Appeals court ponders Microsoft antitrust suit

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You understand the problem - here's my remedy.

"Reguardless of your view of Microsoft, there must have been a better way to resolve this."

There is no doubt MS broke the law. There is also no doubt that the current remedy is ineffective. I think there needs to be a clear statement of what MS did wrong, then an equally clear statement of what a remedy should achieve. Then some action can be taken as you will have a benchmark to test whether or not the remedy is working.

Here's my version for a couple of the most serious offences:

Wrongdoing: MS illegally prevented competition in browsers.
Remedy intent: To restore competition in the browser market
Remedy: fine MS $1 billion to be put in a charitable fund. No Windows functionality to be dependent on IE for 10 years. Any functionality requiring a browser must use published, free-to-use interfaces and must work with at least one other browser. OEMs can ship any browser they like with Windows. MS can partner with any other browser to ensure functionality is supported but there must be no commercial contract (i.e. MS must work with another browser company, say Mozilla, for free).

Wrongdoing: Restrictive OEM licencing
Remedy intent: Prevent MS using monopoly power to dictate what OEMs can load onto PCs
Remedy: MS must provide equal terms to all licencees of Windows based on volume. MS can't restrict what other software OEMs put on their PCs, including other OSs.

Wrongdoing: Creating barriers to entry
Remedy intent: Prevent MS maintaining an applications barrier to entry by use of proprietary, closed interfaces and file formats.
Remedy: MS must publish all APIs required for interoperability for free. They must publish all APIs that are used by MS products to interact with the OS. MS must publish the file format for Word and Excel. They must also publish any future changes for 10 years. They must provide backward compatibility for 5 years.

Any breech of the above to be met with fines in chunks of $100 million. All fines to go to charitable fund as above. Fines can be levied per week from the time the breech is perpetrated until remedied at the discretion of the review board, the maximum fine is $5 billion per year. All remedies reviewed annually by an independent board. The independent board may waive any remedy if Microsoft no longer have a monopoly (as defined in law - read Jackson) in that segment.

Please add more remedies to the list.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 11/04/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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