As the U.S. Justice Department is researching its anti-trust case against Microsoft, it is looking at applying the "essential facilities doctrine". The doctrine holds that a company owning an essential facility for a par- ticular market, such as electric power lines or the only bridge over a river, cannot use that monopoly to hurt competitors relying on the essential facility. The doctrine has historically been applied to electric utilities. Novell and others are arguing that Microsoft's dominance of the desktop operating systems market makes it an "essential facility" so it should share details such as undocumented calls and other information about the DOS and Windows Application Programming Interfaces. Software dominance may well be similar to food dominance, the optimum strategy being a stable of power applications to saturate a large segment of the market. The ownership of a key element, the operating system, may be of less use if the courts rule that the undocumented capabilities (giving an advantage to the Microsoft programmers) have to be documented and distributed to competitors. One would suspect that both the liberal Democratic and conservative Republican strains in U.S. public policy would be pulling the same direction on this one. One against monopoly and the other in support of competition at Bill Gates' expense. Sam Lanfranco York University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
