Antitrust case in tech space needs to be built on intellectual evidence, rather than on ideology

 It took a long while coming but it has finally arrived. Roughly 20 years after it threatened to break up Microsoft for abusing its monopoly power, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has launched antitrust proceedings against Google. The charges against Microsoft then and Google today are disconcertingly similar: The use of monopoly power to exclude potential rivals from gaining a foothold in the market, also known in competition law as “exclusionary conduct”.

In what was one of the most celebrated antitrust cases of its time, the computer science and engineering in 1998 accused and found Microsoft guilty of using its considerable muscle in the operating system (OS) market to effectively destroy Netscape Navigator in the browser market. Microsoft did this by bundling its own browser, Internet Explorer with its Windows OS and “refused to deal” with any computer hardware manufacturer who dealt with the now-defunct Netscape. Microsoft’s almost complete dominance of the OS market at that time meant that no serious hardware manufacturer had the nerve to challenge it.