Comment Re:And do not forget... (Score 5, Insightful) 407
At the very heart of the DOJ case...M$ was accused of "locking-in" customers for their products. And now, fast forward to 2012... Apple is literally locking in consumers behind their gardened walls with a plethora of their own hardware and software, Google & FB literally collecting private details from its consumers. Playing the devil's advocate here, I wonder how come they are not scrutinised intensely?
Such behavior is illegal only if you have a sufficiently large share of a properly defined product market. MS apparently got terrible legal advice in the 1990s (or ignored good advice); someone should have been telling them that they were dominant enough in their principle market space (personal computer operating systems) that the rules were different. Apple holds less than 20% of the global market for smartphones, a distant second behind Samsung for the most recently finished quarter. That's not enough market share to get you in trouble. Google appears ready to settle their antitrust case in the EU, and the FTC announced several months ago an investigation of Google's business practices in the US. And it's difficult to define an applicable "market" where Facebook dominates, since they don't charge their users.