Yet another development has arisen in the legal battle between AOL and Microsoft with their anti-trust case. Microsoft has now accused AOL of itself having a monopoly with the internet, after AOL accused Microsoft of using its .Net strategy as a way to keep its stranglehold on the industry, both in the operating system market and the internet.
The attorney for Microsoft, Richard Pepperman, has now proclaimed that AOL is trying to make a monopoly of the web and the evidence presented was in the form of an internal AOL memo in which an employee attempts to recommend that they should use their ownership of Time Warner to promote its internet services. The memo also includes a reference to making Time Warner"s content unavailable on systems which adopt .Net.
AOL replied to this by saying that the memo simply shows some recommendations and was never taken on board by the company. The evidence provided by AOL was given on behalf of the nine states which have opposed Microsoft"s anti-trust settlement and this current exchange has left the situation again at a stalemate.
AOL is also suing Microsoft using it"s company Netscape Communications to attempt to show Microsoft has also acted in an anti-competitive way by integrating Internet Explorer into Windows. They started this case when share in the browser market dropped to 7% following the launch of Internet Explorer 6.