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Microsoft Agrees To EU Browser Ballot Screen
An anonymous reader sends in coverage from Ars Technica of Microsoft's capitulation to the EU, after European regulators requested that Redmond bundle multiple browsers on new PCs. "Microsoft has decided that the last thing it needs in this economy is some combination of the following: fines, legal bills, and a delay of Windows 7. It has offered to adopt the European Union's preferred solution for browser competition: a browser selector screen at startup."
i dont think you get the point of antitrust legislation. It is not to set standards for all companies, it is to prevent massive companies from abusing their advantage to stifle competition. small companies are allowed to do pretty much whatever the hell they want, as simple market forces will determine their success. however, companies with a large enough market share gain the ability to control their own market forces and destroy all competition, hence the need for antitrust legislation to level the playing field back out. the reason the EU does not require Apple, Google, or KDE to do the same is simple, those companies don't have a monopoly on the OS market.
Nope. And it's really quite simple to understand why.
Microsoft, according to the EU findings (so whether we agree or not is moot), is a monopoly. That means they get to play by different rules to ensure that the free market continues to exist despite the monopoly. In the past, the US has forced companies to break up to break the monopoly, so forcing a browser choice seems relatively minor.
Further, as a deterrent to further illegal actions (which, again, are only illegal because they're a monopoly - different rules and all that), there must be some sort of punishment. To be honest, forcing this seems like a hand-slap more than a punishment: the horse has already left the barn, why are they locking it now?
Should Apple or Ubuntu ever manage to get an effective monopoly, then the same rules would apply to them. In the meantime, these rules only apply to Microsoft.
Google is, so Apple and so does Intel
Note that having a monopoly is not illegal - abusing it is. The fines and other actions taken against different companies reflect the extent to which they abused monopolies.