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March 25, 2004
Corporate welfare for market losers
Robert Levy, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. writes in Cato's TechKnowledge Newsletter (and in the Financial Times) that "Far from promoting consumer interests, the latest EU order [against Microsoft] transforms antitrust regulation into a corporate welfare program for market losers. The implications will not be confined to the Microsoft case. Without some semblance of regulatory consistency, companies competing globally will not be able to satisfy the dictates of divergent legal regimes. That means special interests pursuing their favorite antitrust forum in an effort to exercise the most political clout. The real costs: fewer jobs, less innovation, inferior products and higher prices."
There are three issues here and only one I want to focus on. Should the regional jurisdiction of any region apply to software released on the Internet?
Not only does this apply to large organizations like Microsoft but also to Dimitry Skylarov who was a software engineer in Russia who released software (in Russia) and came to the US to speak at a conference.
I wouldn't worry about triple jeopardy here. Microsoft is doing just fine. Their anti-trust problems are just cost of doing business.
They amount of damage they have caused the tech industry is staggering.