Since 1990, a battle has raged in United States courts between the United States government and the Microsoft Corporation out of Redmond, Washington, What is at stake is money. The federal governmentmaintains that Microsofts monopolistic practices are harmful to United Statescitizens, creating higher prices and potentially downgrading software quality,and should therefore be stopped, while Microsoft and its supporters claim thatthey are not breaking any laws, and are just doing good business.Microsofts antitrust problems began for them in the early months of 1990(Check1), when the Federal Trade Commission began investigating them for possibleviolations of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts,(Maldoom 1) which aredesigned to stop the formation of monopolies. The investigation continued onfor the next three years without resolve, until Novell, maker of DR-DOS, acompetitor of Microsofts MS-DOS, filed a complaint with the CompetitionDirectorate of the European Commission in June of 1993.(Maldoom 1) Doing this stalled the investigations even more, until finally inAugust of 1993, (Check 1)the Federal Trade Commission decided to hand the caseover to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice moved quickly,with Anne K.Bingaman, head of the Antitrust Division of the DOJ, leading the way.(Check 1)The case was finally ended on July 15, 1994, with Microsoft signing a consentsettlement.(Check 1)The settlement focused on Microsofts selling practices with computermanufacturers. Up until now, Microsoft would sell MS-DOS and Microsofts otheroperating systems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) at a 60% discountif that OEM agreed to pay a royalty to Microsoft for every single computer thatthey sold (Check 2) regardless if it had a Microsoft operating system installedon it or not. After the settlement, Microsoft would be forced to sell theiroperating systems according to the number of computers shipped with a Microsoftoperating system...
