> Using Internet Explorer is 100% voloutary and there are alternatives. The US government should not interfere, its unnecessary and I think its an abuse of power from their side.

>Using Internet Explorer is 100% voloutary and there are alternatives. The US government should not interfere, its unnecessary and I think its an abuse of power from their side.

I've already forgotten the IE case so I might be missing some details but what you wrote is 100% true even if it was probably intended in a ironic fashion.

I really, really don't see a reason why a government should interefe in a voloutery exchange. I kinda like my internet unregulated. Crazy actually how many people will "(+1)" sentences like "the internet should be decentralized, free of government and corporate censorship and open to everyone" but will cheer for the EU when they attempt to force a website to change its content.

Hopefully you realize that a lot of people (in the US and elsewhere) actually felt that way, and that simply posting this does not constitute a very thoughtful rebuttal.

The application of antitrust law (in the US and elsewhere) tends to be rather controversial. Which is why it's interesting...

I know, my implicit argument is that this specific argument isn't really valid because these circumstances have happened before and I don't believe the decision against Microsoft is controversial in 2017. I do believe that something like Google, while obviously having alternatives, is often the place people search, so it is in many ways a monopoly and should be heavily scrutinized to ensure it's not using its position for its own gain at the expense of its competitors. I don't know anyone who really uses Bing, and I only use DuckDuckGo because I don't prefer to be in the Google ecosystem, but I am not most people.

> I don't believe the decision against Microsoft is controversial in 2017.

Well, in one sense that's obviously true: it's no longer a source of controversy. On the other hand, if there is a reason you believe the people who argued against the Microsoft antitrust action - or aspects thereof - in the late nineties would retract their opposition today, I wonder what it is. More to the point, I wonder if you have read any legal scholarship or punditry to the effect of "I was wrong, the Microsoft antitrust case was correctly decided." I don't recall ever seeing anything like that, and I'm interested in this stuff.

(plenty of us thought bundling IE was not an abuse of monopoly power twenty years ago, and still feel that way today)

Add my name to the list of people that aren't entirely convinced that bundling IE was a abuse of monopoly power.

Well that's just your opinion, which is not shared by most people. Definitely not by EU citizens, so it can not be an "abuse of power".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Law

That's a very US-centric viewpoint and not one shared by people in Europe.

It has nothing to do with US/EU. The US has a long tradition of anti-trust laws which work essentially the same as the European.

If that were true Facebook and Intel as two examples would have been shticanned the same way they were in the EU. They weren't.

I share it. What now?