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ConservagameR on 26 January 2023
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EpicRandy said:
ConservagameR said:

United States v. Microsoft Corp. - Wikipedia

On June 28, 2001, the Circuit Court overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because Jackson had improperly discussed the case with the news media while it was still in progress, violating the Code of Conduct for American judges.

Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact. The Circuit Court adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" due to Jackson's conduct, which was favorable for Microsoft.

The Department of Justice announced on September 6, 2001, that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty. Microsoft decided to draft a settlement proposal allowing PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.

On August 5, 2002, Microsoft announced that it would make some concessions towards the proposed final settlement ahead of the judge's decision. On November 1, 2002, Judge Kollar-Kotelly released a ruling that accepted most of the proposed DOJ settlement.

Microsoft later "agreed to consent to a two-year extension of part of the Final Judgments" dealing with communications protocol licensing, and stated that if the government later wished to extend those aspects of the settlement as far as 2012, it would not object.

MS only got off initially due to the first judge making a poor and illegal move involving the media, which obviously doesn't change MS past actions leading them to court. MS still ends up guilty after appeal, just with a lesser penalty. MS accepted this, this time.

Convinced yet?

I also saw this on Wikipedia but it is incomplete. It looks like the only wrong thing done by the judge was inappropriate talk to the media while the thruth is that those talks were loaded with partial take against MS

The opinion was notable for its rebuke of Judge Jackson. ``The trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality,'' the court said. ``Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the district court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process.''

nytimes.com

Also, in the end, it doesn't really matter, the whole thing happened only because of the time it happened, OSs were only a thing to the masses for less than a decade and a great part of the reason it was seen as monopolistic was due to incompetent competition which was tripping over themselves every now and then (and yes that include Apple).

The very same behavior that got Microsoft into trouble back then is used without consequence by Google, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Amazon, etc. and is in fact still being used by MS (all bundle their app and stores with their respective OS). So, to me, It's funny to use a 20+ years old case to paint today's MS evil all the while every other actor with the proprietary OS are depicting the exact same behavior and are just lucky they haven't been challenged and/or that the context of today is more lenient on those practices.

If what the initial judge did with the media, made the entire case against MS, then MS would've been found not guilty in the end, which didn't occur.

I'm not even going to start when it comes to all the things that have happened in the past that wouldn't happen or would be handled differently today. 

The initial post was about MS and their relationship with PC's, as to control. I never said MS is alone in this and even Big Mach alluded to that repeatedly.