Reason magazine gets to the bottom of AOL’s recently announced antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. The magazine’s weekly e-mail newsletter neatly sums up the innovative legal theory behind AOL’s lawsuit,
AOL Time Warner filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft claiming that Netscape, which AOL bought in 1999 for $10 billion, was wrecked by Microsoft back in 1995.
The funny thing is that AOL Time Warner is proof positive that merely being big and controlling a ton of marketshare does not a profitable company make. AOL Time Warner is bleeding money at the moment. A nice lawsuit against Microsoft is a pretty good way to focus stock holders’ attention on tertiary matters.