FSFE Supports Microsoft Antitrust Investigation

An anonymous reader sends us to LinuxElectrons.com for an announcement from the Free Software Foundation Europe, in the form of a letter (PDF) sent to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. FSFE offers to support a possible EU antitrust investigation of Microsoft, declaring that "Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards." Opera Software issued a complaint to the Competition Commissioner based on anti-competitive behavior in the web browser market. FSFE president Georg Greve writes in the letter, "Although Opera Software does not produce Free Software, we largely share their assessment and concerns regarding the present situation in the Internet browser market."

Comments

Confused..

[mikesd81]

I never really understood the whole browser inclusion with the antitrust aspect. Of all things Microsoft does, not including a free alternative, or alternative at all, to a internet browser seems petty. I just recently had to format this computer, and recently built another and I promptly downloaded Fire Fox. I think Opera's problem is they just aren't making it like FF and IE are...

That's not to say that MS is innocent, but they're not blatantly stopping any installation of alternative browsers, or office suites.

Re:Confused..

[calebt3]

but they're not blatantly stopping any installation of alternative browsers Not at the consumer level, no. Although their EULA is worded in such a way that I am sure that they would be legally capable of making that decision if they wanted to. Also, (IIRC) MS punished Dell for trying to install Firefox on their machines.

Re:Confused..

[Draek]

it's not that they included a web browser with their operating system, it's that they included a web browser that doesn't properly implement existing standards *and* includes their own propietary protocols with their OS, thereby leveraging their existing monopoly to prevent standards-compliant products from competing fairly in the market.

if IE rendered standards-compliant webpages at least as good as Firefox does (let alone how Opera and KHTML do) and they didn't include the ActiveX crap with it, my guess is that nobody would be complaining about them bundling it with their OS. Certainly I wouldn't, at least.

Re:Confused..

[RAMMS EIN]

It's not that Microsoft actively _prevents_ you from installing competing software (browser, media player, ...) on their OS. But the fact that they _include_ their own already poisons the market. Windows's dominance of the desktop market means that the vast majority of desktop users _also_ get Internet Explorer. They _can_ install a different browser, but this requires extra effort that many people are (understandably) not willing to make.

It is the extra effort that people have to make to get a browser other than Internet Explorer that makes it so difficult for other browser vendors to compete. Many people won't even _consider_ installing a different browser. On top of that, Internet Explorer's dominance makes webmasters (understandably) reluctant of breaking compatibility with it. This means that vendors of other browsers can add features all they want, but if Internet Explorer doesn't support those features, they will not be widely used. This, again, makes it hard for browser vendors to even make it compelling for users to make the extra effort of installing a browser other than Internet Explorer.

For a measure of exactly how hard it is to compete with Internet Explorer, just consider how much it took before Firefox finally started to take away market share from Internet Explorer. Tabs, ad blocking, built-in search bar, better security track record, I don't even know all the extra features. And a large ad in the New York Times. All this implemented in a product that customers could download for free, with no ads or nagware or any other nuisances. This is not a level playing field. This is Firefox being pushed up Microsofts mountain an inch at a time, thanks to hordes of volunteers and I don't know how much money in donations.

Merry Christmas

[c3ph45]

Microsoft anti-trust investigation... it's the type of thing that makes you feel warm inside on a cheery Christmas day. Merry Christmas Slashdot!

From a web developer standpoint

[psychiccyberfreak]

Ok, let me clear it up, Opera is suing MS over their lack of standards compliance, not browser monopoly. Web standards are probably the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to IE. There aren't many good JS debuggers for IE (there are, but I don't find them very bug free). I think getting organizations to support this is a good thing, although in the end it'll probably slip through the cracks...

Do you know what "anti-trust" means?

[SanityInAnarchy]

*sigh* I don't know why I'm bothering replying to someone who can't spell "lawsuit" and doesn't know the difference between "an" and "and", but here goes...

Having a monopoly on anything doesn't make you illegal, but it does prevent you from using your monopoly in one market to discourage competition in another market. That's exactly what antitrust laws are designed to prevent.

Which is exactly what Microsoft did here -- and does. IE7 comes with Vista. IE6 comes with XP. IE has come with every OS they've put out since at least Win98, if not Win95 (too lazy to double-check that). It's not "free", because it's tied to an OS -- but it is bundled with that OS. That basically killed any chance Netscape had of selling a browser, because Microsoft uses their OS monopoly to effectively make IE "free", even though it isn't.

And that, in turn, helps perpetuate their Windows monopoly, as no one can legally run IE without owning a copy of Windows, and it certainly was never designed to run outside of Windows. Thus, if someone makes a website which is not standards-compliant, but which is dependent on IE (even without ActiveX), that website will only work on Windows.

In the old business world, the end of that story would have been: Netscape goes out of business, IE is suddenly no longer free, but there's no alternative. (Think like the story of Office before OpenOffice.org.)

The only reason we avoided this is, Netscape released their browser as open source, thus making it both truly free (in both senses of the word) and actively developed, and IE is none of these things -- thus, Netscape/Mozilla/Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox can actually compete with IE, whereas the original Netscape couldn't. (I know IE7 is better, but it is a direct response to Firefox.)

