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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (108707)	4/30/2000 11:28:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571858

Re: The same action is criminal if you are a monopoly, but it is not if you are not a monopoly. Yes. I know it's hard for this to not sound unfair, but in a complex modern society there are many essential functions. If one of the providers of one of these functions organizes itself well enough that it can deny its products or services to society it is then in a position to blackmail society. What if all of the farmers and ranchers got together as a group and tripled prices? And successfully lobbied congress to ban the import of anything edible? What if they raised prices tenfold? You'd pay or starve. All of the wealth of society would be transferred to the farmers and ranchers. This would deny profits and resources to all other services and industries and, long term, be very harmful to growth and development. Or if the air traffic controllers formed a union and demanded large pay increases and 2 day work weeks or nobody was going to fly anywhere? There are too many critical functions in a complex technical society to permit unregulated monopolies. We'd all spend all our time blackmailing each other instead of getting anything done. Since when was Microsoft officially declared to be the monopoly? The consent decree (agreed to by Microsoft) dates back about 2 or 3 years as best as I can recall. They didn't admit anything but the time at which they accepted the consent decree seems like a reasonable date to me. We humans have been on this planet for tens of thousands of years. For most of that time, including most of recorded history, as a race we were either stalled or going backwards. A civilization must maintain a very delicate balance between not enough structure and too much, between too much concentration of wealth and too little or it stagnates and regresses. Whether or not Microsoft established a monopoly and then abused that monopoly is open to debate. But if they did, IMHO, it is very definitely the responsibility of the government to stop them. Just one opinion. Regards, Dan

To: Joe NYC who wrote (108707)	4/30/2000 11:44:00 PM
From: Paul Ma	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571858

Hi Jozef, Since when was Microsoft officially declared to be the monopoly? I don't think I remember this announcement. Can this finding be retroactive? Can the government say that since "We found today that you are a monopoly and in fact, you have been a monopoly for 2 years, 6 months and 3 days. And even though you didn't know this until now, and operated under assumption that you were not a monopoly, it doesn't matter. As of today's finding the actions that were legal before this finding are now declared to be criminal. As a punishment, we are going to confiscate your company." You are right, it's ex post facto, something the constitution clearly states. Paul Ma