Obama's Justice Department is beating its chest like a gorilla in heat for publicity purposes. What are they going to do? Get a promise like: you can buy it only if you don't sue anybody because you own it? Check. That'll work. (This is the same President that was going to close the torture facility at Guantanamo. Never happened. Let freedom ring.)

Can you remember the last time Justice had a successful antitrust slap-down? Standard Oil of New Jersey, 1911, a monopolist that got broken up into a government-coddled oligopoly. Nice work, boys. IBM, 1960s; oops, scratch that. AT&T breakup, 1982. One relatively benevolent regulated monopoly that became a cacophony of sorry telephone companies with sorry service, giving consumers a choice between bad and worse. And don't forget the Microsoft antitrust case. Microsoft felt so hobbled that it kept doing what it was doing before, at least until Europe slapped it silly for a tidy take: over a billion Euros in fines. That's U.S. antitrust progress.

The good news: whoever buys the Nortel portfolio will unleash it on the competition. That antitrust damnation will be a sweet sensation to patent lawyers all across the nation. Litigator job security. Having already downed numerous Nortel patents, the Dexter of bad patents, Patent Hawk, is available to invalidate that pathetic portfolio.

A jealous Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, cried in his lager, "Companies that are too small to play this game risk ending up as economic road kill." Welcome to the creative destruction of capitalism, Karsten. It's a large-dog-eat-small-dog world. Serfdom for the masses, nicely tucked under the banner of "free enterprise." Someone tell me when relabeled feudalism is over.