If Microsoft was Michael Jackson...

They would have been found guilty and then the children involved would have had to pay him.

Bottom line. MS lost in court over antitrust issues. As a "punishment" MS has been forced to "open" its networking protocol. So MS decided they would just make the protocol license so expensive that their competitors cannot afford it.

As the article points out protocols generally are licensed for free. The reason for this is that when a company creates a protocol like this, they want as many people to use it as possible. If they charged, no one (few) would bother using it.

However if you are a monopoly you can play by different rules. People *have* to use it.

Microsoft is Profiting from Punishment