[scarface74]

Yes that worked out well last time. Microsoft was broken up and they were forced to unbundled their browser from Windows.

Also, politicians never go after companies for biased reasons and we can count on the government with more power not to abuse it.

[ok123456]

It made Microsoft sweat pretty good in the late-90s. They had to behave a little better, but not doing anything too anti-competitive, during a critical juncture of the internet's growth and adoption, while the anti-trust proceedings dragged on.

Just because there was no AT&T style divestiture at the end, doesn't mean there were no positive externalities.

[int_19h]

I think the biggest thing that came out of that anti-trust case is the publishing of specs for various file formats and protocols used by Microsoft software.

[indrora]

And the duplication of... about two dozen string routines, from what I've been able to find.

The actual rendering engine was left to Windows (and to anyone who was using it, like AOL), the shell was left to IE to continue wrapping around it, and a few more things.

[scarface74]

Not really

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-18.pdf

[int_19h]

This mostly talks about APIs, and only briefly mentions protocols.

I don't know about the specifics of what is legally required vs what the Microsoft legal team decided to do to avoid further scrutiny. But the fact is that there's a lot of docs that were published in the aftermath of that ruling:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/protocols/ms-pro...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/data_portability...

[scarface74]

And because of that, a million flowers bloomed and now we have dozens of browsers engines and not one dominant player controlled by a large tech company…

[ok123456]

Without that pressure, they could have pursued a more aggressive strategy with IIS and server technologies. Outlook was only mildly annoying. They could have been much more aggressive there. Microsoft did and does a lot more than Windows and Internet Browsers.

[cma]

Also I suppose companies never go after politicians for biased reasons, with legalized bribery of campaign contributions as the tool.

[scarface74]

Yes, but no company has a “monopoly on violence” - the government does. Given a choice, a powerful government can do far more damage than Microsoft.

[quantified]

Who knew that the browser should have been separated fully anyway because it was a security issue?

They weren't broken up but they were anti-competitive asswipes.