this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.
Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I'm not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.
They really weren't that effective with Microsoft then either. The antitrust was far too late for Netscape and allowed Microsoft to hold a dominate market share with IE until they allowed the browser to deprecate and Google came in with a much better browser and took over the browser market (and are now doing the same bullshit).
As long as we keep giving these companies meaningless fines or wait until the damage is irreversible companies are going to always push the limit and look at any repercussions as just a cost of doing business.
So yeah, not much faith in anything changing.
That is why I am in favour of the financial death penalty. Fines should be 10x the damage done. If a company cannot pay it, they are required to become a non profit.
What are your monetary damages for this?
I think a better solution is one year of global revenue (not profit) as it’s really hard to determine damages in cases like this. That way, it’s legitimately a death sentence regardless of the size or scale of the company. If you set the fines at an amount not linked to profit or revenue, all you’re doing is making it extremely hard for the little guy but less hard for the big corporations - the ones you really want to go after.
I like it, much more practical.
Yeah stuff like this really needs to be percentual and fined to the CEOs and the board, not the company as an entity.
Oh, Microsoft valued at 200 bil for shareholders? Well sorry C's and boardies, you gotta scrunge up 2 bil each now, personally. Those are fines they'd at least notice.
(edit)
Come to think of it, the fined-personally-to-the-decisionmaker might really be the big thing here on its own. The company did this shit under you, CEO. It was your corporate policy and hiring practices that allowed this to happen, even if you did not press the button. You pay up. You take the blame, not the people under you just following orders.
This just ignores the reason that corporations exist in the first place, to shield people from personal liability. There is a mechanism by which you can go after that called "piercing the corporate veil" but it is an extremely high bar to hit.
Which is the problem. As parent rightly pointed out, lack of personal liability is exactly why corporations pull this kind of bullshit. The solution is to lower the bar for holding individuals, particularly executives, personally responsible for the actions of the organizations they control.
You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).
He lionizes her a bit much, but yes she has done far more than her predecessor.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
https://www.axios.com/2021/01/06/shifting-baselines-syndrome-climate-change-coronavirus
And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.
Well they also dragged out the trial so long that time and costs rendered the plaintiff (Netscape) hopeless.
EU anthem intensifies
You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws
malicious slowdowns like this are why microsoft abandoned (non chrome) edge, too. Cause they couldnt keep up with fixing the constant fuckery google was doing, and users are idiots and blamed edge for all the problems.
Microsoft was kind of getting their comeuppance there. They did the exact same billshit when they dominated the market with IE.
You're right.
Lets let google get away with murder because Microsoft did bad a decade+ ago.
I don't think that's what I said? At least it's not how I meant it.