USA government regulators have proposed breaking up Microsoft in an effort to restore competition to the software industry. However, critics contend they are doing just the opposite: destroying a key competitor in order to save competition. The problem, they add, is that the government wants to both break up Microsoft and continue to regulate it.
According to the plan proposed to U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the government would split Microsoft into separate firms, one controlling the Windows operating system, the other holding the applications such as word processing and money management. Theoretically, the first firm will get applications to compete against the second, and the second will provide applications to operating systems competing against Windows.
If Judge Jackson agrees, it would be one of the biggest break-ups in U.S. history.
However, the government proposal doesn’t end there. Regulators would also impose what Wired magazine calls “extraordinarily strict government regulations” on Microsoft that would last three years after a break-up. Among the rules:
If regulators don’t like what they see, Microsoft could wind up back in court asking for permission to improve its products. That, critics say, sounds like a blueprint for progress on the order of the government-owned U.S. Postal Service, a monopoly the Justice Department managed to overlook.
Source: Editorial, “Break Up The Regulators,” Washington Times, May 2. 2000.
For text http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-200052193127.htm
For more on Anti-Trust http://www.ncpa.org/pd/law/buslaw/index1a.html
RSA note: The Microsoft case, as with 99% of all monopoly charges, is driven by competitors. One thing we can be sure of is that the competitors are not motivated by compassion for consumers. Their objective is to see that Microsoft is shackled so that they themselves can make higher profits at the expense of the consumers. Why did the US Justice Department play along? Here are some possibilities: The bureaucrats are envious of Bill Gates! The bureaucrats chose a high-profile target to attempt to justify their existence and raise their own profiles at the taxpayersÂ’ expense (a comment also applicable to the judge in the case)! So US taxpayers, and consumers worldwide lose as the bureaucracy attempts to destroy one of the most spectacular entrepreneurial creations of the latter part of the 20th century.
Eustace Davie, FMF.
