8 ms·

Microsoft returning to its early 00s attitude. I wonder if the EU will step in and make this an anti-competitive thing. Yet another reason to not install Wind

Microsoft returning to its early 00s attitude. I wonder if the EU will step in and make this an anti-competitive thing. Yet another reason to not install Windows 11, including telemetry, adverts, an always on internet connection, and abandoning perfectly functioning hardware in favour of TPM chips.

skohan 5y ago
This in particular seems to blatantly fly in the face of the precedent which was established by the earlier anti-trust judgements against them. It almost seems as if they believe anti-trust has been effectively killed between then and now, and they're ready to poke the bear to verify that it's dead.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Judging at the current state of Internet, anti-trust is not just dead, but cremated, and thrown into the sea.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure, here across the pond we tend to slap these arrogant giants from time to time with few billions fine. Still just cost of doing their often amoral business, but often a big one.
    - zwaps 5y ago
      As a European, I am pretty sure. These cases are fought for years, and theorized over for decades. In the meantime, the companies have gained or lost market share, profits and future revenues move in whatever direction, and the court ruling and the fine have little importance. This may have been different some time ago. Nowadays, however, rest assured that no internet company will be deterred by pesky things such as laws, morality or ethics. If market share is at stake, that is. This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google and Facebook. Google settles important cases (data related) to not have any legislative interference, and will pay the fine for everything else. Microsoft would be foolish to do anything else. The companies are more powerful than the legal systems in the EU. Not the EU, mind you - if the will was there. But it isn't. Look at the fines, look at the dollars actually being paid. And then look at the prospect of gaining 30,40 maybe 50% market share in the browser market - now that all bets are off and Microsoft has gone back to just siphoning off all data without even giving normal users a choice. Yeah. Don't be naive.
    - aspaceman 5y ago
      Lol "slap".
    - bussierem 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google > To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android, and has been fined over €8 billion (~$9 billion) https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... > In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 181.69 billion US dollars. So over the course of a decade so far and ~4-5 different cases, the EU has fined Google for approximately 4% of their revenue of a single fiscal year. Truly "slapping the giant". *Edit: Conversion to dollars*
      - t-writescode 5y ago
        Isn’t that literally the max that they can be hit with in a single case for the GDPR? I’ve called the GDPR fines great because they’re finally actually hitting with real numbers.
        skohan 5y ago
        Wouldn't the other poster's point be that these are not "real numbers" relative go Google's revenue? Fines actually have to affect the bottom line to act as an incentive to change.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
        I don’t think comparing the fine to the company’s entire revenue makes any sense. It should be compared to the magnitude of the conduct they are being fined for. If you base the fine for a specific action on the company’s entire revenue, it creates some perverse incentives around corporate structure and leads to all sorts of absurd results. For example, if breaking the rules to earn 0.1% of revenue leads to the same penalty as breaking the rules to earn 100% of revenue, the company might as well maximize the scale of each rule broken to improve the risk-adjusted return. More reasonably, a fine should be proportional to the amount of incremental revenue that the company obtained by engaging in the illegal conduct, and that should be multiplied by the odds of getting caught (so the fine can’t be amortized as a cost of doing business). I think this rhetoric claiming that fines are just a slap on the wrist made sense at some point when we were talking about million-dollar settlements, but now we’re talking billions, and in some cases it’s so much money that the company certainly didn’t increase their revenue by that much by breaking the rules. I feel like people are just repeating the same old argument and they aren’t thinking critically about the numbers. Companies do, in fact, care about being fined billions of dollars! It’s a big deal! That kind of money really does drive corporate strategy! Try asking your CEO for a billion dollars to build a new product if you don’t believe me.
- kreeben 5y ago
  It's almost as if they realized the cost of abusing their market dominance is minuscule compared to the monetary gains that follow.
  - skohan 5y ago
    That's exactly the cost-benefit equation which anti-trust regulation is supposed to correct. That's why it's a shame it's not currently working.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    We feared communists, and socialism, while creating the corporate demigods that puppet our governments, control our communications and by extension control everything anyone can aspire or achieve.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Yes. Basically they give up a few billions here and there but keep operating without competitors in their core business.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    When Google gets a fine they will spend 15 years in court fighting it. They are not concerned.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble. Android has fewer issues around the browser engine, but with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser, I don't think Microsoft is any worse than Android either. I hope someone will take action against all these three companies but I don't think the laws have been written to deal with this.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    > As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble. Would "but Apple is doing worse" really work as a valid defense in court? Wouldn't it just provoke another litigation against Apple (if the court decided smartphones should be treated in the same way as personal computers)?
