AOL Time Warner Files Anti-Trust Suit against MS 949
ChazeFroy writes "This article at the Washington Post says that AOL Time Warner has filed a suit against Microsoft seeking damages from anti-competitive practices over the Netscape browser."
Can't say I'm surprised.
Re:I don't know the details but.... (Score:3, Informative)
All of these cases are civil cases.
Re:Hipocritical (Score:5, Informative)
The answer to your question is 5.
6 media conglomerates [thirdworldtraveler.com]own just about every major media and entertainment product in the US.
Re:Here's what's really going on (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.fortune.com/articles/2002/magazine/200
AOL's Missing 155 Billion and the timing ... (Score:4, Informative)
According to Fortune, "Instead of adding up to the world's most valuable company, this merger has subtracted $155 billion of market cap. CEO-designate Richard Parsons promises to do the numbers a different way."
Link is at: http://www.fortune.com/articles/2002/magazine/200
Re:I don't know the details but.... (Score:2, Informative)
This is why we have class action suits. They keep the courts from being flooded with a few thousand lawsuits because XYZ credit card company screwed their card holders. Each card holder affected could bring their own suit so the judge may opt to nip it by making it a class action.
Re:Hipocritical (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Then MS can fire back... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is sad... Netscape simply sucked. (Score:5, Informative)
Once a big chunk of their revenue stream was taken away, the quality of the browser really began to suffer. Tack on the fact that M$ had some licensing agreements with many PC OEM's requiring them to NOT SHIP Netscape on PC's as well as their weird proprietary tags (not that NS didn't have a few as well) and you have a recipe for NS' demise.
Hell! M$ even courted major entertainment sites and encouraged them to develop their sites so that they could ONLY be viewed with IE for Windows! I'm a Mac user and years ago I used only Netscape and I couldn't even access the star trek website. Totally unsupported for Netscape and the lack of Mac support was just rubbing salt in the wounds.
M$ needs to pay for this reckless disregard for consumer choice and if AOL/TW wants to use their own money to fight this battle, I'm fine with that. The US government , since Bush was appointed president, has shown that they no longer have the cojones to do what is right and just.
Netscape? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What you seem to forget (Score:3, Informative)
I think the only reason the games consoles can do it is because it's part of a viable and LEGAL business model - razor and razorblades, not an attempt to use your deeper pockets to put a rival out of business as Microsoft did to Netscape.
Re:*sigh* Same old line. (No .. look at Apache) (Score:2, Informative)
If you do look at the NT market IIS *has* pushed other competators out. Apache on NT for example is mainly used as a development platform before deploying on *nix.
In the findings of fact it was found that MS witheld API's from Netscape, API's that made IIS run faster on NT than Netscape's server. Netscape's business model was a razor/blades one. Make little money from the browser (free for personal use, $$$ for corporates) and sell the server. Bundling IIS with NT kept Netscape out of that market, bundling IE on the desktop made it make less sense use Netscape's Server as it would be talking to MS's browser.
I'm not saying Netscape was a saint or didn't make plenty of it's own screw ups but MS did leverage their monopoly on the desktop against Netscape's browser and did hide API's on NT to keep Netscape's server out of the NT market. The case against MS is that it used it monopoly in one area to extend into another, that is illegal.