Comment Articles

Antitrust: An open letter to the European Commission

John Carroll ZDNet.com

Published: 18 Nov 2003 16:45 GMT

I'm no fan of antitrust. That should be clear from past articles (my second article on ZDNet was named, rather melodramatically, "Death to Antitrust") where I've outlined several reasons why I believe antitrust policy is outdated and detrimental to economic health.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not emperor of the world, and lots of people think antitrust is very important to the proper functioning of modern economies. The US government obviously falls into that category, as does European Commission, who last week conducted hearings where Microsoft and its opponents argued over remedies proposed by the European antitrust authorities.

I take less issue with the actions of antitrust regulators, however, if they make it a point to consider the original purpose of antitrust, which was to benefit consumers using competitive markets as a means to that end.

In my post-Tunney comments (which was originally a letter sent to State Attorneys General involved in the case, as well as the Microsoft legal team and Judge Kollar-Kotelly), I argued that requiring Microsoft to open protocols related to interoperability was in keeping with the original spirit of antitrust, more in keeping with the lessons of the last 100 years of economic history and vastly superior to the structural remedies previously advocated by Judge Jackson. Along those lines, I recommend that the European Commission concentrate on mitigating market power through the enforcement of more open desktop and server interoperability protocols and reject attempts to take software design decisions out of Microsoft's hands.

What not to do - The Commission's Media Player Proposals
The European Commission understands the difficulties faced by competitors when Microsoft decided to integrate a new feature into Windows. Given that every copy of Windows ships with the new feature, third parties must convince end users that their product is sufficiently better than the existing, integrated product that they are willing to download a replacement. Though this is certainly easier today compared to 10 years ago before the Internet revolution reshaped global commerce, it still requires interest on the part of the individual.

This is a valid issue. However, making life easy for competitors is not the goal of antitrust. Consumers derive a number of benefits from the presence of features integrated into Windows that outweigh the heightened competitive pressures faced by third-party vendors of those features.