"Can you name one monopoly that exists anywhere that is not the creation of a government in the first place?"
Microsoft.
I'm a libertarian, but one of the reasons I can't even consider being an anarchist is that I consider anti-trust regulation to be a good and proper function of a government. I'd break up a lot more, personally. It's one thing that I find the otherwise-excitable class warriors to be bizarrely reticent to do.
I'd also observe that antitrust regulations do not forbid monopolies... they forbid the abuse of monopolies, according to a certain definition of abuse. Microsoft was not punished for having a dominant desktop OS, they were punished for using that dominance to engage in shenanigans to try to "abusively" (in accordance with the legal definition) extend that dominance into a another sphere. Of course that is the theory, and what happens in the courtroom in fact may be arbitrarily related to the theory, but that is the theory.
I certainly suffered under that monopoly (as did the entire industry) but couldn't the argument be made that market forces took care of it without government intervention?
I'm aware that there was an anti-trust judgement against them, but as far as I can tell it didn't deter them in any significant way.
It seems to me that they simply collapsed under their own hubris and the blowback from their decades of abusive practices, and as soon as they weakened the competition ate their lunch.
"I certainly suffered under that monopoly (as did the entire industry) but couldn't the argument be made that market forces took care of it without government intervention?"
YMMV vary, but my conclusion is this: The government successfully prevented Microsoft from crushing the rest of the browsers. They really were trying, really did damage Netscape, and really were well on their way to more dominance in that field than they had a "right" too. And they were on their way, too; Netscape was faltering and IE was a better browser for a good long time. As it is they still had enough dominance to end up causing web tech to stagnate badly for a few years.
However, recall why Microsoft was so scared of the browser, which is that it threatened to become its own OS and make it so you could run a computer without Windows that could do everything you needed. Broadly speaking (bear with me here), this still has not happened. Here in 2014, you could run a small business out of a browser, and you can do a lot with a Chromebook, but Windows is still around, still powerful, and still pretty full of legacy software that doesn't exist in a browser and businesses are not having an easy time disposing of... witness the continuing lurching life of Windows XP, which Microsoft wants to be rid of and can't be.
I think it was a good decision and still correct, even if ultimately it really only served as a very large shot across Microsoft's bow (even if it was aimed at the hull) due to the fact that the browsers of the time weren't going to be able to manifest the promise of displacing Windows. We'll never know, but the secondary effects of chastising Microsoft may have been worth more than the primary effects ever could be. And I do think the secondary effects were more important; the direct impact pales in comparison to the fact that they'd just been notified they couldn't proceed down that path any farther than they'd already gone without the costs exceeding the benefits.
Of course, what truly displaced Microsoft turned out to be more Apple, via the MacOSX and mobile, which Microsoft continues to struggle with. But so may years ago, who'da thunk it? And it would have been silly for the government to count on that.
Not the way I remember it. Netscape owned the browser market. Microsoft didn't even have a dog in the fight (remember they were "blindsided" by the internet). You signed up for internet access with Earthlink or Juno or some other company like that and they sent you a CD with a free copy of Netscape.
Microsoft licensed the Mosaic browser from Spyglass and that became IE. As you pointed out, they developed IE until it was a better browser. The Netscape stagnation happened when they had a long delay in releases due to their undertaking a "thing you should never do [1]," a from-scratch rewrite. Around that time the 2000/2001 dot-com collapse happened which certainly didn't help, but Microsoft didn't cause any of that.
Fast-forward a decade, and now Microsoft is stagnant. Apple developed WebKit and Safari, and Google came along with Chrome, a better browser. By the time Microsoft worked its way through IE 6-7-8 to a browser that was actually competitive again, they had lost a lot of their browser share. Apple, with Safari, and Firefox, rising from the ashes of Netscape, also offered compelling alternatives.
"Who'da thunk it." Well I'm not sure. I don't see any evidence that the government has any better thinkers than the companies in the tech sector though.
IE 4 was a better browser than Netscape. I think we may finally be distant enough that we can drop our allegiances and just admit that. Netscape did not randomly decide to drop everything and rewrite a browser, they did it because they were trapped in a terrible, terrible code base that could not easily be extended to grow into the future. Netscape "layers", their answer to what we at the time called DHTML and today don't even have a name for it because it's just how the web works, were atrocious, and it was directly a result of their code base not being able to do anything else.
Netscape was boned either way... not doing a from-scratch rewrite would still have doomed them to being stuck behind Microsoft for a long time. It would have allowed them to keep making releases instead of just going silent, but they still would not have been able to be as good as IE. And they'd have still be stuck hard by the fact that Microsoft monopoly'd the price of a browser down to 0... and Microsoft would probably have monolopy'd the price of a server down to 0 too even faster than it did, given the chance.
Microsoft was "stagnant" because they could be stagnant because they had won. The judgment at least prevented them from pushing home the advantage, because they knew they'd be slapped down. This is what I'm saying was probably the most important thing about it, and it's easy not to see what "didn't happen", but I suspect that Microsoft would have done yet more "evil". Perhaps it would have gone poorly, but it would have been foolishness for anybody to count on that. (What we know now about Microsoft and Ballmer's leadership makes that a safer bet, probably, but we didn't know that at the time!)
I think people look back at the world in which Microsoft was slapped, and see a world where bad things didn't happen, and don't realize that, due to second-order effects, there's probably more relationship between those two things than they realize, even if obvious first-order effects are missing (like, Bill Gates never rent his clothes in twain on national TV going "Woe are us, for we are injunction'ed!"). In the end Microsoft's dominance would have been cracked sooner or later, sure, but in the long run we're all dead; no policies can be written based on that theory.
Microsoft exists due to intellectual monopoly (copyright) granted by government. Copyright wouldn't exist in free market because it conflicts with property rights.
Hard to prove, hard to disprove. Even without IP the sheer staggering output of such a large and at the time, effective corporation would not have been easy to copy in any reasonable manner. Enterprises certainly would not have trusted their support to people without the source code. Lack of IP, after all, wouldn't mandate that Microsoft make their source available externally, and without that, the knockoffs aren't going to have a lot of luck doing anything but blind aping. Consumers might have had some copy-based knock-offs available, but frankly, they probably would have always had reliability problems and Microsoft would have made efforts to make those problems worse, many of which would have worked well enough to probably make the problem mostly go away.
I can't disprove that Microsoft depended entirely on IP, but I'd suggest that it's at least a reasonable theory that it really didn't.
Microsoft.
I'm a libertarian, but one of the reasons I can't even consider being an anarchist is that I consider anti-trust regulation to be a good and proper function of a government. I'd break up a lot more, personally. It's one thing that I find the otherwise-excitable class warriors to be bizarrely reticent to do.
I'd also observe that antitrust regulations do not forbid monopolies... they forbid the abuse of monopolies, according to a certain definition of abuse. Microsoft was not punished for having a dominant desktop OS, they were punished for using that dominance to engage in shenanigans to try to "abusively" (in accordance with the legal definition) extend that dominance into a another sphere. Of course that is the theory, and what happens in the courtroom in fact may be arbitrarily related to the theory, but that is the theory.