Re:Do you know what "anti-trust" means?

[houghi]

since at least Win98, if not Win95

The first version of Win95 came without IE. These were both the normal and the a(lowercase) version. The A, B and later C did have (different versions) of Internet Explorer. source

Re:Do you know what "anti-trust" means?

[erroneus]

It has been a LONG LONG time since you've checked then!

Fact is, 5.2.3 is the last version of MSIE released for MacOSX... and well, it doesn't work particularly well.

The lock-in argument works perfectly. Now, if you want to experience the web the way the majority of users do, you have to run Windows and MSIE 6 or 7. If you want to do business with the likes of ADP and several banks and others, you have to run Windows, MSIE and enable ActiveX! (Huge security problem if you didn't already know) Microsoft has enabled and encouraged developers to use their MSIE API as if it were the Win32 API which extends any vulnerability that MSIE has into any program that uses it. (This is where some, but certainly not all of the vendor lock-in comes from.)

Microsoft's intentional modification of web standards (you think they don't have the expertise in-house to follow standards?) has managed to twist the internet's primary uses into an almost exclusively Microsoft-centric experience. (If you didn't guess, I mean the WWW and Email as the primary uses of the internet.) Microsoft's dominance in the OS and Office arenas have been unfairly exploited to serve their interests in the expansion of their monopoly to the public internet. This serves to create problems for competitors past, present and future in the arena of the public internet. It serves to damage the standards and standards bodies that were created to ensure that competition exists while innovative and technological progress moves forward. It serves to unfairly discourage users from choosing alternative operating systems (by that I mean MacOS and Linux) when doing business or recreational activities. (And is it relevant to suggest that the existence of a Microsoft-monoculture has made possible the exploitation of the entire internet infrastructure as spammers and other assholes create botnets in global proportions... millions and BILLIONS of computers are compromised to serve their interests because the majority of machines are running identical software with identical weaknesses. With every famous worm and every bit of spyware and every bit of email-distributed attack software floating, evolving and plaguing the public internet, there is another clear indication of the mess that Microsoft's monopoly has created.)

The matter of this antitrust action being limited to the browser addresses only a part of the problem I describe above, but it is a very central part of the problem.

Re:No surprise here

[SanityInAnarchy]

The difference is that if you don't like Safari in Mac OS X, you drag it to the trash. If you don't like Internet Explorer in Windows... well, tough.

I'm curious... Does removing Safari also remove Webkit? And if so, does it break other OS X apps?

If removing Safari does not remove Webkit, then they're really not much better than MS in that respect. If you don't like IE on Windows, you can, in fact, prevent it from being used for just about anything except as an HTML engine for other things -- and even that can be replaced with Gecko, though people generally only bother to do it under Wine.

The issue here isn't that Microsoft has a monopoly, it's that they abuse that monopoly by strong-arming hardware manufacturers into bundling Windows (and IE) on every PC sold.

I realize it's different because MS is a monopoly, but Apple does exactly the same thing -- only worse. They control both the hardware and software, and God help you if you should try selling a Mac clone that can run OS X. And that was on PowerPC.

If you buy a PC, you're FORCED to purchase Windows and IE.

No longer the case. For instance, you could buy a Mac -- yes, they ARE PCs now, amusing ads notwithstanding. Or you can buy a computer with Linux preloaded -- off the top of my head, Dell and Asus are doing this.

The only way this is true is if you define a PC as an x86-compatible machine running Windows, which makes your point moot -- if you buy a Windows machine, of course you're forced to run Windows, because, guess what, you're buying a Windows machine!

Windows is simply the platform of people who don't know any better. It's the AOL of operating systems.

No, it's worse. It's the platform of people who can't use better.

I have to use Windows at work. Specifically, I have to use Windows XP Professional, since one of the programs I rely on will only run on Windows XP -- not 2K, not Vista. (Oh, and it needs Windows Media Player 10. Not 9, not 11.)

I could install Linux, and I have, but I can't use it during work. I can't get virtualization working properly at the moment, so I can't run Windows in a virtual machine. And this software does NOT work on Wine.

I suppose I could buy a Mac, but what would be the point? The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is Apple products look shinier and work out of the box more often.

I don't wanna hear the tired argument that Apple should be forced to remove Mac OS X from their Macintosh computers. If Microsoft manufactured computers, I would expect them to be have Windows preinstalled.

Except that if Microsoft manufactured PCs, you almost certainly could still install Windows on other PCs. That is the very thing that made Windows a disruptive technology -- the deal that they got from IBM which allowed Windows to run on IBM clones.

Apple does not allow OS X to run on anything but a Mac, and does not allow Macs to come without OS X. So, it is absolutely one huge package, and it is exactly the kind of thing that would get you worked into a froth if Microsoft did something half as bad. The only difference is, Apple is a minority, and people actually want to use Apple products, whereas people are most often forced to use MS products -- but that is not a legal difference.

