New Microsoft Antitrust Lawsuit
On February 14th Tangent Computing filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Microsoft for allegedly violating section 2 of the Sherman Act. Pair of articles here and here. According to one article, Tangent:
has charged “artificially inflated prices for its operating system software,” injuring Tangent, it’s alleged. Because of “exclusionary practices”, Microsoft has been able to “increase, maintain, or stabilise prices at anticompetive levels” without the constraint of competitors. Microsoft, Tangent alleged, promotes its own proprietary DRM (digital rights management) standard, which strengthens its monopoly position. It has also “distorted the content format decisions made by content owners, titling such decisions towards Microsoft’s proprietary media formats”, WMV, WMA and WMF. Further, Microsoft, it’s alleged, has failed to provide suitable information to convert .DOC, .PPT and .XLS Office file formats. Tangent alleges that Microsoft’s server OS includes “special, undocumented interfaces used by its servers to communicate with one another when multiple servers are part of the same network”.
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