Historically, there are three justifications for antitrust legislation. The first and politically most important involved protecting the public interest. Beginning in the 1870s and '80s, a growing public clamor arose over the alleged ability of certain monopolies to control the flow of vital goods and to force the public to pay artificially inflated prices for what they could not do without. As century wore on, anti-monopolist sentiment grew increasingly hysterical. One midwestern editor supposedly sat down and counted up more than 400 monopolies that were supposedly pushing U.S. farmers to the wall. Although most of the fire focussed on the railroads, the fact is that, thanks to overconstruction of rail lines, rail freight rates were falling faster than crop prices. Nonetheless, the railroads were never, as far as I know, targeted by the trustbusters authorized by the Sherman Anti- trust Act. Rather, labor unions were prosecuted as restraints of trade, followed by Standard Oil, which, however tempting a target, was not as vital to the American economy as oil is now.
Another rationale is to ensure market efficiency, which supposedly is enhanced when no single player is allowed to dominate the field. This strikes me as a classic a priori assumption, one motivated by a Jeffersonian belief in the virtue of small producers rather than in any empirical study showing that large producers really do inhibit efficiency. If one believes in free markets, then one should agree that the essence of a free market is that allows individual players to occasionally win in a very big way. Penalizing big winners seems to me to be contrary to laissez-faire.
The third rationale is the question of equity. Big players like Bill Gates should not be allowed to corner the market and treat lesser players like Netscape unfairly. But the logic of this assertion is a bit hard to follow. Is Gates treating Netscape cruelly because he's a mean SOB? Or is the mere fact that he's cornered the market itself inequitable and unfair? If it's the latter, see point no. 2. If it's the former, big deal. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I say. If modern business is a form of trial by combat, then the solution is to get the other person before he (or she) gets you.
Bottom line (to use a very '90s expression), none of this makes sense at all. None of what MS deals in can be considered by any stretch of the imagination a vital public commodity. And all this whining on Netscape's part seems to be just that - whining.
By the way, the socialist movement was extremely hostile to antitrust legislation. Lenin's book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was entirely orthodox in asseting that monopolization represented a doomed attempt by the bourgeoisie to resolve the crisis of capitalism thru what might be called bourgeois socialization. It would too much to say that Lenin applauded this tendency, but it would be correct to say that he hailed it as a sign of growing crisis. Bourgeois socialization was a contradiction in terms; nonetheless, it pointed the way to socialization via working-class revolution.
The U.S. Socialist Party was of the same mind. To quote the International Socialist Review of September 1900: "The character of the anti-trust movement is analogous to the anti-machinery movement of a century ago when the hand loom weavers marched throughout England and destroyed the power looms. Hargreaves, Arkright, and Compton were driven from their homes by howling mobs for inventing the new method that displaced the old. The cry of `Down with machinery' has been supplanted with `Down with the trusts.'"
One and a half cheers for Bill Gates?
Dan Lazare