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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons a lot of people see the Microsoft anti-trust suit as a mistake (in that it wasn't based on any sound legal theory, and history has shown that every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for it; essentially, the government stepped on the neck of one private company in an asymmetrical way because the administration at the time didn't like their face.)

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Microsoft's antitrust suit was mostly about illegal business practices, wide bullying of vendors and OEMs to block conpetition. How was it not based on sound legal theory ?

[Edit: I'm actually thinking of the EU lawsuit that was probably broader and better managed than the US one. Memories are now vague, it took me a while to even remember US and EU had different suits, but sure th US one was a lot worse in many aspects as Microsoft was on their home turf.]

> every MS competitor just did what MS did and didn't get smacked for

If you believe this, is the fault on those who smacked MS or the regulators who didn't smack the later violations ?

Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ?

> Is your argument that a crime shouldn't be punished in the past if people fail to punish it later in the future ?

Not precisely, but I do believe punishing one corporation and then not punishing their competition starts to smell a lot like using the force of the law to create an unfair market disadvantage.

I agree with your point, having let Apple and Google run so long without any intervention is unfair. The hammer should have fallen a long time ago, and yet the EU seems to be the only entity with a chance at breaking the status quo.

Was it because they wanted cooperation on surveillance and other law enforcement projects from the winner-who-had-taken-all?

100 pct. They blew their powder on this, gave tech antitrust a bad name and let stuff 1000x worse go unchallenged for decades and now we are where we are.

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