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LOL, it's these f--king liberals who are constantly bitching and whining about how people can't think for themselves, so we need the government to constantly step in and do that for them, instead of letting the market sort it out. In this case, IE lost its dominance not because of government interference, but because of actual competition, making the whole argument pointless. "
This, precisely. I'd +100 you if I could. When will people learn that, when demand is high enough, there will eventually be a product that will rise to it? The only thing government interventions like this accomplish is to pay the lawyers which, upon reflection, is exactly what said lawyers desire. We wanted a web that wasn't dominated by Microsoft, and we got it not because governments fixed it, but because Mozilla and those like them provided a better product. Those better products balanced the market. It did take time, but we're far better off now than we would have been had anti-trust laws actually worked. If they had, we'd not have khtml, Firefox, Webkit, nor any of the amazing browsers we have today. There would have been no motivation to create them and even less to improve their progenitors. These amazing engines were born out a desire not to equal IE, but to be better than IE. This is as it should be.

Because THAT works fscking great.
Blind faith in free market self-regulation is just as delusional as blind faith in government regulation.

Um, actually it did Granted, it doesn't work in some cases, but in this case, I'd say we made out okay.

WorknMan,

"LOL, it's these f--king liberals who are constantly bitching and whining about how people can't think for themselves, so we need the government to constantly step in and do that for them, instead of letting the market sort it out."

-100, but only to cancel out darknexus

I'll grant you that government execution is often poor, but without any antitrust enforcement we'd be in a pretty sad state of affairs. It's not just about the anti-trust violations that end up in court, it's also about additional violations that would occur if they knew they could get away with it. For example, without the threat of government anti-trust regulation, microsoft could very well have insisted that manufacturing partners lock down x86 systems via UEFI secure boot and prohibit owner overrides, like they did with ARM.

The market can only work it out if the playing field is sufficiently level.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with UEFI secure boot. In fact, it does have its advantages, and the government has absolutely no business telling MS (or anyone else) that they can't implement it. They don't exactly try and hide it, so you either buy it with a locked bootloader, or you vote with your wallet and pass on it.

What IS wrong is the government telling consumers that they are legally not allowed to unlock their own devices if they choose to. That is the government's doing, and you guys want MORE government intervention? This idiocy never ceases to amaze me. Maybe it would be a sane argument if the government was actually competent at regulation, but as even you admitted, they're exceedingly poor at it.

IE was holding on to it's majority stake even despite major marketing campaigns by Firefox. And it took another dominant power in another related market to actually push IE down. Competition? May be. Free market competition - definitely not.