Doubt's log
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Friday, November 02, 2001
There are lots of people reacting to the Microsoft settlement. Here is a list of reponses and my summary:
- Dave Winer's The Microsoft settlement
Dave expects the government to make correction to the browser market. However the court case talked about monopoly maintenance, not an unlawful new monopoly. Hence it is inappropriate to "correct" that market. Preventing further maintenance behavior is a good enough goal and the existence of direct restrictions in a punishment in itself. The maintenance behaviors were illegal not in themselves but because Microsoft was ruled a monopoly. He also dismisses the OEM market which is especially funny because the OEM market is the market the Microsoft was declared a monopoly in. His final comment is from the perspective of ISVs. The settlement seems to me to have two "customers" the OEM market and ISV’s. The ISV get RAND access to anything Microsoft does on the wire; which is a big deal for building interoperating and competing products.
- WSJ: Finally, a Settlement
The WSJ seems to like the settlement because of how it does the right actions without getting the lawyers involved. It also talks about the state's AGs motivations at this point.
- Salon has two articles Getting away with it and Is Bill Gates' nightmare over?
The first article sums it up and says that all the bad stuff that came out in trial demands hasher penalties. He says that behavioral remedies are not enough. This though flys a bit in the face of the appeal court judges who said that even if they didn't throw out the parts of the case they did, a structural remedy makes no sense. He does make one semi intresting point about the DOJ not going after the much more difficult tying standard. It is my belief that the DOJ didn't stand a chance of meeting that standard and wanted to do the peverbial "bank".
The second article has a lot of reposnses from different people. In the first part of the article I disagree with the loophole claim. The DRM claim is just plain article hype. The areas are involved with security by obsecurity, which I personally don't like, but the claim it is a offlimits to competition is silly. The professor has valid points that the "if you fail to comply" sections are weak, but he doesn't seem to understand that a lesser settlement is appropriate after sizeable chunks of the lawsuit was hammered off by the appeals court. There were a number of people who saw it from the "they didn't do anything wrong" view, which is correct outside of the monopoly context. The FSF folks are upset that microsoft isn't sharing the software for "Free" and that IP isn't being given away.
4:26:01 PM
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