Microsoft And How Its A Monopoly Since 1990, a battle has raged in United States courts between the United States government and the Microsoft Corporation out of Redmond, Washington, headed by Bill What is at stake is money. The federal government maintains that Microsofts monopolistic practices are harmful to United States citizens, creating higher price and potentially downgrading software quality, and should therefore be stopped. While Microsoft and its supporters claims that they are not breaking any laws, and are just doing good business.Microsofts antitrust problems began for them in the early months of 1990, when the Federal Trade Commission began investigating them for possible violations of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts, which are designed to stop the formation of monopolies. The investigation continued on for the next three years without resolve, until Novell, maker of DR-DOS a competitor of Microsofts MS-DOS, filed a complaint with the Competition Directorate of the European Commission in June of 1993. Doing this stalled the investigations even more, until finally in August of 1993, the Federal Trade Commission decided to hand the case over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice moved quickly, with Anne K. Bingaman head of the Antitrust Division. The case was finally ended on July 15, 1994, with Microsoft signing a consent to settlement. The settlement focused on Microsofts selling practices with computer manufacturers. Up until now, Microsoft would sell MS-DOS and Microsofts other operating systems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) at a 60% discount. Only if OEM agreed to pay a royalty to Microsoft for every single computer that they sold regardless if it had a Microsoft operating system installed on it or not. The number of computers shipped with a Microsoft operating systems installed, and not for computers that ran other operating systems.Another practice that the Justice Department ...
