1) Google does make political donations, but they are quite small (~$5000 per candidate) and primarily towards candidates who - to generalize greatly - are "pro internet" (eg anti-SOPA etc)[1][2][3]. One could argue that these people also generally have a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy which is favourable to Google. One could also argue that a a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy is sensible..
2) Based on your comment If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is it would appear you don't understand what anti-competitive behaviour is or what happened in the MS case. A company can give away anything they like - it only causes legal problems if they have market dominance in that market and they use that dominance to exclude other competitors. Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for making IE free - they got in trouble for stopping PC manufactures installing Netscape on new PCs if they installed Windows and for manipulating the Windows APIs to favour IE over Netscape.[4]
[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-g...
[2] http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html
[3] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
Using open secrets data does not even begin to cover the ways in which a company can influence politics.
That sounds almost sensible until one realizes then when you say using their search monopoly what you mean is using the money they make from search.
By that logic NO profitable business would ever be able to move into another line of business. Also, that isn't what anti-trust law is about.
Actually anti-trust law is about using the profits from one business to vertically integrate others by using the profits from one to subsidize the other. There is a modern component to it that revolves around consumer harm but anti-trust law was written as a means of redress for other businesses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_a...
Until and unless Google (or any other modern player) has a 90+% market share in some area, comparisons with MS's antitrust case are faulty.
That's right. IE was free. Netscape was not. I think this is a point a lot of people miss.
Netscape did crash far too often though in that time period and was probably better even beyond all the made for IE websites.
Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. They did so because it came installed by default on their computer and most of them were too lazy/ignorant to find alternatives. Heck, most people didn't even know what a browser was. They just knew that double-clicking that blue e icon allowed them to get on the Internet.
IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.
> Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was
> "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was.
Recently, they've caught up pretty well.
I'm still a Microsoft hater, but IE did win because it was better. Netscape totally dropped the ball on that.
It damned sure was. The browser game was Netscape's game to throw away. And sure enough, they did just that with 4.
IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.
None of the browsers shipping today have anything to do with the browsers that were shipping in the NS4/IE4 era.
* Faster than Navigator.
* Had more features than Navigator, DHTML being the most important.
* Were highly compatible with content written for Navigator.
Navigator ran on more platforms. So yeah, if you were not running on Windows, Navigator was superior.
As far as bundling Internet Explorer is concerned, one can argue that Microsoft foresaw that a browser was going to become a required piece of software that everyone would want to have on their PC (just like a text editor; nobody every complained that Microsoft was giving away Notepad and Wordpad with Windows). And without a pre-installed browser, you'd have to go to an FTP server just to get a copy of a different browser, something that the average user would be unable to do. Similarly, Apple bundles Safari with every Mac, iPad and iPhone for the same reason: you couldn't sell one of these devices today if they didn't have a browser on them as soon as they came out of the box.
Microsoft did engage in real anti-competitive tactics, such as coercing hardware manufacturers to pre-install Windows on all their machines whether users wanted it or not. However, there are laws against "restraint of trade" [1] that apply whether a company is a monopoly or not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...
Thats the definition of a monopoly. At least in my language. (Dutch).. Dominant market share. Not all monopolies are bad, but any market with high margins and a single vendor with 90+% maketshare is a monopolistic market. Thats just how words and definitions work. Thats not an opinion.
Now here comes the opinion part: consumers had little to no choice. Why? Because the core functionality, is compatibility. Who would buy a car that you cant drive on the common road? I make the road analogy, because the difficult aspect of the OS market is that its infrastructure.
Imagine a world where cars, gas stations, oil supply and roads were completely unregulated except for the upholding of IP laws (in particular: patents) that enable certain types of incompatibilities to get legal protection. You are driving in a MS car, with special patent-protected tires, that only work on MS roads. They are also the only type of car allowed to drive on those roads. They have a special patent protected triangle shaped gas supply, that only MS fuel stations can resupply. Now, on this road you will only find exits to MS shopping malls, not those of competitors.
