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EU Investigating Microsoft Over IE Bundling Again
vu1986 writes, quoting GigaOm: "Microsoft has confessed to violating its browser choice agreement with European antitrust regulators, after they opened up a fresh investigation into the company's behavior. This is a big deal, not least because it means the company could now face a fine of up to 10 percent of its annual turnover — $7 billion at last count."
Microsoft agreed in 2009 to inform users they could install other browsers. They did, mostly, but Windows 7SP1 users didn't get the software update. Microsoft is claiming it was just a software bug, and have taken actions to fix it.
what about there boot loader lock in that is even bigger.
Apple bundles Safari with every computer sold, last I checked. In fact, I'm pretty sure Safari is the ONLY browser you can use in iOS (everything else is just a reskin). And I don't recall Apple ever offering a Safari-free version of their OS, or giving me a pop-up screen asking me if I want Safari or not.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I've heard this tune before......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Sorry for the self-response, but I just realized that it might mean Europeans are *dumber* than those redneck Americans. The reason is that in America there's no legal requirement for some browser selection screen, but Firefox and Chrome have huge marketshares that are comparable to Europe anyway and there was no need for some ridiculous "selection screen" to do it.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
And obviously the EU would like things to stay that way. competition is good.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Grandparents.
Like what happened with AT&T.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Well, to be honest it's not like Britain has any big computer makers. They haven't figured out how to make a PC that leaks oil yet.
Coming from Microsoft, Ballmer could kill someone in front of a lot of public (probably throwing a chair on his head), and could try to get free claiming that it was a software bug. But acknowledging that 3 years late is malice, not stupidity.
" 'we learned recently that weâ(TM)ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.' Microsoft says it started distributing the BCS software to Windows 7 SP1 machines on 3 July, a couple of business days after discovering the problem."
If the users have already turned-on their new machines, then they are already PAST the browser choice screen. It is pointless to install it after the fact and Microsoft is in violation of the terms of the lawsuit. Furthermore does anyone really believe it was a "mistake"? Last time I told a cop I made a mistake and thought the green left arrow w/ red stoplight meant "go" instead of stop, he just laughed and gave me a ticket. There's really no room to let Microsoft go, else it sets the precedent that criminals can just say "ooops I made a mistake" and be left free to go.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Sure, go after Apple's iOS boot loader lock first, since they have several times the number of devices as Microsoft that are affected by a lock.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
In most cases bugs in your code is usually bad for your business. But Microsoft has bugs that are peculiar in that, it helps the company. It breaks competitor's products from the DR-DOS days or help it avoid compliance with court rulings... You know at some point people are going to say, "this level of incompetence is simply not possible, it must be intentional". And Microsoft will pull a Ham Burger and argue, "No! We are that incompetent!".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I doubt this is anything other than an innocent mistake by MS. Surely nobody thinks MS would be stupid enough to leave out the browser ballot on purpose and risk 10% of their turnover? I fully expect somebody responsible is currently pursuing opportunities outside of MS.
28 million PCs sold ---
and no one notices or gives a damn about the missing browser ballot.
Not a word.
Not a whisper from Opera.
Google. Mozilla...
Until today, Slashdot, Ars Technica, The Register and all the rest have been as silent as the grave.
Or emit Lucas smoke.
It's not actually hard, just a variant fluid-cooled system.
Since the seals aren't perfect for any oil with the recommended heat absorption properties, it will come with a pan that you put under the case and a top-mounted reservoir of spare coolant oil.
The other half of the problem is intriducing a new screwdriver that will be neccessary to perform even basic maintenance, and the screws will have an unusual thread so you can't just replace them with metric or US screws.
Think of it as a parole violation, not an actual crime.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Just to give an example: EU Battery Directive (2006/66/EC) and Unisys.
Apple doesn't have a previous conviction on the subject of using it's de-facto monopoly to keep out the competition.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Any sanctions won't be for "a bug in their software". They will be for:
1) Violating the agreement they made in place of the fine for the past violation, and
2) Filing a false declaration of compliance with the agreement in December 2011.
When you have a legal obligation to do something, and when you declare in an official legal document that you have, in fact, done what you had an obligation to do, well, the fact that you didn't do what you had an obligation to do and hadn't actually verified that you had before you made the legal declaration has consequences.
