Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 3rd Jul 2006 22:07 UTC
Good as well as bad news for Microsoft on the legal front. Their good news is that a judge has rejected Go Computing's claim that Microsoft used dirty tricks to keep it out of the operating system market. However, their bad news is that an EU committee ruled on Monday that Microsoft failed to comply with a landmark antitrust decision, paving the way for fines of up to 2 million euros a day, a source familiar with the situation said.
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Member since:
2005-08-13
Well, I agree with you on some of your points. Telstra is what you call a natural monopoly(I realize that may seem somewhat ironic since its formation is anything but natural). Where I live in the States we have similar problems in smaller towns, where there is only one company and the price is through the roof for broadband($55 a month for 386k down). However, an analogy to what Microsoft is doing(remembering of course that analogies aren't perfect) would be if you had cable they wouldn't sell you phone/internet service. Its a situation where they are leveraging their monopoly in one market(phone & DSL) to another market(in this case cable) where they aren't primary players.
The reason I make that analogy is part of the US antitrust case was that manufacturers had to sign agreements that they couldn't bundle non Microsoft software. That ment they couldn't bundle Netscape, this is important because its a situation where Microsoft made no money on IE, it wasn't in their core business. Now, I have no problem with it being included, and in fact, most people who were for the Anti-trust case thought the bundling was only a minor part(I think Be inc's head made some comment to that effect)
The problem was that they didn't let the manufacturers decide, in fact, they couldn't even sell other operating systems. This is a case where Microsoft used clout in the OS industry to affect the browser industry.
Your example seems to be a clear case of a monopoly. However, there are several different ways a company can be a monopoly, and it isn't always bad.
-Michael Moran