To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (23716 ) 12/1/1999 10:45:00 AM From: Daniel Schuh Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Cool, only a couple questions. Also, the kinds of regulations that regulators impose on natural monopolies in the regulated sector of the economy are strikingly similar to the "conduct remedies" proposed by latter day interventionist adherents of the Chicago School approach (including the various proposals to regulate Microsoft). theregister.co.uk When a story is largely fictional, it is hard to remember the purported facts. "Monopoly power is .. the power to control market prices or exclude competition, which cannot exist absent high barriers to entry" and "there is no applications barrier to entry [to the operating systems market]". But then we are told: "MS-DOS eventually became the predominant operating system for personal computers, in large part because of a number of popular applications were written for MS-DOS". Oh dear. theregister.co.uk Microsoft tries to make an argument that "market entry costs are very low and profit opportunities vast in software platform technology" but conveniently forgets to explain why, if this were true, Microsoft has no serious competitor. Microsoft pointed to Netscape and Linux as examples of real threats, which was naive, and at a range of operating systems that are mainly part of history thanks to Microsoft's success. theregister.co.uk This apparent absence of spin could in itself be a good sign for a settlement. Posner has been recruited in order to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement between Microsoft, the DoJ and the states before trial judge Thomas Penfield Jackson moves on to the next phase of the case (when the baseball bat will come out). Considering that the public positions of the two sides are virtually diametrically opposite, he's quite possibly on a hiding to nothing here, but it's just possible Microsoft may now be ready to deal. Previous scenes in the case have tended to be punctuated by a source close to Microsoft's legal team (company counsel Bill Neukom, inevitably) spinning furiously, the objective being to try to win the propaganda war, even if the legal one is going south. We can't make a firm judgement on the basis of just the one two hour exploratory meeting, but if silence continues to reign this can probably be viewed as a signal that Microsoft thinks it can get something constructive out of the talks. That still leaves a hill to climb, as what Microsoft and the opposition think are likely to be two separate things. The DoJ has been burned by talks with Microsoft once, over the consent decree. Then, Microsoft contrived an agreed wording that really did give it carte blanche to integrate anything it cared to into the OS. The DoJ won't want to get swindled like this again, but Microsoft being Microsoft, the methodology employed then - attorneys at the conference table, Bill Gates screaming on the phone to over-rule them - is likely to show up once more.
