Linked by David Adams on Tue 23rd Aug 2005 16:37 UTC, submitted by kellym
The antitrust regulator in South Korea will begin a crucial hearing on Tuesday (Monday evening US time) to determine whether Microsoft violated the country's fair trade rules by bundling its instant messenger and Media Player programs into its Windows XP platform. Officials have been reticent about whether the regulator, the Fair Trade Commission, will rule on the case after a closed hearing of two days. The commission held a closed hearing in July to listen to arguments from Microsoft and its local competitors, but it has not clarified how many more hearings it will need before ruling.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
"The appeals court ruled that the district court was wrong."
That's not exactly true. They said they don't have enough evidence to prove that bundling has a negative affect on consumers.
Here's the quote:
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[/i]"We do not have enough empirical evidence regarding the effect of Microsoft’s practice on the amount of consumer surplus created or consumer choice foreclosed by the integration of added functionality into platform software to exercise sensible judgment regarding that entire class of behavior. (For some issues we have no data.) ‘‘We need to know more than we do about the actual impact of these arrangements on competition to decide whether they TTT should be classified as per se violations of the Sherman Act.’’[/i]
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The higher court's ruling was maintained. The epaulette court didn't reverse that decision.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust_case
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"The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft on browser tying and attempted monopolization, but also affirmed in part (and reversed in part) his ruling on monopolization."
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So to summarize, the courts DID rule that Microsoft is a monopoly, but the appeals court managed to inject a semblance of doubt into the accusation by saying that there was no data which *proved* consumers were hurt by Microsoft's bundling... which is true because we don't yet have a fair and competitive marketplace that we can compare it to.
This element of questionability, doesn't necessarily show that they found Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly as you're saying, but rather, that *they* can't prove it.
It doesn't matter that Judge Jackson's "findings of fact" DID prove it, because he was thrown out of court for talking to the press, those findings of fact ended up not weighing against Microsoft.
Microsoft knew that they could overturn the higher courts ruling... so they got the appeals court to simply say that there wasn't enough data to prove it in their opinion which allowed them to remove any punishment for Microsoft's anticompetitive activity.... which is all Microsoft's lobbyists needed to do in the end as it proved Microsoft with a license to continue to act outside the law.