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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

Zuck already merged Facebook's and Instagram's database so good luck splitting them.

I hope free market economy prevails or in another words lawsuits fail. They should've learnt their lesson with Microsoft(antitrust is waste of taxpayers' money).

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The Microsoft antitrust thing was about bundling Internet Explorer in Windows, and also Microsoft's Java VM. The argument from Microsoft was that these two components constituted essential parts of Windows (to that end internet explorer became a web view control in Windows) and so couldn't be removed. In practice this hurt competition from other browser vendors and from Sun.

20 years on, Internet Explorer is dead and Microsoft Edge uses Blink (the same engine as Chrome). Firefox is the only other browser with a distinct rendering engine.

Microsoft's Java VM also died. It was removed in XP SP2 and Microsoft no longer distribute, even via MSDN, versions of Windows that shipped with it. You could argue these events lead directly to the creation of .net since Microsoft's original plan was to jump on the Java train.

So it worked, or at least certainly shaped those various markets.

That thing in your pocket you use to browse the web and make phone calls is a computer too, so Windows isn't the dominating operating system. And IE isn't the number one browser anymore, so this worked out.

I was alluding to PC operating system industry but whatever. Yea it worked out really well Microsoft is only worth $2 trillion.

And try to work from home or remote work on your smartphone and not on your PC or laptop and tell me how productive you are. Or try to get any serious task done on smartphone except taking photos, browsing the web and writing notes.

> Yea it worked out really well

It did, actually. Microsoft was not able to engage in as many unfair anti-competitive practices in the browser space, and partially because of that, there was a increase in browser competition.

Preventing microsoft from locking the world in to its browser, with illegal and anti-competitive practices, caused lots of better browsers to be developed.

Standard oil? Antitrust is only a waste of taxpayers' money if there's no real willingness to go after the offenders.

What happened to Microsoft? Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition.

People stopped caring about Windows being dominant years ago. Mac and Linux became competitive for those who wanted it, mobile ate the world, and Windows only dominates in Office and gaming, neither of which are apparently worth fighting over.

>Windows only dominates in Office and gaming, neither of which are apparently worth fighting over.

Everyone and everything is worth fighting over.

Agree personally, I just mean the general population doesn't care anymore.

I think that's less an indictment of anti-trust lawsuits being effective and more of an indictment of either a lack of knowledge or willful ignorance around how connected the economy was becoming via computers.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are all companies that are beyond a reasonable scale - there are far too many eggs in those baskets for long term economic health. Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.

>Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.

Maybe because >Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are extremely useful consumer technology companies. I don't know about you but I won't be buying fighter aircraft anytime soon.

Boeing gets about 28.6 Billion from the US government each year[1] given the US population of around 400 million you're giving them (if we spread the cost evenly) about seventy five dollars every year. Once upon a time this was a large sum of money - now-a-days it's probably less than most folks spend on spotify and definitely less folks spend on coffee in a non-pandemic year.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho...

> Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry.

Definitely not, unless you are defining computer in a way that only includes computer form factors that existed in the 90s and also excludes server computers.

That isn't how antitrust works. In the US, having a monopoly is not a crime; abusing a monopoly is. The consent decree had very specific goals and requirements, you can go read about it at Wikipedia. But none of them were about shrinking their market share.

The European EC decision was different, but also was not targeting market share.

A monopoly of any kind subverts both the free market and democracy, and there is literally no such thing as "wasting taxpayers' money" at the federal level in the US, because the US issues its own currency

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