Listers,
I hope you enjoy this fine analysis of Microsofts' monopoly status.
Very interesing. I got this from an OS/2 mail list I subscribe to.
Regards,
Dale Mentzer
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
>From The New York Times
December 12, 1999
WORD & IMAGE
BY MAX FRANKEL
How to Bust His Trust
Bill Gates should have to choose between his Windows and our wagons.
The judicial finding that Microsoft has attained, enjoyed and abused
the power of a monopoly reached me at a fortuitous moment. I
instantly knew what punishment fit the crime.
Just a few hours earlier, I had been reading about the tycoon known
for "his visionary leadership, his courageous persistence, his
capacity to think in strategic terms, but also his lust for
domination, his messianic self-righteousness and his contempt for
those shortsighted mortals who made the mistake of standing in his
way."
Bill Gates, the visionary predator? No. John D. Rockefeller Sr., the
"Titan" of Ron Chernow's splendid biography. The parallels are
uncanny. Also instructive.
Each man seized upon a product that would shrink the earth and define
a century. Each employed it to amass incomparable personal wealth.
What refined oil did for Rockefeller, processed information has done
for Gates. Both brilliantly appropriated the creativity of other
folks. Both used that control to gobble up competitors and to crush
all challengers. And when finally challenged in court, both
shamelessly denied the undeniable evidence of their monopolistic
ambitions and predatory conduct.
All this coincidental instruction in the behavior of Microsoft and
Standard Oil left me wondering whether Americans would ever learn to
overcome the fateful flaw in our free-market system: the very greed
that makes us economically creative also repeatedly makes us
creatively criminal.
But I was also left full of admiration for Judge Thomas Penfield
Jackson's quick grasp of the world of Windows and ways of the Web. He
mastered the intangibles of Bill Gates's vision much sooner than
anyone understood old Rockefeller's devilish designs. And the judge's
dense, 200-page indictment of Microsoft was devastating enough to
evoke Gates's interest in a deal that might yet rescue him from a
lifetime of litigation.
I don't know what either Microsoft or the trustbusters of the Justice
Department would deem a proper settlement of the case. But I think
Judge Jackson should not close the affair until he can reassert an
elementary principle of fair commerce: competition can flourish only
if the roads to market are equally available to all competitors.
There's no way to test the market value of a dozen eggs if only one
farmer owns a wagon to bring them to town. And if every farmer has a
wagon, the market still will not work if one of them collects the
tolls for use of the road. For foxy old Rockefeller, the road was a
pipeline, then a railroad track, from refinery to port, and he
conspired to dictate the tolls for all those roads. Inevitably, he
not only paid less than any competitor to ship his own oil; in time,
he even commanded a rebate -- called a "drawback" -- from the tolls
paid by his rivals.
Decades passed before enough Americans understood how they were being
cheated and wrote broad antitrust laws that might protect them
against similar betrayals of capitalism. Those are the laws that
Judge Jackson now strains to enforce on Bill Gates. But he won't
succeed until Microsoft is made to choose between running the wagons
and owning the road.
In simpler days, this was sometimes called the "common carrier" rule.
If you owned the track, you had to convey everybody's freight fairly.
If you owned the wire, you had to connect everybody's phone and carry
everybody's message. If you owned a movie house, you had to be
available for anybody's films. If you owned a cable, you had to carry
all television programs. You could be a common carrier or the creator
of something to be carried, but not both.
Simple but also quaint. Technology has a way of overtaking ideology
and blurring such distinctions. The cable companies learned to make
their own TV shows and to discriminate against rivals. Now the cable
owners think they can also become phone companies and the phone
companies are angling to send television shows to my computer. And
all these wired companies are being challenged by gadgets that send
messages and pictures invisibly through the air. What's an egg
anymore? Who's a road?
Bill Gates thought his virtual monopoly could never be understood in
the old physical terms. And if he had not left a telltale trail of
e-mail, the Feds might never have made a plausible case against him.
But given the evidence from Gates's own computer, Judge Jackson well
understood that Microsoft's imperial triumph had been deliberately
and probably illegally engineered.
Gates built Windows, a good road to the information market, and then
schemed brilliantly to make it practically the only road that PC
owners could navigate. Nearly all wagons -- computer programs -- had
to fit on his tracks. Gates's own wagons -- the Microsoft programs --
rode free on his Windows highway, and those of his allies were waved
onto low-toll express lanes. Rockefeller rebates redux.
Gates had the market effectively cornered until the Internet produced
the prospect of an alternate, Window-less turnpike. Microsoft's
long-suffering competitors foresaw a chance of bypassing the personal
computer and giving people a much simpler machine that would "borrow"
the computing power and programs they periodically need via the
Internet.
Belatedly aroused, Gates poured all his monopoly power into blunting
that threat. He conspired to destroy rival dreamers, like Netscape,
so that his Windows would remain the universal gateway to the
Internet. But he was found to have rigged contracts and prices --
while plotting to control the Internet -- and the remaining question
is how best to bust his trust.
The remedy, now as in Rockefeller's time, is to make the monopolist
choose: Windows or wagons? Gates has already said he wants to keep
the road; he wants no deal that deprives him of Windows. Very well;
then make him sell off his wagons, his Word and Office programs, and
fairly share the Windows specs that competing programmers need to run
their wagons on his road.
And then, dear federal trustbusters, please take a look at my cable-TV
bills.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The choral background music for the recent Internet Explorer TV ads is the
Confutatis Maledictis from Mozart's Requiem (Mass for the dead). The words
of the final blast of music that accompanies "Where do you want to go
today?" are "confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis..." which
means "the damned and accused are convicted to flames of hell."
- anonymous
It is easier to get older than it is to get wiser.
This mail written by a user of Arachne, the DOS Internet Client
WWWWW World Wide Web Without Windows
http://home.arachne.cz Arachne DOS Browser Home Page
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