Last night I had dinner with friend whose son, an antitrust lawyer, has represented two cases that appeared in front of the Supreme Court. I asked my friend if his son had an opinion on the Microsoft (MSFT) case; the answer didn’t surprise me but his son’s guess at the remedy did. Most people believe that Microsoft will go the way of IBM (IBM) and other monopolies who have been found guilty of abusing their power: there’ll be some kind of fine but in the end it will not affect them in any lasting fashion. My friend’s son thought the penalties could be less than one million dollars with perhaps several million in court fees: that’s the part that surprised me—how low he thought the fine could be.
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