re more likely to join together and settle. Because the mediation is voluntary, any settlement solutions offered by Posner aren’t binding.Posner is considered part of the “Chicago school” of antitrust theory along with Judge Robert Bork, and has argued that predatory pricing — a monopolist’s driving prices down to kill a competitor — almost never exists. The school of thought holds that the market will adjust itself and competition will emerge automatically. Posner has said that too much of law — and especially antitrust law — is decided by arguing over legal theories rather than empirical facts (4).One of the strongest legal arguments the Department of Justice has in its case is that Microsoft threatened to pull Compaq Computer’s Windows license if the computer maker replaced the Internet Explorer icon with Netscape’s on the PC desktop. Microsoft has already admitted making the threat, but they also said they didn’t mean it. They got Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale to concede that he had no evidence Microsoft ever punished a computer seller for displaying the Netscape Navigator icon, rather than Internet Explorer. But now the threat is dead. It is very likely that this behavior change will be the only long-term effect on Microsoft of this anti-trust trial. But it is a real effect and a real improvement.The government believes Microsoft's efforts to monopolize the market for Internet browsers could have an wide-ranging impact in the networked world. If most people accessed the Internet with Microsoft software, some critics of the company suggest that it could control commerce and content on the global computer network. The stakes, they contend, are much higher now than they were in the markets for word processing or spreadsheet software (2).Microsoft contends that it’s competitors lost market share because of incompetence, and that those same companies were trying to ent...