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      It's not a defence, for sure. I just think that until the much worse mobile market gets prosecuted for antitrust violations, there's little chance people will go after Microsoft.
  - sciurus 5y ago
    > with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser Are you sure about that? On Android my default browser is Firefox. If I email myself https://detectmybrowser.com/ https://detectmybrowser.com/ and then open it in the Fastmail app on Android, it says I'm using Firefox.
    - throwaway744678 5y ago
      I believe it is a choice of each app developper (open web links in a WebView or in the external default browser)
    - rtpg 5y ago
      Gmail will often try to prompt you to use Chrome _on iOS_. It's extremely agressive and just like... why......
- yuliyp 5y ago
  Interesting, I went back and read the settlement, and definitely did not realize at the time that all of the terms of the settlement have long since expired: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503526/download https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503526/downlo... What's amazing to me is how much platformization has happened since then, especially in mobile, where even though no one company is a monopoly, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are definitely flexing their "we own the platform" muscles quite as strongly as Microsoft did in the late 90s (or stronger), to the detriment of both users and developers.
exodusanon1 5y ago
The last one is not a necessarily true point. If Apple and Android can stop supporting older hardware on their newer operating systems, why can't Microsoft?
ljm 5y ago
It's kind of a problem with such huge companies. The bit of MS that is funding VS Code and other open source dev-tooling has managed to win back a fair amount of good-will through their work. But that doesn't automatically mean that the bit of MS that is dealing with Edge, or Windows, or Teams, is also as virtuous. In fact, they seem purely driven by business analysts who don't actually care about the product, just the metrics. If they did care, you wouldn't get nagged about Teams every time you booted up the computer, and you wouldn't see them trying so hard to keep Edge as the default browser.
- skohan 5y ago
  It also doesn't mean that the work they're doing with VSCode is "virtuous". It's generally foolish to expect multinational corporations to act as if they are motivated by virtue - the incentive structure is just not set up for that.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    Well, small companies do not act virtuous either (with some exceptions of course).
    - skohan 5y ago
      Yeah I totally agree. I think there are some small companies which intentionally set themselves up to forward a particular cause, like sustainability for example. Also privately held companies don't have the same accountability structures as public companies, so it can be the case that virtue is a motivator for that individual but for the most part we shouldn't expect virtue from profit-driven companies, and that would very much be the exception rather than the rule.
shbooms 5y ago
just curious, is there any hard evidence that the telemetry in Windows 11 is any worse than what was in Windows 10 (which was already pretty horrdendous)?
nivenkos 5y ago
EU should really just start prohibiting Microsoft from public procurement and education.
- chopin 5y ago
  Not only for anti-monopoly reasons but for data-protection reasons as well. It's hard to swallow that any public service uses Microsoft after the Schrems-II verdict.
- JTbane 5y ago
  I'd agree but there seems to be an epidemic of baby-duck syndrome, as people refuse to even take the first step to learn anything other than Windows. Additionally, there is a lot of legacy Win32 applications still in use by gov't and institutions.
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  This (banning MS products in education) is difficult. Schools rarely consider anything else because it's what "business" uses, and so there's a lot of push-back from both students and parents whenever a school suggests moving away from Microsoft. I'm secretary of the parents association of a rather large European school, and face this argument at least once a year.
marcodiego 5y ago
> Microsoft returning to its early 00s attitude. They may have taken some step in different direction when that was convenient or profitable but NEVER changed their attitude.
psyc 5y ago
Maybe in some vague way - but in a technical sense, not allowing the user to implement or install their own protocol handler very much goes against the historical spirit of Windows. But then again, so does ads in the shell. But Windows has always allowed vast, fine grained programmatic read/write access to anything the running user has authorization for, and for admins that's almost everything. Certainly everything in userspace, such as URL protocols.
gentleman11 5y ago
I can’t figure out how to disable internet search in my app search on windows 10 any more. All my privacy settings keep getting undone in updates. It’s messing with my browsers. This OS stresses me out, it isn’t even an OS any more, it’s a manipulator now that refused to get out of your way
- maxk42 5y ago
  Invest the time into figuring out Linux. It's really a breath of fresh air!
neltnerb 5y ago
I have to admit, this user-hostile stuff is really not making me confident in upgrading the 50+ Windows 10 computers in our facility to Windows 11.
sneak 5y ago
Windows is trash, if you are running PC hardware and not gaming, seems that KDE or GNOME is now more than good enough. It wasn't always this way, but it is now.

skohan 5y ago

This in particular seems to blatantly fly in the face of the precedent which was established by the earlier anti-trust judgements against them. It almost seems as if they believe anti-trust has been effectively killed between then and now, and they're ready to poke the bear to verify that it's dead.

