is because it knows that it can draw things out until people start saying stuff like "the case is totally irrelevant today" and they'll get away with it.