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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator
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To: Harvey Allen who wrote (23967)5/26/2000 1:10:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton  Read Replies (1) of 24154
 
Harvey, from the same WSJ article:

Mr. Boies said various three-way breakup proposals were rejected because they would be inefficient, disruptive or harmful to consumers. Part of the reason behind the rejection of one form of the three-way split is the Justice Department economists' surprising conclusion that competition doesn't really work in the operating-system market anyway.


Dividing the company into "three Windows clones," Mr. Boies told the judge, wouldn't be sustainable because consumers would inevitably gravitate toward a single company or standard.

interactive.wsj.com

Thank you, David Boies. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Structural remedies will destroy Microsoft's monopoly, maybe, but they are not going to restore competition -- all they will do is make it easier to replace one monopolist with another.

As for conduct remedies, the big hole in the DOJ's case all along has been causation. There's no proof that but for Microsoft's anticompetitive conduct there would be competition in the OS market, or any other market, for that matter, hence no basis for concluding that conduct remedies will result in a restoration of competition, either.

Antitrust laws are not well designed to deal with natural monopoly. The remedies quandry the DOJ is facing right now (and that the court seems to want to gloss over in its rush to thwart Microsoft's delaying strategy) is the direct result of that fact.

If I were Bill Gates, I think I'd be pretty ecstatic about how this case is going right now.
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