It’s a little difficult to compare a pizza restaurant directly to the reasons MS were sanctioned for their practices, as a pizza restaurant operates in the middle of a chain that starts at the raw materials for a pizza and ends at a customer with a pizza, but I’ll give it a shot!
The kind of practices you’d undertake as a ‘middle’ entity to become and then be considered to be taking advantage of your monopoly position are somewhat different to that of an original supplier, as @ddnn has highlighted in their post.
In the MS antitrust case, the key point of contention was the bundling of IE with Windows - the allegation here was that if IE was bundled into Windows, users would just use that instead of looking for third-party software, which then gave MS an unfairly inflated share of the browser market whilst cutting out competing companies who also sold web browsers - a key thing to bear in mind is that this was at a time when web browsers weren’t all just free things you could go ahead and download, but boxed software that was being sold on store shelves.
Alongside this there were various issues raised with comments made by MS execs to other partners where they openly talked about the bundling of IE and Windows as being a strategy to drive other software vendors out out business. In tandem with the bundling, they were also found to have deliberately made it more difficult for users to even install competing browser products, something else enabled by their ownership of the dominant OS platform.
The key factor that made these actions ‘criminalised’ (to borrow your phrasing) is that as the biggest player in the OS space, they were leveraging that position to purposely smother competing products rather than allowing their own products to live or die on their own merits: had they been able to provide years of evidence that the bundling of IE was purely to benefit the consumer, and had they not been shown to have deliberately obfuscated and hindered the processes for a consumer to install a third party option, it’s possible that the decision would have been in their favour.
To use your pizza restaurant analogy - Your hypothetical, wildly successful pizza company would have significant deals with suppliers and advertising agencies, in a local area this may constitute a significant portion of those other companies’ revenues. To be considered a ‘criminalized’ monopoly, they may go on to do things like:
- Go to the company that sells all the pizza ingredients and threaten to find other suppliers if they don’t stop doing business with the other restaurants
- Tell advertisers that they won’t pay for anymore ads if they continue to also run ads for other restaurants
Your reaction to this may be ‘so what, the other restaurants can just find a new supplier or advertiser’ but that’s where your analogy kind of falls apart as a comparison to MS and Google - in their case, MS aren’t just the pizza place trying to sell the IE Pizza, since they are the company who also supply the Windows ingredients and marketing they’re also the supplier and the advertising agency!
So, consider that scenario - your pizza place now owns and operates the largest pizza ingredient supplier and advertising businesses in your local area. That’s great! But, it could be considered a ‘criminalised’ monopoly if they then went on to:
- Refuse to sell pizza ingredients to other pizza restaurants who won’t sell pizzas with the exact topping combinations they dictate (The same way that MS signed contracts for vendors who wanted to sell PCs with Windows to exclude third party browsers from their shipped system images)
- Make it difficult for restaurants to order their toppings from another supplier if they don’t like the ones they supply (The same way that MS made it more difficult for a user to install a third party browser)
- Perhaps they would even insist that any restaurant that ordered their dough also ordered their toppings (The same way that MS insisted that IE must be bundled with Windows and that the two products were actually inseparable)
), please do share some insight in regards to what that could actually and practically mean in the foreseeable future of enforcing punishment/limitations resulting from the ruling.
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) is that it allows anyone to bundle Firefox into a distro with any customisations that they see fit - there’s no requirement on the maintainer of any given distro to have the default search engine set to Google, or any other setting that may otherwise be the case with a vanilla build of Firefox.