Nog een artikel van Yahoo! over het Microsoft feest, met speculaties over de mogelijke uitslag van de rechtszaak:
Legal experts said Jackson was unlikely to seek to break up the company, the radical remedy imposed on Standard Oil in 1911 and agreed to by AT&T Corp (NYSE:T - news). in 1984.``Even a very ambitious judge is likely to find that a sobering prospect and to look for ways to avoid that process,'' Kovacic said.
Instead, experts said, Jackson is likely to demand that Microsoft change its behavior toward computer manufacturers, removing restrictions on the licensing of the market-dominating Windows operating system. Possibly he will also order the software giant to unbundle its Internet Explorer browser, they said.
Neukom, Microsoft's top attorney, said that it was premature to talk about potential remedies but that he found it hard to believe Jackson would order a breakup, based on the opinion.
``Interpreting these findings in the way most negative for us, it's hard to imagine this would require structural relief,'' he said.
But Kovacic said Jackson's powerful opinion left open the distant possibility he would demand that Microsoft break up or auction off licensing rights to its core Windows product. [break] In dezelfde trip heeft ook The Register een artikel over dit onderwerp gepost: [/break] One remedy favoured by Sun's Scott McNealy has some possible merit. Microsoft's growth is fuelled by its ability to hire bodies and buy into markets, so an appropriate punitive measure would be to stop all mergers or acquisitions for,say, 15 years, or whatever is deemed the period of time during which Microsoft has acted anticompetitively. This could be accompanied by some compulsory divestment, which would go some way towards the Baby Bills concept, but could be more easily applied to units which could be conceivably free-standing.
Source code is another issue that could be addressed. As Microsoft owns, according to Jackson, in excess of 90 per cent of the market, Windows code could be declared to be an essential facility, a concept well-known in antitrust law. Microsoft would retain its intellectual property rights, but a new industry would be created for specialist programmers who could produce drivers and locate bugs. This would inevitably require independent oversight, but if properly implemented it would make it impossible for Microsoft to use it own knowledge of the code to disadvantage competition, and it would make it impossible to break rival products via code changes.
