The big loser from this ruling is Mozilla. The Firefox search deal gives them a big chunk of their money and they are already financially not in great shape.
And just like when we force AT&T to do a bunch of stuff, that incentive should be "encourage and fund a healthy and competitive market or be dismantled with prejudice".
We made AT&T basically give away patents to anyone and open up their network to compatibility. People regularly talk about the innovations that came from the labs funded by that agreement. Then they turn around and dismiss government regulation of industries as "stifling competition", as if a monopoly has any desire to compete if they do not have to.
UNIX and the C programming language were first released before the agreement but continued to be worked on by the labs after the agreement was signed and took force. C++ had it's first commercial release in 1985 (agreement took force in 1985). Fiber optic transmission which powers the Internet also came from those labs. DSL technology is another one you might have heard of.
