Automatic updates weren't enabled on XP until one of the service packs. So millions of PCs will never know about the new browsers.

Fair Dealing != Fair Use. Fair Dealing is far more constrained. Note: format shifting is typically believed legal under fair use but would need to be explicitly specified as allowable under Fair Dealing. Note how time shifting is given its own line item.

exactly. And the med students can dissect cadavers at home too.

If you've stabbed 5000 people, why stop? Keep going and reduce your marginal cost further!

Because leukemia is such an exotic disease, nobody ever dies of that while waiting for a bone-marrow transplant.

Shipping IE with Windows wasn't what violated anti-trust laws. It was their manipulation of the markets surrounding that that was. I read the judge's findings of fact back when the lawsuit was taking place; I remember the details clearly. MS didn't let OEMs remove IE (naturally, it's part of the OS) but they also didn't let OEMs install competing products. That, and other related market manipulations involving the price of the Windows OEM license, was what violated the law.

The browser and the HTML controls are a fundamental feature of a complete operating environment. If the government can step in and say "you need to take X out of your OS because someone else might want to sell and X", that does not actually benefit the customers whose software, which used that X, no longer works. Consider notepad: it's such an important program that Windows won't even let you replace it. That's because, for the decades that it's been there, there are hundreds of programs out there which have come to rely on it. If you take it away, those programs will malfunction. Even if you install a different text editor. The same is true for IE.

All that MS has to do to satisfy antitrust violations is to provide a way for people to replace certain IE functionality with equivalent COM objects, or to allow people to install other browsers. The applet which allows you to specify system-wide default browsers, media players, etc, is the right idea. Getting rid of the MSHTML control or iexplorer.exe is not.

I guess nobody cares about the countless applications which depend on installed apps like notepad or iexplorer.exe to get stuff done? Sure, those apps may be badly coded, but they exist and people want to continue running them.