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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

It's possible for a monopolist to have a great product that allows people to do amazing things that were never previously possible and still be harming the consumer.

Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start using computers for the first time, yet their browser bundling was considered problematic.

Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town and across the country in real time. People love talking to their far away friends and relatives! But they were simultaneously providing this futuristic service and harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices and monopoly pricing.

It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great service to you and me and be harming consumers with priority placement of Basics products and even harming competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in deciding what Basics products to make.

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Let's be clear about something misunderstood about Microsoft: Microsoft won that litigation in America, which is the jurisdiction we're talking about. Framing Microsoft's browser bundling as being "considered" problematic is the same as framing someone who was acquitted as being "considered" a criminal. The Microsoft approach remains an acceptable practice in law and is one of the principle points of the Apple v. Epic fight.

>Microsoft won that litigation in America

No they didn’t?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

> the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.

To expand on this: they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, but they were found to have abused their market power in support of IE.

First Trial:

> On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.

Appeal:

> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.

> they basically won the right to bundle on appeal,

If, by “appeal” you mean “settlement negotiated with the new, Microsoft-friendly Administration”, that is correct.

That’s not what “appeal” usually means in a legal context.

If you’re convicted of murder because the government dismissed black jurors due to their racial prejudices in order to assure the jury was all white and then the conviction is overturned on appeal and the prosecutor declined to reprosecute, are you guilty of murder? No. You aren’t.

More closely: if you take a plea bargain and plead guilty to breaking and entering instead of murder, are you guilty of murder? What if you only agreed to the plea bargain because you didn’t want to spend the millions of dollars to litigate again? This latter hypothetical is the reality of corporate prosecution in America: companies will settle just to avoid tainting their reputation and spending the cash to win on the merits. That doesn’t mean that they’re guilty.

Most jurisdictions do not consider American Plea bargains a proper legal process.

You are suppose to be tried in a public process by an impartial judge and a jury of peers, not making a deal behind closed doors with a prosecutor looking to advance his career.

Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other would-be commodity software are legend. They should have gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a nightmare for me as a consumer.

Should they have, though?

I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of.

How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS?

I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS with no browser installed by default would be a reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.)

Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for preventing someone from winding up in a situation where they have no browser installed at all and can't look up how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is obviously less catastrophic.)

> How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS?

That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-competitive problem, but it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors).

Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking it up by division and splitting some of those divisions further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all the Windows trademarks go to some independent interoperability consortium).

> it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors).

I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break the existing usage.

> splitting some of those divisions further into competitors

Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies reforming into a few huge companies which usually deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers?

Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility.

(I still claim, though, that given two initially equal products and equal resources, that one will probably relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's happened almost every time a large open source project has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)

If you were a competitor at the time, the Halloween documents were NOT NEWS to you, they were just a frightening admission of what everyone knew MS was already doing.

Yes, they absolutely should have been broken up into fragments, if not crushed and handed out to the rest of America for free.

Microsoft and Bell were successfully sued using existing antitrust law because they WERE harming consumers.

So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?

They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's not really about how happy customers are. "We're the best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential rivals.

It is in the US though?

Laws that prohibit anticompetitive practices do just as the name implies -- they prohibit companies from acting in a way that inhibits competition with their competitors in the market.

The impact on consumers is often used as a justification and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement. It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their options.

> They are using their power to force competitors out of the market.

Everyone does this, it is called competition.

In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust regs to act as a reset.

And they would be wrong. The fact that everyone does it is the reason no one truly succeeds, not in the long run. A MAD strategy not only with two players but with millions.

That is why every free market monopoly that has ever existed has passed and we are not living under the thumb of a single all encompassing mega-corporation and the only pseudo-monopolies possible are the ones guaranteed by law in regulations.

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