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Originally Posted by Andy Sjostrom
a) ask competition not to integrate the browser into their phones or
b) ask competition to also bundle Pocket Internet Explorer with their phones
c) if a or b are refused, file a suit and team up with the DOJ...
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or - none of the above... I know that those points were partly in jest, but... here I go again:
Since no single mobile phone maker has a monopoly on the market, you couldn't really go after them easily. Since Opera clearly doens't have a monopoly anywhere in anything (they're just a tiny thing), I don't think anti-trust laws apply there as well.
Antitrust laws apply to Monopolies, and how they compete. For good or for bad, the laws are designed to prevent a company that *already* owns a market from unfairly preventing others from competing in that market (or form leveraging their monoply to unfairly compete in other markets).
I don't think the laws apply to a group of companies that jointly decide on another vendor's product (I'm not a lawyer, so it's just my 2 cents....)
That is - if Opera themselves had a monopoly on cellphones (or the OS that runs them, I guess), and could therefore dictate what browser was put in, you might have a case. People might argue now that Nokia and the other european makers are an "oligopily", but Motorola is an American company, and doesn't use Symbian (that I know of), and Samsung is Korean, and I haven't seen any of their phones with Symbian either.
So anyway - while I love PPC, and I really like the smartphone, I definitely don't want MSFT to "own" that market - they do their best work when facing stiff competition (remember the leap from CE 2.11 to PPC? That was because of Palm).