This will be the focus of our next Microsoft conference. The current DOJ litigation deals with narrow issues concerning restrictive contracts and product bundling. The easiest remedies would limit the use of restrictive contracts, such as contracts that prevent Internet Service Providers or OEMs from giving consumers the opportunity to choose non-Microsoft products. Practical rules regarding product bundling are more difficult, as is the issue of predatory pricing, which DOJ and the EC have ignored. But there are several other types of remedies which may be more useful.
Issues regarding interoperability are very important.
The European Community's 1984 undertaking with IBM was mostly about interoperability issues. There has been much antitrust work on interoperability that relates to telephone monopolies. Biases of Internet navigation and related areas are very important, particularly if Microsoft succeeds in monopolizing the browser market, dominating the search engine market, and becoming the front end for new video set top boxes. Policy makers and the public need to debate conduct rules which would prevent a dominant OS vendor, like Microsoft, from exercising undue influence over Internet information searching and navigation technologies. There are also other remedies that challenge Microsoft on a more basic level.