By Jeffrey Tucker from Beautiful Anarchy link Mar 20, 2015

Without much fanfare, this month Microsoft announced that it is phasing out its notorious Internet browser called Internet Explorer. In all the news stories about this, the main focus has been on how it has been outcompeted by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, among many other browsers on the market. In addition, mobile applications are making gigantic gains over web browsing in general.

Indeed that is true.

On the platforms I've managed, I watched as IE went from 95% of use to 20%, a spectacular and well-deserved crash and burn that took fully 20 years. Microsoft was never able to fix its interminable security problems. Each new version, from 1 to 10, seemed to fix some issues from the previous version while introducing more problems.

It wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault either: as the dominant browser, it was subjected to non-stop hacking from every malware creator in the world. Even Microsoft's team of a thousand developers couldn't overcome this. It didn't help that Microsoft itself was crippled by its sheer size and bureaucratic management structure.

What we have here is a normal story of how markets work. IE was once cool, way better than the jalopy it displaced (Netscape Navigator), but it was unable to keep up against other and more nimble innovators it inspired. It had a 20-year run of it, which isn't so bad. But history moves forward and in the wild world of the Internet, no one can presume that market dominance means permanent market power.

Tell that to the Department of Justice!

The DoJ was the main player in a story that seems to be oddly forgotten. The DoJ hounded Microsoft for fully 10 years from 1994 to 2004 over its alleged monopolistic behavior. Even in the early years of the web, government regulators and judges had presumed to know better than entrepreneurs how to structure the market. In a long series of judgements, regulations, settlements, and impositions, the antitrust regulators diverted countless billions away from market progress toward litigation, which, in the end, turns out to be about absolutely nothing.

It wasn't antitrust regulators that killed IE. It was market competition.

The saga began when Microsoft released its browser as a preinstalled part of the Windows operating system. This action was considered to be a no no because it somehow represented an exploitative vertical integration of products that harms consumers, and stood in violation of a court order dating from 1994.

But there was a slight problem: IE was a free product!...