Microsoft’s Antitrust Luck Runs Out

You have to hand it to Lina Khan. The Federal Trade Commission chair, appointed by outgoing President Joe Biden, is working until the bitter end (which is likely two months away). Bloomberg reported Wednesday afternoon that Khan had signed off on an antitrust investigation of Microsoft. That’s a big deal.

Microsoft is the only one of the five big tech firms—also including Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Alphabet—that has not faced a sweeping antitrust investigation in the past four years. (Inquiries into the other four led to the U.S. government suing each, and it prevailed in the search case against Alphabet, while other cases are pending.) Of course, Microsoft has already gone through an antitrust investigation and lawsuit, back in the late 1990s, when the U.S. government sued it for tying the sale of its software products to the use of its Windows operating system, which dominated the personal computer market.