Last week in antitrust class we covered United States v. Microsoft. Our analysis centered on “Microsoft III” and the Sherman Act Section 2 violations issues. (Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes monopolization a felony.) There has been an awful lot said about US v. Microsoft, 10 years later (like the Berkman Center’s conference on the topic last fall), so I want to focus what struck me about Microsoft’s conduct, as a lifelong, self-proclaimed computer geek.

I should mention that I’m learning antitrust from Herbert Hovenkamp (you know the author of the 20-volume treatise on the topic, and about whom Justice Breyer reportedly wrote that practitioners would prefer to have two paragraphs of his treatise on their side than three Courts of Appeals or four Supreme Court justices…).

• Microsoft had the forethought to realize any application capable of interacting directly with PC hardware (which is what Netscape Navigator did) could make the MS OS irrelevant. Promoting Internet Explorer through contract ties with Windows (and later by “commingling” the IE and Win code), MS put OEMs in the position of having to choose between installing a web browser they had already paid for, and an additionally-licensed one, that they would have to support (like Netscape). Cornering the browser market was a means of maintaining the OS bottleneck, controlled by Microsoft’s monopoly. As Hovenkamp told us, you only need one monopoly in the production chain to extract the full monopoly profit from that chain.
• In an attempt to show that the “commingled” Windows and IE was faster than Windows with IE installed on top of the OS (as justification for combining the code of the two programs), Microsoft faked a courtroom demonstration with two computers — the “commingled” one had a clock that ran slow to make it look like it was faster than it was. Unfortunately, the government had a stopwatch at trial…
• Microsoft threatened to cut off Intel if Intel developed a natively-Java-supporting chipset, as MS knew Sun’s version of Java provided interoperability between all kinds of apps and OSes. Bill Gates recognized that such wide OS support for developers would lead to the “commoditization” of operating systems.
• Microsoft licensed Java from Sun, then changed it and misled software developers into believing that its version of Java would work with any OS, when in fact it was exclusive to Windows. MS itself called its version of Java “polluted.”

If you find any of these things as remarkable as I do, you should really check out the full opinion and some analysis [pdf].

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