The former Microsoft lawyer leading this prosecution is doing Microsoft's bidding.
Letting "the market do its thing" only works until a few companies accumulate enough power to monopolize the market.
The last two decades have seen being the next Google transformed into being acquired by Google, which has been to the detriment of everyone.
And those four players are more of a cartel than competitors, having agreed to mostly stay out of each other's ways.
The primary overlapping markets between them are consumptive devices and cloud services -- which I presume they're all in because they consider it strategically important enough to their other businesses to incinerate money.
See earlier comment about consumer devices.
Office suites have Google sharing an MS Office-compatible suite they purchased. Apple has MS Office on its platform. But no real competition or innovation.
Who aside from Microsoft runs a gaming platform?
What looks like open competition gets a lot narrower in overlap once you look at the details.
Which is exactly what you'd expect, if you allowed companies to get too big and too dominant: they're not dumb, so they strategically rig the game in their favor to disadvantage new entrants, while carteling with similarly sized peers to ensure everyone mostly stays out of each other's pools.
a) can't hope
b) shouldn't hope
I’m not sure why you’re being so sarcastic as it’s not a novel idea and it’s less “figured out the clever game” and more that even the appearance of impropriety removes faith and trust in the institution.
This seems like a nuanced and reasonable take, but a rather generous interpretation of the GP comment. I think it’s reasonable for the parent comment to push back against a definitive statement laying an accusation with no evidence.