Judge OKs new Microsoft antitrust deadline

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Department of Justice Makes the Common Man Poorer: In the mid 1990s, the original equipment manufacturers could get better deals with Microsoft if they excluded other operating systems. The Department of Justice ruled that the practice of exclusion is illegal.

Well, that sounds good. The fact is that ?these better deals are, now, because of the Department of Justice, excluded, which also means that costs went up for the original equipment manufacturers. Ordinary folks buying their personal computers with Windows preinstalled, had after that ruling, to pay more for them?. This is Governments in action!

How do we know, in the interest of society, that this is a better outcome than the one that was before that ruling? The Department of Justice thinks so, but that, I am afraid, does not say much. How do I now that this ruling is bad for society? Because Governments do not know how to run an economy. The more Governments intervene in the economy, the more chaotic will the economy be. When these destructive actions bloom, like in the former Soviet Union, the ?destructiveness is revealed?.

The ?other? reason is that I rely my opinion on the market process, peoples voluntarily actions (without physical force). If the original equipment manufacturers in the past thought, for instance, ?that the Linux operating system was going to be very popular?, Microsoft would have had to give them enormous discounts or to give up the deals entirely. On the average, then, the discounts would have to equal the amount what they would lose in profits. It does not matter If Microsoft is a so called monopoly, the value of the deals, in the eyes of the original equipment manufacturers, has fallen in the same second as they thought that Linux would sell. For them it would have been the same thing as if Microsoft would have asked for a higher price.

But the Department of Justice wants to promote competition? Yes, but competition was the very cause of those deep discounts. If competition or potential competition in this case never existed; neither would any discounting have ever existed.

Bj?rn Lundahl, G?teborg, Sweden; Posted by: Björn Lundahl Posted on: 09/23/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use