llustrated in his book, The Antitrust Paradox, leveraging and tie-ins are a non-issue. This is so because of product integration. When purchasing a refrigerator that dispenses ice and water, the icemaker and other mechanism are considered part of the refrigerator. Its conceivable that a Hotpoint refrigerator may have a more desirable dispenser then a Kenmore refrigerator but the dispensers, while having a separate function, are integrated into the whole product.The argument that the Microsoft antitrust case is not about 'leveraging' or tie-ins as much as predatory pricing, i.e., that Microsoft is giving its browser away to knock Netscape out of the market doesnt hold much water either. Economists have shown that predatory pricing doesn't typically make sense, that the losses are often larger to the predator than to the prey. This comes about because once the predator raises prices, anyone who has bought the prey's assets at fire-sale prices becomes a low-cost competitor. With this consideration, it would seem highly unlikely that anyone capable of taking a small start up to a worth of $360 billion dollars would have enough business savvy to recognize the folly of such a practice.For the sake of good old fashion capitalism I hope theres a good chance that the appellate court tosses out the breakup remedy. Better still, although less likely but not impossible, would be to see the whole thing overturned. Microsoft intends to challenge the findings of Justice Jackson as clearly erroneous. That may very well be, however, Seal Straughthe question of relevancy seems the bigger issue. Are the charges valid in todays business arena? I think not.What about other laws regulating issues such as intellectual property? Is that which is considered intellectual property today what the originators of such laws envisioned? Surely many of the measures used to determine those types of violations no longer hold true due to technological innovat...
