These days, when anyone thinks of how tech intersects with the law, I'd guess that they think about antitrust. The EU wants Big Tech platforms to be more interoperable—and it's prepared to force them to make it happen. Apple's fingerprints are all over digital ads. Diehard Taylor Swift fans even pursued an antitrust initiative against Ticketmaster last fall after the site crashed the day that tickets for the singer's much-hyped Eras Tour went on sale.
None of this is new. Wind the clock back 20-odd years and you'll see that many of the same questions were shaping the tech space. In the late 1990s, the Justice Department brought antitrust charges against Microsoft, alleging that the company was trying to monopolize the PC market. "As the old economy gives way to the new, some of the most profound questions in public policy revolve around how a legal regime conceived and enacted in the industrial era applies to the information age—if, indeed, it applies at all," journalist John Heilemann wrote in his sprawling WIRED cover story on the case. "Whatever the ultimate outcome of United States v. Microsoft, the case promises to yield a historic precedent, one which will shape fundamentally the terms of competition in the dynamic high tech markets at the center of our emerging postindustrial order."
Heilemann's story of the case came out in November 2000, after a US district court judge had ordered that Microsoft be broken up, and before an appeals court overruled that decision. As such, it documented the Microsoft antitrust saga at a particularly striking moment. Heilemann toiled away at the piece until the last second, and the final product ballooned to a whopping 52 pages. He later recalled that afterward, "Condé Nast chair S. I. Newhouse Jr. faxed me a note saying that it rose to the level of Greek tragedy."
Microsoft and the DOJ eventually settled on a less extreme antitrust penalty, a conclusion that would no doubt set the tenor for future antitrust proceedings. Looking back at the case now, how, if at all, do you think it ought to have shaken out differently? Let me know what you think in the comments below the story.
See you next week!
Eve
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