This case involves the application of familiar and fundamental tenets of antitrust law. Microsoft recognized that emerging technologies posed a threat to its Windows operating system monopoly and concluded that competition on the merits would not defeat that threat, so it mounted a campaign to maintain its monopoly power through anticompetitive means. A.The Offense Of Monopolization 1. Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Servs. The courts assess the legality of the defendant's conduct in light of, among other things, the defendant's proffered justifications, the consistency of those justifications with the defendant's actions and assertions, and the sufficiency of those justifications to explain the full extent of conduct.
Predatory conduct is, of course, exclusionary.
The Supreme Court's decisions in Eastman Kodak and Aspen, and this Court's decision in Neumann, state settled antitrust law. Neither Microsoft nor its amici dispute that the standards for exclusionary and predatory conduct, set out above, are correct statements of the law. See MS Br. Rather, they incorrectly contend that the district court applied different standards, notwithstanding that court's explicit reliance on the antitrust principles set out in Eastman Kodak, Aspen, and Neumann. They then attack those different standards, which the district court did not endorse.