If the judge fines MS, I don't think that any of the money would go to AOL/Netscape or any of the companies that supposedly have been harmed. I imagine it would go into the US Treasury. What would be the point of that except as a punitive measure.

In the days before the PC, IBM served a useful purpose by R&D'ing many advances and setting many useful standards (such as SQL). MS has served a similar purpose by developing (or at least marketing ) many advances.

For the sake of MS in the legal case, one might hope that Linux will show itself to be a strong competitor and soon.