The Antitrust Law's Regulation Of Software Tying In The United States

Tying arrangement has been an important issue in anti-trust law for a long time. According to different market powers possessed by different firms, tying arrangement can be classified as exclusionary behavior or vertical restrictive competition behavior. Every tying arrangement can bring about negative effects such as heightening entry threshold to the market, excluding other competitors, altering market structure. And it can also harm the legal right of purchasers and deprive their freedom of choice. However, the existence of tying arrangement sometimes is reasonable, and so it is not being entirely forbidden in nations.The positive results of tying arrangement are especially reflected in software tying. Microsoft, for example, by bundling Windows XP together with its Media Player and Messenger Services, saves many consumers time and money. Therefore, most software consumers tend to support the continued practice by computer marketers of including various software products in an operating system with no extra charge. Such bundling practices, however, may also result in the effect of making it difficult for smaller software producers to enter and compete in these ancillary software markets and, ultimately, provide additional innovation. As innovation markets expand worldwide, the question that whether antitrust regulators should permit or forbid a dominant firm in technology markets to bundle several products has become increasingly critical and divisive.The antitrust regulators have formalized the regulation of traditional tying arrangement, but the rules for software tying arrangement are still under discussion. Because on the one hand, the software products and the software products market are complex, how to understand and make sure the behavior of software tying is a hard task for economists and lawyers, especially the latter. On the other hand, there are few researches and cases regarding software tying, the regulators lack the experience on how to deal with software tying.Counties follow the American antitrust law in theory and practice. But even in American antitrust law, there are still loopholes in software tying. Until recently, many scholars have got down researching into this question. However, the limited results are centralized on the cases surrounding Microsoft. The rules for software tying arrangement have not been shaped yet. Therefore we should analyse a lot of foreign data. On the basis of economic theory and the characteristics of software products, we can finally put forward suggestions on this issue.