Re:A High Frequency Trader's Apologia, Part 1
by javert on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @09:35AM
(#3857819)
The decision made by the court was that they had to provide access to "secret" APIs
What did those APIs do? If they were APIs that one would need access to to make a competitive alternative to IE for Windows, then my story would be surprisingly accurate given the little that I remember. To be clear, the case I'm remembering greatly predated Windows 7.
Anyway, maybe I just got the story from some shitty pop news article many years ago and it's all wrong. But it stands as a hypothetical rhetorical device in the discussion about monopolies.
"Would have continued"? MS still bundles IE with Windows and uses its backend rendering tech in the system. The decision made by the court was that they had to provide access to "secret" APIs, not that they had to stop bundling IE.
This would have led to the collapse of the Windows, because IE was too bug-ridden and security-vulnerable at the time, just barely acceptable. There had to be a separation of the two for Windows to remain viable. The EU had a particularly harsh ruling on this, IIRC.
But there was never any separation! All copies of Windows with the sole exception of Windows 7 in the EU come with IE as the default and only browser. The HTML rendering technologies are still the same (Trident). And IE is still the most used browser.