"The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"
This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?
Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS.
> We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)
https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-s...
I guess it is not as untenable as I thought, and the EC believes it can just throw shit towards the CMA until they get away with it. I also have my confirmation on whether the EC would be stupid enough to accept the deal.
Anyway, you cannot disagree with the fact that MS still _tried_ to stifle Linux, which is the point (and the part that I'm quoting). And arguably both as server and as a desktop OS.
...but this goes back to the US interpretation of "monopoly practice" vs. the European interpretation. Where was the consumer harm? How does MS "stifle" an OS that you can just pick up from a CD, floppy disk, or the Internet and drop on a machine you own?
History seems to have shown "You can't." In general, the biggest hindrance to Linux desktop adoption is the Linux UX (and for games, the experience of building one with the libraries available on Linux [https://utopixel.games/en/blog/building-outer-wonders-for-li...]), not anything Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) have done to it.
It's irrelevant what you think about Linux UX. It is just fact that MS is worried enough that _to this day_ they are using their monopoly position to stifle non-Windows OSes ( desktop AND server) every frigging time they can. Same way they have doing continuously for decades.
And also despite the fact their marketing dept says that "MS loves Linux" and the armchair analysts say that MS makes money from Linux servers.
They settled a lawsuit with Microsoft, but Be didn't fail because of anything Microsoft did any more than it failed because of anything Apple did. Nobody wanted yet another operating system to write code against. Be failed for the same reason that Plan 9 hasn't caught fire and served as a meaningful alternative to the Linux ecosystem; when your architecture is too far divorced from the existing ecosystems after the ecosystems grow sufficiently large, it doesn't matter if your solution is slightly better... Developers don't want to invest the time starting over.
Monopoly protection is a lot of things, but it isn't a mechanism for somebody to try and compete with DC power for long distance transmission when the world has already wired up AC.
"The competition sucks" has never been an argument _at all_ in any antitrust case and never will, by definition.
... but yes, "Your honor, the competition is just too bad at this to compete" is an antitrust defense as a result. At least in the US system.
I don't disagree with anything you quoted -- it is abuse of a dominant position that is illegal (even in my country at the very least, which last time I checked was in the EU). Just note that it doesn't really matter if you got your monopoly because "the competition sucked" or not, just the fact that you have a dominant position, and you abused it. So I disagree with the conclusion.
And let it be clear that all of this is an off-topic, since again the point was that MS is still using the same anti-competitive strategies they were using decades ago, to this day.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Emphasis mine: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." The American system recognizes the notion of proper monopoly; if one company is doing something very well and every other company lacks the tools or skill to do as well, that is not actionable. Using market dominance is also not, by itself, actionable ("Competition is a ruthless process" &c). What the US does consider actionable is consumer harm... undercutting your opponents' prices because you can isn't actionable by itself ("Hey, look at all that competition lowering prices! Consumers love low prices!"), but undercutting them unsustainably and then jacking the price later when you grind them out of business is.
But you're right that we're having a two-ships-passing-in-the-night discussion on the topic now, because Europe takes a very different view upon this (protection of the marketplace, in the European history of antitrust, is protecting the right to make a living competing, not the consumers' right not to be screwed). Much of what I'm saying is in the American mindset, and reasonable people can disagree because reasonable people can come from different philsophical backgrounds on what constitutes protection-worthy antitrust behavior.
(Linux, as example, in the American system it's hard to make the argument that MS being unwilling to spend the money to port software they own to another OS is consumer harm. It can be made though; I believe that's one of the reasons the FCC was blocking the MS / Activision merger. But it's right on the edge of a defendable argument, because the counter-argument is "Who cares if Word doesn't run on Ubuntu distros if OpenOffice is right there?").