When you talk about "bundling" IE with Windows, you're repeating the spin put on the situation by lawyers for Microsoft's competitors...including those technically employed by the guvmint. Here's the True Scoop:

There's not much to Internet Explorer, actually. The browser, Bowser, is just a thin shell around a Windows component (yep, part of the OS), called "MSHTML".

MSHMTL is an HTML page viewer. Because it's a component and not an application, anybody is free to use it in their own software. You can build your own Web browser in a few lines of code, add HTML help to a program, even replace the Soviet-style grey dialog boxes in programs with a rich, colorful, Web-style interface. Norton AntiVirus and several other programs I've encountered use HTML interfaces instead of the old-fashioned Windows interface, and they're a pleasure to use.

In other words, I.E. as it were, Microsoft has been extremely generous in essentially giving away its Web browser technology for anybody to use.

The lawyers try to portray adding anything to the operating system as somehow sinister, but it's really no more unusual than adding support for various kinds of peripherals and data. Operating systems originally knew nothing about images; now Windows supports several image formats and provides free components to use them. Ditto with support for sound files--that's built into Windows now. Support for the HTML format is simply part of the proper evolution of the operating system.

All of the above is strictly limited to the technical issues of Microsoft's behavior, something that lawyers and judges and politicians are the least competent to judge. That's not to say that Microsoft's business behavior has always been above reproach--at times it's been so far below reproach that it's a wonder Bill has stayed out of jail. But I have to agree with Tom's regularly-expressed opinion (gasp!), that the guvmint has no business at all intervening in Microsoft's technical decisions. They will screw it up, guaranteed.

--Robert