Let’s remember when a judge ruled Microsoft was in violation of antitrust laws, on this day in 2000 (April 3)
With the ubiquity Google and Apple have in our lives, it is somewhat hard to believe that in the late 1990’s, the US Department of Justice was concerned with Microsoft being too big and powerful. The issue was MS bundling Internet Explorer as an a piece of software built in to Windows, and it was unfair to competitors like Netscape.
In a stinging rebuke, a federal judge Monday ruled Microsoft Corp. violated the nation’s antitrust laws by using its monopoly power in personal computer operating systems to stifle competition.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said the company “maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market,” which violates the Sherman Act. Microsoft also violated the Sherman Act by “unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system,” the judge wrote.
The decision, while expected, was a setback for Microsoft, which had hoped to reach an out-of-court settlement with the government. However, when those talks broke down over the weekend, Judge Jackson decided to release his so-called “conclusions of law.”
This ruling was actually the second part of Judge Jackson’s ruling, per Politico:
Previously, Penfield found, on Nov. 5, 1999, that, in dominating the personal computer operating systems market, Microsoft had sought to crush threats to its monopoly by Apple and other software producers.
In having brought the case on May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department alleged that Microsoft, by bundling IE with Windows, had triumphed in the “browser wars,” because every Windows user had a built-in copy of Internet Explorer. It further alleged that Microsoft had illegally restricted the market for competing Web browsers, such as Netscape’s Navigator or Opera, which users needed to download over a modem or purchase separately at a store.
Microsoft would go on to reach a settlement with the DOJ when the (even) more corporate-friendly George W. Bush administration took office. Of course, today IE does not have the same monopoly on user’s web browsers. Hell, Internet Explorer doesn’t even exist any longer. Ultimately, it wasn’t enforcement of antitrust laws that undid IE (though that didn’t hurt, and neither did the advancement of download speeds to make switching browsers easy), it was, ultimately, ridicule.
