How to Break Up Microsoft nytimes.com
The good gray Times keeping up on things as usual, with another article on remedies. Not something I'm into speculating about.
tacked against the landmark antitrust cases of the past, the actions taken by the Justice Department against Microsoft last week are pint-sized.
The behemoth Standard Oil Co. was broken up more than 80 years ago into 34 refining companies, pipelines and other pieces. AT&T was broken up into one long-distance company and seven regional phone companies. The government spent 13 years trying to dismantle IBM before dropping the effort in 1982 out of exhaustion. All the government wanted from Microsoft last week was less heavy-handed behavior.
But that would mean standard Microsoft business practice. For the "it's so unfair" crowd, this article presumes that such remedies will prove insufficient.
Nobody at the Justice Department is openly talking about breaking up Microsoft -- yet. But many analysts predict that Microsoft's chokehold on cyberspace will tighten, and that the government will respond by trying to restructure Microsoft to weaken its ability to block competition, rather than by subjecting every move by Bill Gates to judicial challenge. Economists are already thinking hard about feasible ways for the government to take bold action.
The government's suit seeks to prohibit Microsoft's exclusionary practices. But many analysts are skeptical that a monopoly backed by the power of Windows can be sidetracked by behavioral pinpricks. If the skeptics are right, Microsoft's commercial tentacles could grow to gargantuan length -- grasping new technologies for transmitting movies and other video data over the Internet, for example. At that point, Microsoft's economic muscle could make that of the old AT&T look puny by comparison, and Justice will be compelled to revisit the trust-busting tactics of yesteryear.
This gets into another one of these small mind things, where the friends of Bill, not to mention any names of course, are always preaching the inevitability of Microsoft's triumph in all these diverse areas, based of course on leveraging the "OS". In any context but antitrust, where Galt rules.
A couple academic economists are cited with proposals like Gerald Lampton's for various means of splitting Microsoft into competitive entities. Way too speculative for naive high school civics guy, and they no doubt lack the proper Microcentric perspective of Jack Klugman, er, Paul Krugman writing in Slate. Me, I just wish if Microsoft is going to rule the world, they had some more technically elegant battle plan that Windows, Windows, Windows.
Companion article: Rating the Bigshots: Gates Vs. Rockefeller nytimes.com - Bill's richer, but John D. was more generous. John D. even sowed the academic seed for some of Bill's defenders, in case you guys didn't know.
He established the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller University, financed the University of Chicago and sponsored Spelman College in Atlanta to educate the families of freed black slaves.
And after the financing mentioned above, William Rainey Harper hit him up for the funds for Rockefeller Chapel on the U.C. Campus. Chapel being a somewhat size-independent appellation in that case. An ironic mix of God and Mammon there.
Cheers, Dan. |