Isn't this common practice now? Look at the android platform, its designed to maximize exposure to google products and even now comes with chrome as the default browser. At one point in time the argument made more sense, but now its less of a big deal. They aren't trying to cripple peoples use of other browsers anymore, which was really the biggest concern.
http://interserver.net/
Antitrust actions are largely about misusing dominant market power. What market power you have in the market you are leveraging is a key factor. Microsoft Windows is quite dominant in the desktop OS market in the EU. Apple iOS isn't even #1, much less dominant, in the mobile OS market in the EU.
Bundling, as such, isn't the fundametnal issue. Its just the means by which Microsoft was found to have leveraged their dominant position in the desktop OS market.
... I get a not-very-computer-literate relative asking me "why TF does my new machine keep on and on asking me if I really want to use IE, despite me keeping on telling it yes I do, and please shut up about it?"
That wouldn't be because you are using mostly US news sources would it? Which you would expect to focus on things involving the US and US companies.
Like the 900 million euro fine for Saint Gobain, the 300 million euro fine for Air France, and so on. You can count the number of US versus the number of european companies that have had actions taken against them by digging through http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm?fuseaction=dsp_result&policy_area_id=1&case_title=
The EU says M$ has to inform users they can use other browsers. Why? Does Ford, Mercedes, BMW or any other car maker have to inform their owner they can use a different radio in the dash? or that they can use different tires than what comes on them? And why is this not an issue for Apple and Safari? Or better yet, why not an issue for Ubuntu? Ubuntu does not inform me that i can use something other then Firefox when i log in.
Mac OS X != iOS, as much as the Lion releases appear to want you to believe it. The actual bot lockdown on these things was Samsung's, which is why the same buffer overflow attack for the check code worked around it for the initial jail-breaks.
Technically, there's really nothing preventing you from jail-breaking these devices and running your own OS in place of iOS, other than the alternatives out there so far pretty much suck so there's not a huge incentive for capable hackers to do it. The graphics and I/O stacks on Linux for the Apple hardware are generally pretty low performing compared to Apple's stack, and they're pretty poor performing compared to the Raspberry Pi stack, since they generally try to avoid binary-only drivers in kernel space, and that costs memory bandwidth doing double-crossing of the protection domain boundary. The primary reason anyone does it is to run unapproved applications, which typically includes doing data tethering without paying the phone company for the more expensive fixed-cap tethering plans.
The problem with the Windows UEFI is that they are trying to put together an ISA for ARM, like in the Intel architecture PC industry, and then lock everyone else out of the hardware. They'd happily do that on Intel, too, if they thought they could get away with it.
For things like cell phones, where there's incredible regulation on Software Defined Radios, which then varies from country to country, that's really a matter of "you lock your baseband to the particular hardware and vice versa, or you don't get to ship your phone". The iPod Touch and the non-cell enabled iPad are less arguable, as are the putative ARM-based Windows 8 netbooks which in theory won't be unlockable. Well, at least not without using a dediprog to reflash the firmware after opening it up and violating the warranty. That assumes someone with enough clue is willing to spend some quality time with IDA pro and some serious compute cycles to get some matching hashes and/or looking for bugs in the implementation.
Actually, they enforce rules against anti competitive behavior quite strongly against local cartels.
Intel & MS just happen to be reported about in the US because they are US companies, AND they have not been able to contribute to a PAC to get the rulings defanged.
At least when it comes to the table space, there's the iPad, and then there's the wannabes. This would probably not be an issue, except they disallow other browsers to use their own JavaSCript rendering engine, and instead they have to wrap a UIWebView in their browser. THis has two effects: (1) you don't get high performance JavaScript, and (2) they disable JIT'ing in a wrapped view, so the performance is never comparable to Safaru.
Admittedly, this comes about from the technical chicken-and-egg problem of JIT'ing an extended UIWebView, vs. not having full support for emerging HTML5 standards (pick one) and Apple's inability to do proxy code signing on scripts like this, necessitating disabling the JIT'ing. They can't trust that the wrapped UIWebView isn't being used to run interpreted programs not explicitly approved by Apple for use on the device.
But you can argue that this is in fact a wielding of monopolistic power in the tablet space effectively causing harm to browser competitors to Safari.
