> Further, as pointed out elsewhere you don't have to have a monopoly for being sued for anti-competitive behavior.
Conversely, you can have a monopoly and commit abuses and get away with it in the pro-business United States. Microsoft is noticeably intact, despite what we may have wanted to happen in the late 90s.
At this point it’s always important to remember that the DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft was largely about them abusing their market power by including a pre-installed web browser.
In this case, the market came together to produce a solution much better for society than the state could have concocted, or predicted: high quality open source software. We can all be thankful that Netscape’s market for $40 web browsers (actually buggy groupware by that point) wasn’t protected for any longer than it should have been, because the pressure of Microsoft’s dominance drove the market towards demanding more symmetrical rights via entirely new approaches of software development and distribution across desktop applications, server and embedded operating systems and software, and web-based platform-agnostic applications.
Conversely, you can have a monopoly and commit abuses and get away with it in the pro-business United States. Microsoft is noticeably intact, despite what we may have wanted to happen in the late 90s.
Apple realistically has more to fear in Europe.