I was there, it was more like the US threatened to break up Microsoft, and then Microsoft, their army of lawyers, and the courts laughed the government out of the room. The government had to settle for lesser sanctions. ("Sanctions" which, in my opinion, were not sanctions at all.)
>Fast forward a decade later and apple, google and amazon bundle a crazy amount of unrelated services into their platforms without the regulators raising an eyebrow...
That's because the "sanctions" solidified that practice as explicitly legal. So now EVERYONE started doing it. The only thing you needed to do was to allow other people to put their unrelated services on your platform too. You could even charge other people for that if you wanted. (And you didn't even have to let unrelated services on your platform in certain cases. For instance, at the time, Windows was riddled with viruses and bugs, so where the safety or security of the consumer was concerned, you didn't have to allow or even have certain services on your platform. Little known loophole there.)
The problem was really that the issues on the face of it, to someone like me, a young developer activist at the time, were not really the questions dealt with when you finally get into court. The law is about the law, and there was no getting around it.
I became convinced that what we should be doing is trying to change the law. I'm just to old to put that kind of effort into agitating for changed laws any longer.
EDIT: It's probably only fair for me to add that the courts turned out to be right in the Microsoft case. History has shown that information processing paradigms can change on a dime. (PC to mobile). The law is there to provide reasonable safeguards to all actors in a market, and ensure that competition is fair. It's just that "fair" in the eyes of the law, looked a bit different than "fair" did in my own opinion.
>Fast forward a decade later and apple, google and amazon bundle a crazy amount of unrelated services into their platforms without the regulators raising an eyebrow...
That's because the "sanctions" solidified that practice as explicitly legal. So now EVERYONE started doing it. The only thing you needed to do was to allow other people to put their unrelated services on your platform too. You could even charge other people for that if you wanted. (And you didn't even have to let unrelated services on your platform in certain cases. For instance, at the time, Windows was riddled with viruses and bugs, so where the safety or security of the consumer was concerned, you didn't have to allow or even have certain services on your platform. Little known loophole there.)
The problem was really that the issues on the face of it, to someone like me, a young developer activist at the time, were not really the questions dealt with when you finally get into court. The law is about the law, and there was no getting around it.
I became convinced that what we should be doing is trying to change the law. I'm just to old to put that kind of effort into agitating for changed laws any longer.
EDIT: It's probably only fair for me to add that the courts turned out to be right in the Microsoft case. History has shown that information processing paradigms can change on a dime. (PC to mobile). The law is there to provide reasonable safeguards to all actors in a market, and ensure that competition is fair. It's just that "fair" in the eyes of the law, looked a bit different than "fair" did in my own opinion.