Breaking Microsoft provides enterprise space

Breaking up Microsoft might seem to be overkill a dramatic remedy for antitrust violation. But the inconvenient truth is that less drastic remedies are apt to be less effective and might involve government or court officials taking a permanent oversight role in the American software industry, hampering its evolution.

Microsoft is the latest target of antitrust laws designed to prohibit companies from conspiring by way of mergers, contracts or other forms of cooperation to reduce consumer choice. Though the laws do not outlaw monopolies, they do prohibit a single company from deliberately creating or maintaining a monopoly through anti-competitive practices rather than simply by selling a product that is better or cheaper than someone else's... A proposal to split Microsoft in two raises profound questions about the government's role in the new economy. Can, and should, laws designed to manage the emergence of industrial and natural-resource monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries be applied to the technology and intellectual-property giants of the 21st century?

No one can answer that question with absolute certainty, but in our view American business and American consumers would be ill served if the Justice Department abandoned the broad tradition of antitrust regulation as it has evolved over the past 100 years. That tradition teaches that government must sketch, with as light a hand as possible, the boundaries of fair competition. Microsoft insists, with some defiance, that it will defeat on appeal any attempt to restrict its marketing strategy. But it seems to us that a Justice Department proposal to break Microsoft in two would provide room for the companies to prosper while creating enterprise space for competitions....
-- Excerpted from an editorial in The New York Times

Germaine Greer on knickers
Lingerie is a fancy French name for underwear. Underwear is any garment that is not meant to be seen in public; the category includes, from the skin out, pants, singlets, brassieres, corsets, girdles, suspender-belts, vests, slips and petticoats. Under each of these headings could be marshalled dozens of variations; pants, for example, include briefs, Y-fronts, jockey shorts, boxer shorts, knickers, cami-knickers, drawers, bloomers, panties, pantettes, panty-girdles, panty-shorts, pant-slips, scanties, bikini briefs and thongs. Who wears all this stuff? And why is our culture increasingly obsessed by it? British people spent 1.6 billion pounds on lingerie last year, 25 per cent more than in 1991, influenced no doubt by the images that proliferate everywhere. Underwear is used to sell anything from Citroen cars to Vogue website. There is even an exhibition of underwear, Inside Out, organised by the British Council, opening in London next month.

When I was growing up, certain kinds of women's underwear were called `foundation garments'. If your clothes were to look good you had to underprop them with foundation garments, so at 14 or so you were packed off to be `fitted' with your first bra and and girdle. The bra fitter was usually a deep voiced, whiskery female of what seemed horrifyingly advanced years and she measured your budding breast by (horribly) spreading her hand over it. The girdle was (and still is) a garment so repellent that you had to dash to take it off in the toilet and stuff it down behind the cistern before foreplay reached the revelation point. Nowadays, firmness of the rear end is supposed to be achieved by working out, and no more covering needed than a thong. But thongs can be repellent on certain bodies. My hairdresser confided to me the other day that, though his wife is a beautiful woman he finds the sight of her buttocks surrounding a thong deeply off-putting. The very thought of Cherie Blair's mythical thong ismind-boggling.

-- Excerpted from `Knickers who needs them?', by Germaine Greer, The Observer, May 7

Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.