Software Development as an Antitrust Remedy?
William Page and Seldon Childers discuss one of the more interesting aspects of the remedies in the Mircosoft case.
An important provision in each of the final judgments in the government’s Microsoft antitrust case requires Microsoft “make available” to software developers the communications protocols that Windows client operating systems use to interoperate “natively” (that is, without adding software) with Microsoft server operating systems in corporate networks or over the Internet. The short-term goal of the provision is to allow licensees of the protocols to write applications for non-Microsoft server operating systems that can interoperate as well with Windows client computers as can applications written for Microsoft servers. The long-term goal is to preserve, in the network context, the “middleware threat” to the Windows monopoly - the possibility that middleware applications running on servers might become a platform that could erode the “applications barrier to entry” as Netscape and Java had threatened to do. The district court singled out this provision as the “most forward-looking” in the final judgments, and as the key to assuring that the other provisions do not become “prematurely obsolete.” The provision has, however, proven to be by far the most difficult to implement. We argue that it has not accomplished its purpose and that courts can draw some hard lessons from the experience.Thanks to Danny Sokol for the pointer.
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