I'm also kind of waiting to see if there's going to be a UUNet-style "your filters aren't good enough for me" lawsuit from some irate parent should anything "dirty" get through to their Child's iPod Touch. It'd be logical, given that Apple has elected to content filter the store, and is therefore arguably operating in loco parentis when it comes to protecting kids from the evil applications on the Internet. Should be fun if someone tries to apply the UUNet content filtering decisions to the App Store.
This made sense when the EU first started moving against MS. It made less sense by the time judgement was finally reached and the whole business is pretty much irrelevant now. I was actually quite annoyed when my Win7 machine started informing me that I needed to choose a browser last week, one of Firefox / Chrome / Opera / the Apple Konqueror derivative / one other option.
The battle is over. MS forced IE upon us for a while but they caved in years ago. Win7 has been out for years now and it seems no-one noticed that the question had not been popped. It is just inertia on the part of the EU that they still care. It takes years to start a process like this (I knew a lawyer involved in the case 9 years ago) and years to stop it again.
No anti-US conspiracy, just inertia. Of course the whole thing pretty much started after Bush was elected and stopped the anti-trust proceedings against MS. That abdication of responsibility got the EU started. Hey, we need the money to bail Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy out ;-)
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Who is getting on Apple's case for bundling Safari? I won't even go into Chromebook, but Apple has a bigger monopoly in the tablet space than MS ever had in the desktop space. OS makers should be able to bundle whatever browser they want. This is just a case of the EU getting greedy and lookng for way to take cash from anyone who has it.
Yes actually. Ford, Mercedes, and BMW are forced to acknowledge that aftermarket car parts made by other manufacturers will work in their vehicles, allowing a competitive market for replacement parts to exist.
Agree completely! I think you meant to post this one level up though.
I own a repair shop so I install and/or reinstall Windows quite a bit. In every single version of Windows for at least a year and up until a few weeks ago, Google was completely hidden as a search provider from the window that opens after choosing "I want to choose my own search provider" during the first time configuration of IE8. Google wasn't in "most popular" or "newest" and it couldn't be found via a search. Bing was there though.
If you go into Manage Add-Ons and click the link to see more search providers available to add, that loads an identical but different version and Google is on page one and easily findable. Hmmm, imagine that. Because of that, I had to put a hard link directly to google's add-on confirmation page on my flash drive to get there in a reasonable time. Hmmm I wonder why they changed that recently. Strange timing.
...who thinks this rambling about browser choices is seeming practically benign considering all the things Apple is doing...
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Actually, Microsoft's license agreement with the computer retailers prevented them from bundling other browsers. Why would Microsoft do that if they weren't afraid of the competition?
Why do all these claims about "only American companies" keep popping up all the time, when it is so easily disproven by official statistics?
Because they assume everything that happens is in American news.
Because
1) Ubuntu does not have a dominant market position to use as leverage against competitors
2) Ubuntu hasn't been convicted of anti-competitive behaviour
3) Ubuntu hasn't made a deal with the court to present a choice of browsers, in order to waive the fines for said anti-competitive behaviour
To make it even clearer: There's no general rule that says a manufacturer needs to inform their users about their choices. It's a specific company (Microsoft) that has made a deal with the court to atone for their previous anti-competitive behaviour. If they don't like the deal, they should have objected ten years ago, and just paid the fine the court gave them in the first place.
And there hasn't been. The lawsuit was ten years ago, where Microsoft was found guilty of, among other things, preventing computer retailers from installing competing browsers. To waive their fines, Microsoft suggested to the court that they'd make a "ballot box" where users where given a choice of web browsers.
That "ballot box" may have been a meaningless gesture, but if so, the court's error lies in being too lenient on Microsoft.
Because that's the penalty Microsoft agreed to in place of a larger fine when they were convicted of illegally leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to constrain browser choice.
Neither Ford, Mercedes, nor BMW has been convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly in the market for cars (unsurprising, since none of them has anything approaching such a monopoly) to constrain the market for radios and agreed to such notification as part of a negotiated penalty for that conviction, so the situations aren't parallel.
The same reason its not an issue for the auto manufacturers.
The same reason it is not an issue for Apple.
Even if violating the terms of imposed as a result of a previous anti-trust conviction were a common practice, I suspect the EU would continue to impose sanctions on firms that engaged in that practice.
The present investigation isn't about a new anti-competitive practice, its about Microsoft violating the sanctions for the previous conviction and filing a false declaration of compliance with those sanctions.
of all the cars i have bought, none of them say this when i first turn on the radio.