> Is anyone here even old enough to remember the AT&T case in 1982?
You mean the one that divested Ma Bell, broke their tyrannical control over what could be plugged into the telephone network, and made today's Internet possible? Yeah, I remember that one.
Are you sure you do? It's a real weird choice if you want to argue that antitrust enforcement doesn't work, but go off, I guess.
Other browsers were allowed to exist in Windows restriction-free. The DoJ simply took umbrage with MS bundling IE with Windows. The judgment was vacated a year later and IE still ships with Windows and never took over the world.
Conversely, the Apple App Store does not allow competitors and is directly the reason you can't buy your app anywhere else. Further, MS never profited directly off of IE whereas a sizeable portion of Apple's profits comes directly from their app store.
Also, most of US v Microsoft took place prior to Ballmer coming into power.
As a result, Microsoft had to enter into a consent decree, allow additional non-Microsoft software on PCs, and share a variety of interop protocols.
That's far from nothing, and the web would have been substantially worse without it.
Imagine if IE was the only Windows browser, MS JScript had dominated over JavaScript, IE-only AJAX was the only option, etc.
Measure not against perfection, but against the status quo.
(I'd also argue the entire experience fundamentally changed MS into the company it is today, where interoperability and "growing the pie" again seem important, vs the Borg-like domination trajectory its leadership was then on)