Re:No surprise here

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's completely insane that they are seeking to force a modern operating system to ship without a browser.

I seem to remember that they'd allow you to ship a modern OS with an alternative browser.

And besides, the only reason that sounds insane is that we've been doing things that way for awhile. How insane is it that MS still ships an OS without antivirus? Especially when their Control Center will nag you to install some third-party antivirus?

And even more insane is that they are going to have one set of laws which apply to Microsoft, and one set of laws which apply to everyone else...

No, that's exactly what anti-trust laws are for. Read that again until you get it, because I cannot make it any simpler. Anti-trust laws were created to restrict monopolies. Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is not. Therefore, Microsoft gets restricted, and Apple does not. If Apple had 90% of the market and Microsoft had 10%, we might be seeing the same thing in reverse...

Oh, one more thing: I strongly suspect that at least half this argument has nothing to do with unbundling IE, and is really about forcing IE to comply with the web standards they've been shitting on all these years. And this provides a neat counterpoint to above -- if Apple had 90% and MS had 10%, Apple still wouldn't be under as much fire, because Webkit actually follows standards. Wasn't it the first to pass ACID2?

Re:ho ho ho!

[tristian_was_here]

There should be a "-5 Knob head" that I could use to rat this parent post.

Re:No surprise here

[cp.tar]

The only difference is, Apple is a minority, and people actually want to use Apple products, whereas people are most often forced to use MS products -- but that is not a legal difference.

I always thought that MS being a monopoly made it a legal difference as well.

That's why Apple may do some things, while if MS did the same, that would be anti-competitive.

Re:No surprise here

[cp.tar]

Microsoft is a part of the W3C.

That means they first make the standards, then when everybody else implements them, they decide not to comply.

Re:That's complete bullshit

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or should I use another computer to download a browser, burn a CD and then install it from there?

I didn't say "should". But, if you look at the history, there was actually a time when a browser was considered separate than the OS -- when you might actually go out and buy a browser when you got Internet access.

Of course, people are too stupid to do that, so now everything's bundled. Windows is bundled with the machine. Nero is bundled with every CD burner, and WinDVD or PowerDVD with every DVD drive. And I actually like it better that way.

Lots of people use Firefox, because it's better than IE, and the Firefox user base is growing. So, obviously what you claim, is a lie.

Except for the part where I claimed something? What did I claim?

Well, except you use the word "sell". Anyone trying to "sell" a browser today is an idiot (except perhaps for special embedded devices).

Largely because MS gives away IE, yes. Well, and because of Firefox, which might not have existed, had MS not given away IE.

Utter lie and complete bullshit and idiocy. "One can not legally run IE without owning a copy of Windows". So? Some don't even want to run IE at all, ever thought of that?

I did, actually. What the fuck does that have to do with the current discussion?

If any random idiot somewhere makes a web site which is IE-compliant, is that reason enough to sue Microsoft?

The trouble is, it's not one "random idiot", it's quite a lot of them. And they don't realize they're doing it until they bother to test on another browser, at which point, they often shrug their shoulders and say "Meh, it works for most people."

And that is pretty directly damaging to the Web. That and the fact that those of us who would like to write a cross-platform website will have to spend twice as much time getting it to work in IE as it takes to get it to work in any other browser.

If someone writes a program which only runs on Windows, is that reason enough to sue Microsoft?

Except that you never claimed it would run anywhere but Windows. "Website" implies being able to access it anywhere.

And worse yet, you claim that the fact that IE ships with Windows "helps perpetuate their Windows monopoly". You are so full of shit. What helps them perpetuate the Windows monopoly is that businesses around the world uses Word, nothing else, at all.

Wait, I'm full of shit because I suggest that there might be more than one reason, hence the word helps? Which is more believable, that there is one reason, or that there are many?

If it was only Word, don't you think more businesses would be using OpenOffice on a Mac by now?

And the lies and bullshit continues. Netscape died because it wasn't open source?

I never said that.

Netscape SUCKS, SUCKED, and HAS ALWAYS SUCKED.

Wow, you're a moron.

Out of curiosity, you say you use Debian. What's your browser? Let me guess: Iceweasel?

You are using a Netscape derivative, my friend.

Now, here's a fucking clue, and you probably need to read this three times or so: I did not say Netscape died because it wasn't open source. I said it did not die because it became open source, which is why you have your Iceweasel.

Re:CSS today ODF + PDF tomorrow

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Regarding PDF, Microsoft had support for PDF in Office 2k7, but Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft in the EC (fearing that it would threaten Adobe's own monopoly in Office to PDF conversion tools), which forced Microsoft to remove PDF support. How's that for irony? An "open" format (PDF) that Microsoft is forbidden to support in its products.

As for ODF, Microsoft is sponsoring an open source ODF plugin for Office, so they already do that.

Oh, and OOXML is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard (see Brian Jones' latest blog entry on the progress ECMA is making to address the objections raised to the OOXML submission). When that happens, I fully expect you to make a post saying that all parties should be forced to support OOXML, since it'll be an open ISO standard.