Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearded One who wrote (22066)	12/9/1998 1:49:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

What happened in those cases? I don't know, but I'm not sure how much it matters, because antitrust law has changed a lot since those days. One additional comment: The quote I pulled from Hayek on this issue comes from an article he wrote back in 1941 called "The Economics of Planning." (Page 142 of volume 10 of the Collected Works, to be exact) Why is that relevant? -- Because Hayek was engaged in a debate over the feasibility of the socialist planning model, in which, Hayek points out, the government, or planning board, or whatever, would have to create a relative order of priorities among the different needs of society, a relative order of value of the various factors available to meet those needs, and then make a determination of how much of the available factors society can afford to use up before moving down the list to the next item of importance in the hierarchy of needs, or the next available substitute in the hierarchy of factors of production. All of these things the pricing mechanism does automatically and much more efficiently than any planning authority could ever do. I would argue that this is relevant here because it defeats the argument that the government should simply be allowed to decree that the browser and OS should be separate, without any evidence about the plausibility (or lack thereof) of Microsoft's technical justification for integrating them, or proof that their claim that consumers do in fact prefer the integrated version is false. If the government were to do that, to simply say, "We think consumers will be better off if the browser and OS are separate," it would be establishing a governmentally decreed order of priorities among the competing needs of society and factors of production involved in operating systems and browsers, albeit, the amount of planning and intervention involved would be on a much smaller scale than Hayek was talking about in his articles. Nevertheless, it would be, according to Hayek, one more small step away from a free society and market economy, towards a totalitarian society and planned economy. So formulated, this is much more than an argument about judicial competence to engage in the kind of regulation of software design that the D.C. Circuit was talking about. It suggests that no governmental body has the competence, and, if we value a free society, no government body should be allowed, to make this kind of choice by decree, at least in the absence of proof that Microsoft's tendered technical justification of, and proof of consumer preference for, integration is a sham. I don't want to overstate this, or sound like a nut-case making this argument, but if Hayek's basic ideas have any validity, I think this argument does, too.