Monopoly is something a devastating factor causing troubles to entrepreneurs. Something extraordinary has to be achieved by these new comers to the market to get their work up to some level. In the presence of monopoly competition does not grow and customers have to pay more and compromise with the quality of products, because they don’t have any other choice. They would have to accept whatever the products are in the market at whatever rates. On the other hand if the completion grows, more and more products would be available in low prices.
In the 20th century, AT&T ended up its dominancy when Justice Department battled with them for 1974 to 1982. More than a decade in 1980s went through in similar fight between IBM and Justice Department because IBM had the hardware monopoly. In 1998, Justice Department started a case against Microsoft as due to their monopoly new firms found hard to come into the competition. Several restrictions were applied on Microsoft. Microsoft also faced several acquisitions in Europe.
And one of the latest Antitrust proceedings made by European commission has been started. According to the commission Microsoft has failed to the commitment it made in 2009 to start a browser market so as to let new firms come in to the competition.
According to the contract, Microsoft was supposed to display BSC that is “Browser screen choice” on windows PCs in Europe where the default browser is Internet explorer. Most of the companies which exercise monopoly are the tech companies. Microsoft fed the market with its highly popular OS in 80’s and got hold of the market since then. Now most of the necessary tools are built-in by default in its OS. On the above allegation Microsoft’s response was as bellow,
“We have fallen short in our responsibility to do this. Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7….”
If lost this battle, Microsoft could face many sanctions and penalties. They already had escaped a fine in 2009 when they opted to use BSC allowing users to select any internet browser of their choice on their PC instead of IE. Microsoft offered a fix that will be sent out to all the users about 28 million who were affected.
Negotiations with Google are also underway to prevent the only dominance of Google in Internet search and marketing which is the soul of eCommerce business. If any lawsuit is brought against Google, it might be dead. According to some reports, Federal Trade Commission is planning to bring legal actions against Google. They have been monitoring Google for antitrust concerns. The most important thing is the loss of power, fame, and appreciation when facing such lawsuits irrespective of winning or losing. Microsoft battled for around 4 years which made them lose their focus. Other competitors took benefits of this situation and thus Google became the master in search engines and Apple in music.
It’s not the free internet world today as it was back in 90’s, Google’s crawler might not catch each and everything. In order to compete with Facebook, Google started its own social sharing network Google + which has not been much successful. At the same time Google has wisely stepped into the new era of internet browsing and that is mobile internet. It has launched Android which is a free platform for application development.
Microsoft has already been stumbling to get hold of the market and on the other side, Google the market leader in internet search might be pushed into the same situation if faced a lawsuit.