Don't let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) "education reform" work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.
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Microsoft's illegal conduct was so blatant, persistent and obviously wicked that it prompted serious enforcement action from the DoJ's antitrust division, which Reagan neutered and which every president since has whittled down even further.
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The most notorious moment in that last-of-its-kind enforcement action was the multi-day, video-recorded deposition of Bill Gates himself, in which he conducted himself so badly that the video went analog-viral, airing on newscasts and being passed hand-to-hand on VHS.
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Today on @arstechnica, @dangoodin001 revisits that momentous week in 1998 when Gates covered himself in everlasting shame and gave us a peek behind the curtain at the private persona of a swaggering monopolist.
Goodin's piece was occasioned by Microsoft's intervention in the Epic-v-Apple affair, in which a Microsoft exec decried Apple's abuse of its "complete monopoly over the distribution of apps … to coerce app developers into using Apple’s payment platform."
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Gates's deposition is a reminder of how far Microsoft's position changed between 1998 and now. As Goodin writes, Gates's plan for the deposition was to obstruct, paint the DoJ as technically incompetent, and to "deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case."
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This was a brutally stupid plan. It failed SO BADLY. Government lawyer would ask Gates questions like "What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996" and Gates would claim not to know what "concerned" means.
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It was the Fat Tony defense: "What's a truck? What's a murder?"
It was so stupid and blatant that people in the gallery started laughing aloud at Gates's obstruction (after all, part of his defense was that he was a genius whose mind could not be understood by mere govvies).
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The deposition really revealed Gates's expectation that he would be deferred to and even worshipped in the manner that his absolute authoritarian rule over Microsoft had accustomed him to.
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As Ken Auletta noted, Gates had never had to sit for a job interview or suffer other routine indignities.
Goodin: "he had little or no experience tolerating—let alone encountering—dissent, criticism, or challenges to his authority."
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But even with a better strategy, Gates would have still been in trouble, because he put a bewildering array of radioactively illegal conduct in writing, and the DoJ had it all in black and white:
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* A conspiracy to force Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer and break compatibility with Netscape
* A conspiracy to modify Windows so Netscape-rendered content would appear "degraded"
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* A conspiracy to make an incompatible version of Java that only ran on Windows, with the goal of "wresting control of Java away from Sun"
* A conspiracy to get Apple to break compatibility with Netscape, tying Microsoft Office improvement to Apple's sabotage of Netscape
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With all this evidence, the fact that Microsoft escaped serious sanction tells you just how degraded antitrust law has become (it's gotten weaker and worse since). But just as telling is the impact that antitrust enforcement had on Microsoft's conduct.
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It's undeniable that the reason web companies like Google survived the 2010s is that Microsoft had lost its nerve, after years of traumatic DoJ investigation and litigation.
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Gates admitted this last year, saying the reason Microsoft didn't bid for Android was they were "distracted" by the antitrust action:
But that action had ended YEARS before Android. When Gates says he was "distracted," he means he was terrified.
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And as @superwuster pointed out, it probably made them a better company. Monoplism makes companies act like mafias, stupid and lazy, with an emphasis on abusive commercial practice rather than technical or organizational excellence.
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When AT&T was broken up in 82, corporatists cried that America was sacrificing its "national champion" just as Japan was eroding America's technical dominance, and without AT&T's monopoly power, America's tech industry was done.
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Instead, breaking up AT&T opened the space for THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and a generation-long American dominance of a system that has become a planetary nervous system, a source of prolonged American dominance and trillions in GDP.
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In other words: Fat Tony is a shitty businessman.
People express dismay at that 2016 photo of Trump with tech's leaders around a Trump Tower boardroom table, aghast that these people who run our tech world were willing to meet with a racist bully.
Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into AI discussions. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book on why I'm sick of AI⹋, which @fsgbooks will publish in 2026.
‡probably
⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI"
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large.
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Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the vast misery that generates billions while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Ever notice how people get palpably stupider as they gain riches and power? Musk went from a cringe doofus to a world-class credulous dolt, and it seems like he loses five IQ points for every $10b that's added to his net worth.
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I'm only a few chapters into Bill McKibben's stupendous new book *Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization* and I already know it's going to change my outlook forever:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
McKibben is one of our preeminent climate writers and activists, noteworthy for his informed and brilliant explanations of the technical limits - and possibilities - of various climate interventions, and for his lifelong organizing work.
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One of the dumbest, shrewdest tricks corporate America ever pulled was teaching us all to reflexively say, "If a corporation blocks your speech, that doesn't violate the First Amendment and therefore it's not censorship":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Censorship isn't limited to government action: it's the act of preventing a message from a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. The fact that it's censorship doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's illegitimate or bad.
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Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.
Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.
Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.
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