<< Huh? Courts said that MS is a monopoly and that they have abused that monopoly. >>
<< Being a monopoly is not illegal, abuse of monopoly power and position is. That is what the courts determined. >>
Being a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing that monopoly is. MS was found to be a monopoly and it was found to abuse that monopoly. I never claimed anything else. I think that DOJ should have looked furhter than just the browser-issue. There's a potential lawsuit looming in the bootloader-issue (In short: MS forbids OEM's who sell computer installed with Windows to offer a second OS (BeOS, Linux etc.) as a boot-option)
<< The DOJ has a case against the practices that MS made in abuse of their monopoly position, but any punishment
or remedy they come up with can only go so far as to address those practices and correct the companies behavior
in those areas that were restrictive of competition from other companies, or restrictive of consumers better interests. >>
Then the correct step would be to unbundle MS-software from the OS. This case only involved IE, but it could be extended to involve Media Player as well. And maybe also MSN.
I think that besides that MS should be punished. This is a second time MS has been in court over this matter, they lost in both cases. It's obvious they don't respect the rule of law. They should be made to respect it. Punitive damages (in order of billions of dollars) is not out of the question IMO.
<< The problem with the breakup idea was that some parts of the company do not have a direct link to the practices
that the court ruled against, and as such those parts would be unduly punished by such a remedy. >>
Well, not necessarily. I mean, MS can't use Windows to push Office for example. It would be illegal. And MS has said that they don't do anything like that ("We have chinese-wall between the OS-division and the apps-division"). Then separating applications from the rest of the company wouldn't hurt the application-division. Since OS-division doesn't help Application-division (it would be illegal to do so), no harm would be done in separating those two officially... Unless OS-division does help the apps-division in secret.
Only way it would get hurt is reduced cash-flow. But I think that the apps-division is strong enough to live without rest of MS.
<< Even the DOJ has to act in a fair and impartial manner in this regard. >>
True. But it has been proven that "punishments" like we saw in the last lawsuit don't cut it. MS lost, and was punished. Nothing changed. They should be punished in such way that they wont do it again. If they don't get punished they will think "This is the second time we got away practically scot-free! We can do whatever we like!"
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