Today Judge Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge in charge of quarterly reviews of Microsoft’s consent decree compliance will hold a conference in Washington, DC. But remove any visual images you have of a court, with wood paneling and expensive suits – instead, thanks to State AGs and Google, this review process is beginning to look like a three-ring circus.
A new ACT paper describes the changes in the PC software market and why it’s appropriate to let the Consent Decree expire. Microsoft’s largest competitors are now simply using the consent decree process as a way to trip up the company at every turn. Competitors like Google, Symantec, and Adobe have all used the system to file nuisance complaints that have slowed Microsoft’s ability to deliver new features.
It’s time for this review process to end, because this antitrust case is sooooo 1990s.
Innovation and competition—driven by applications that harness the power of the latest technologies—continue to transform the landscape of the software industry. The on-demand model has risen to challenge thick-client desktops from Microsoft, Apple, and Linux.
Thin-client “cloud” software was not a factor in the late 1990s as it is now in 2007, and its largest proponent, Google, was not even incorporated the day that the U.S. Justice Department filed its antitrust suit against Microsoft. Almost a decade later, Google is arguably Microsoft’s strongest competitor.
Despite the new software environment, government antitrust regulators are targeting the industry for ever-greater scrutiny. Continued oversight of the consent decree in the U.S. and the ongoing willingness of EU competition regulators to bring new cases are all signs of regulatory overkill.
Antitrust regulators should avoid overly interventionist policies in today’s on-demand technology markets. In the case of Microsoft, Justice Department supervision of the terms of the consent decree will end on November 12, 2007. We don’t need continued oversight going forward—we have Google and other market forces minding Microsoft well enough.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.