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 (22607)	2/7/1999 3:54:00 PM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

If the law comes down to how a piece of code is configured as a set of files, then Microsoft will be able to configure the code appropriately. I think that, if the courts are going to implement the DC Circuit test properly, and assuming they adopt something like the approach I am outlining, they are going to have to go through Microsoft's code, line by line, to determine what code is needed to run IE but not needed to run Windows. DLLs can have different combinations of code, some used by Windows, some by both and some by neither. And, yes, I think Microsoft will have a lot of leeway in designing software and "integrating" products formerly sold as separate components. If the tied product has even one line of code needed to run that product that is not needed to run the tying product, and that developers can access through an API and use for their own programs, then the tie is legal under this approach. But, again, this is not the definitive "legal" answer. This is my opinion only. I think it extremely likely that Boies will argue that the court should use a kind of rule of reason, where you weigh all of the anti-competitive effects against the pro-competitive effects touted by Microsoft to decide whether the tie is legal. And, in Bork-World, that means weighing the relative benefits to consumers of different product configurations. I am not sure Bork's approach is really suited to this kind of wieghing in the case of a natural monopoly. When Bork wrote his book, he was addressing a specific problem: the tendency of the antitrust jurisprudence of the Warren Court to impose structural remedies when to do so defeats the purpose of antitrust. His basic message was that, where firm size is dicated by efficiency and markets are naturally competitive, being overzealous in the application of structural remedies is counterproductive. I'm not sure Bork's consumer welfare approach is really appropriate in the case of a natural monopoly like Microsoft, where consumer welfare has been brought as close to the optimal level as can be done given the fact that the normal condition in the market is monopoly. In these cases, you then have the government imposing regulatory remedies to try to raise consumer welfare, something it does not do very well and which I think is incompatible with the basic organizing principles of a free market economy. In other words, where they conflict, Hayek trumps Bork. What do you think?