Catch Me If You Can! The Microsoft Saga and the Sorrows of Old Antitrust

Abstract

At the intersection between intellectual property protection and antitrust, the Microsoft case has now become a synecdoche, a part for the whole: the browser war has indeed evolved as a marginal skirmish that should be interpreted in the light of a more general IPR war. Andrea Renda describes the peculiar aspects of the Microsoft case and leads us through the hidden places of digital capitalism, in search of an approach that reconciles the outstanding potential of e2e architecture with the need to ensure that content producers are able to control the diffusion of contents circulating on the Net.

Keywords: Antitrust, microsoft, open source, architecture, control, software, network, standard

JEL Classification: K21