Take a look at the FCC's best rulings, and there you will find Carterfone. You will find it, for example, in the agency's 1998 decision to let consumers pick and choose their own cable set top boxes. "Subscribers have the right to attach any compatible navigation device to a multichannel video programming system," the Commission declared. "We conclude that the core requirement, to make possible the commercial availability of equipment to MVPD subscribers, is similar to the Carterfone principle adopted by the Commission in the telephone environment."

"ODF has clearly won," said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft's recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format.

"We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible," he said. "We couldn't do that during the release of Office 2007. We're looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators."

By owning the "standard" and developing it in secret, without participation from other vendors, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. There is no balance of interests in OOXML. It is entirely dictated by Microsoft, and voted on, in many cases, by their handpicked committees in Ecma and ISO.

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Remember, standards bring interoperability, the ability to try out new tools and techniques, the ability to migrate, the ability to chose among alternatives, the ability even to run non-Microsoft products. If standards are meaningless and ineffective, then the incumbent' vendor lock-in will win every time. At that point, isn't it convenient for them to have a monopoly in operating systems and productivity applications? This, in my opinion, is the essence of Novell's 2004 complaint, Opera's present complaint, and the ongoing file format debate. Microsoft's monopoly power and the resulting network effects have lead to a relationship with standards where they win by winning, by drawing, or even by cheating so much that they discredit the system.

"This is a virtual diamond mine," says Apollo CEO Bryant Linares when I arrive at the company's secret location, where diamonds are made. "If we were in Africa, we'd have barbed wire, security guards and watch towers. We can't do that in Massachusetts." Apollo's directors worry about theft, corporate spies and their own safety. When Linares was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond company just might put a bullet in his head. "It was a scary moment," Linares recalls.

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Seeking an unbiased assessment of the quality of these laboratory diamonds, I asked Bryant Linares to let me borrow an Apollo stone. The next day, I place the .38 carat, princess-cut stone in front of Virgil Ghita in Ghita's narrow jewelry store in downtown Boston. With a pair of tweezers, he brings the diamond up to his right eye and studies it with a jeweler's loupe, slowly turning the gem in the mote-filled afternoon sun. "Nice stone, excellent color. I don't see any imperfections," he says. "Where did you get it?"

"It was grown in a lab about 20 miles from here," I reply.

He lowers the loupe and looks at me for a moment. Then he studies the stone again, pursing his brow. He sighs. "There's no way to tell that it's lab-created."

Given how much the diamond cartel sucks, this is nothing but good news. Competition always lowers the prices.

Apple Inc. in a new class-action lawsuit is charged with illegally tying iPods to its iTunes Store in order to forge a monopoly over the digital media market so it can inflate prices, exclude competition, and force consumers to continue to buy into its closed ecosystem.

The one thing Apple does really good is integrate all their products seamlessly. If only they published the specs for all of these integrations so it was an open, level playing field.

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

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Operating systems, it says, are not a natural monopoly, requiring just one supplier. Instead, in a competitive market, there would be a broad compatibility between different supplier's products. "Competition would encourage open standards and interoperability as vendors would, for competitive reasons, want their products to interact with other vendors' products," the submission says.

The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn't exist -- like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players.

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The new hardware limits the number of potential customers for Apple's products, adding engineering cost to a device in order to reduce its functionality. It's hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can't build their own players to load up iPods -- now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it's conceivable that we'd get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy -- this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).

It won't be the first time Apple has rejigged iTunes/iPod to lock out competitors: back when Real built a DRM player for its own music that would run on an iPod, Apple threatened to sue them and engineered a firmware update to break their code (again, nothing to do with fighting piracy). This is the soul of anti-competitiveness: Real made code that iPod owners could use to get more legal use out of their iPods, Apple threatened to sue them for endangering their monopoly over delivering iPod software.