This could go on and on. Im not in the MS is evil boat, but market regulations in the IT are about 1% of what we actually need. And compared to traffic, snailmail, phone systems, electricity its extremely unregulated.
And maybe, if they are all truly forced to compete on quality, we would no longer have this "everything is broken and nobody seems to mind" problem. Because nobody minds, because it is not about getting customers: it is about how to hijack them. How to lock them in. And this is even more true for a connected world ... I cant just move a social life to another social network. I do not have the freedom to do that.
If we can not pick indiviually, we should be picking democratically. Or at the very least, regulate it all until there are enforced common fileformats, including application-containers, open communication exchanges and full data liberation. The only other alternative is complete exploitation by a monopolistic bully.
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity." [1]
A good example would be an electricity provider that owns the only power transmission lines in a given area. (This would usually be a legal, government-regulated monopoly.)
In contrast, it was definitely possible to use Macs as an alternative to PCs, even in large business environments. At some point, I even worked on developing an enterprise software product that ran on Macs.
"If we can not pick individually, we should be picking democratically. Or at the very least, regulate it all until there are enforced common fileformats, including application-containers, open communication exchanges and full data liberation."
There's a lot of software available that allows Windows machines to exchange data with all sorts of other machines. Most Microsoft products that I've ever seen allow you to export or import your data in open formats (e.g., Excel allows you to export data as CSV format). Not to mention that many third-party products can read and write Microsoft file formats. So I don't see how Microsoft is locking up people's data. All this interoperability was created by the free market (e.g., Microsoft's influential customers demanded it), not by government regulation.
Think about what kind of a mess bureaucrats and courts with no technical knowledge have already made of our patent system. Do you really want government regulators and courts to also dictate what our standard file formats should be? I'd much rather take my chances with the free market.
The only legal implementation of the win32 api. The only legal implementation of FAT. The only legal implementation of doc'95. The only legal implementation of directx. Example after example, not of innovation (comparable solutions exist) but of intentionl incompatibility. The intent was demonstrated, not just in encrypted file formats but actual email correspondence where the intent was made explicit.
Yes. Legal action, pressure and illegal (from a ToS perspective) reverse-engineering allowed some people to overcome parts of their prison. This was not the result of the free market, but a political and social campaign. And although it liberated some, these people paid a hefty price of digital exclusion, and this war took almost a decade, which many players only survived because they chose to pay Microsoft "protection" money. From Novell, to TomTom.
Your coloring of events, is far removed from reality. Just ask any linux desktop user foot soldier in the 90ties. There were times they were updating MSN protocols as often as possible, just to make sure people using linux would be socially isolated, with their "illegal" clients..
The biggest shame, is that with all this focus on the oppression in the last decade, we fail to discuss, the even bigger risks in our new cloud based world, and the consolification of computing devices. Things are going to get even worse, without regulation... Microsoft was a kind dictator compared to how Apple or Amazon tend to operate.
And just because politicians may be corrupt, that does not mean, that there is a solution to all of this that does not require the right types of regulations. Like data liberation. If we need to fix politics before we can fix this we better get started.
Oddly MS argument was that the browser is a core part of the OS that should ship with the OS. I think history has shown this to be true. Browsers are now more commonly bundled in OSes then grammar checkers in word processors.
If you consider the market for mobile phone/tablet OSes available to OEMs the market is really Android and Windows Mobile and Androids market share may lead it to be regarded as a monopoly. I think that they need to be (and probably are) VERY careful in their behaviour in relation to all the phone manufacturers.
Please note I am making no accusation of anti-competitive behaviour by Google but I do believe that they will fall under competition law in several markets so they are not generally immune from such accusations.
"That's a nice business over there, would be a shame if we found you were running a monopoly, why don't you contribute to our campaign and we'll protect you from those DOJ lawyers"
If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is.