re: Youtube TV is going nuclear on Roku

quote:

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I seem to recall a place and time when Microsoft was sued by the US government in an anti-trust case won by the government to break up their bundling of Microsoft's commingling of the code of its operating system with its Internet Explorer browser.

How is this any different?

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FTC/DoJ had an inquiry into Microsoft anti-competitive practices in the early 90s. As a result of that, Microsoft promised to the DoJ it would not tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows, in an effort to avoid charges of monopolization. That doesn't mean nobody can bundle products, just Microsoft agreed that it wouldn't do so.

Then, years later, Microsoft wove Windows and IE together in such a way so that they could claim IE was a feature integral to Windows, and not a separate product bundled (making them not in violation of the prior agreement). But really they were in violation of their prior agreement by forcing this technicality. So the judge ordered them to stop and commit to their agreement. Roku/Google has no prior agreement not to bundle products.

Microsoft was found guilty of committing monopolization in the end, and there was ample testimony and evidence that Microsoft was intentionally doing this (amongst many other things things) to choke their competitors out of the market and give themselves the monopoly position they had been accused of for years. Section 2 of the Sherman Act defining monopolization specifies that first, market dominance to the degree of monopoly has to be established and second, it had to be gained as a result of unlawful exclusionary conduct. The government was right to find them guilty of this, though the initial decision to break them up may have been heavy handed. I don't think this applies to either party in this situation.