Ygg2 5y ago
Judging at the current state of Internet, anti-trust is not just dead, but cremated, and thrown into the sea.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure, here across the pond we tend to slap these arrogant giants from time to time with few billions fine. Still just cost of doing their often amoral business, but often a big one.
  - zwaps 5y ago
    As a European, I am pretty sure. These cases are fought for years, and theorized over for decades. In the meantime, the companies have gained or lost market share, profits and future revenues move in whatever direction, and the court ruling and the fine have little importance. This may have been different some time ago. Nowadays, however, rest assured that no internet company will be deterred by pesky things such as laws, morality or ethics. If market share is at stake, that is. This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google and Facebook. Google settles important cases (data related) to not have any legislative interference, and will pay the fine for everything else. Microsoft would be foolish to do anything else. The companies are more powerful than the legal systems in the EU. Not the EU, mind you - if the will was there. But it isn't. Look at the fines, look at the dollars actually being paid. And then look at the prospect of gaining 30,40 maybe 50% market share in the browser market - now that all bets are off and Microsoft has gone back to just siphoning off all data without even giving normal users a choice. Yeah. Don't be naive.
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    Lol "slap".
  - bussierem 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google > To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android, and has been fined over €8 billion (~$9 billion) https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... > In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 181.69 billion US dollars. So over the course of a decade so far and ~4-5 different cases, the EU has fined Google for approximately 4% of their revenue of a single fiscal year. Truly "slapping the giant". *Edit: Conversion to dollars*
    - t-writescode 5y ago
      Isn’t that literally the max that they can be hit with in a single case for the GDPR? I’ve called the GDPR fines great because they’re finally actually hitting with real numbers.
      - skohan 5y ago
        Wouldn't the other poster's point be that these are not "real numbers" relative go Google's revenue? Fines actually have to affect the bottom line to act as an incentive to change.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
      I don’t think comparing the fine to the company’s entire revenue makes any sense. It should be compared to the magnitude of the conduct they are being fined for. If you base the fine for a specific action on the company’s entire revenue, it creates some perverse incentives around corporate structure and leads to all sorts of absurd results. For example, if breaking the rules to earn 0.1% of revenue leads to the same penalty as breaking the rules to earn 100% of revenue, the company might as well maximize the scale of each rule broken to improve the risk-adjusted return. More reasonably, a fine should be proportional to the amount of incremental revenue that the company obtained by engaging in the illegal conduct, and that should be multiplied by the odds of getting caught (so the fine can’t be amortized as a cost of doing business). I think this rhetoric claiming that fines are just a slap on the wrist made sense at some point when we were talking about million-dollar settlements, but now we’re talking billions, and in some cases it’s so much money that the company certainly didn’t increase their revenue by that much by breaking the rules. I feel like people are just repeating the same old argument and they aren’t thinking critically about the numbers. Companies do, in fact, care about being fined billions of dollars! It’s a big deal! That kind of money really does drive corporate strategy! Try asking your CEO for a billion dollars to build a new product if you don’t believe me.
kreeben 5y ago
It's almost as if they realized the cost of abusing their market dominance is minuscule compared to the monetary gains that follow.
- skohan 5y ago
  That's exactly the cost-benefit equation which anti-trust regulation is supposed to correct. That's why it's a shame it's not currently working.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  We feared communists, and socialism, while creating the corporate demigods that puppet our governments, control our communications and by extension control everything anyone can aspire or achieve.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Yes. Basically they give up a few billions here and there but keep operating without competitors in their core business.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  When Google gets a fine they will spend 15 years in court fighting it. They are not concerned.
jeroenhd 5y ago
As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble. Android has fewer issues around the browser engine, but with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser, I don't think Microsoft is any worse than Android either. I hope someone will take action against all these three companies but I don't think the laws have been written to deal with this.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble. Would "but Apple is doing worse" really work as a valid defense in court? Wouldn't it just provoke another litigation against Apple (if the court decided smartphones should be treated in the same way as personal computers)?
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    It's not a defence, for sure. I just think that until the much worse mobile market gets prosecuted for antitrust violations, there's little chance people will go after Microsoft.
- sciurus 5y ago
  > with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser Are you sure about that? On Android my default browser is Firefox. If I email myself https://detectmybrowser.com/ https://detectmybrowser.com/ and then open it in the Fastmail app on Android, it says I'm using Firefox.
  - throwaway744678 5y ago
    I believe it is a choice of each app developper (open web links in a WebView or in the external default browser)
  - rtpg 5y ago
    Gmail will often try to prompt you to use Chrome _on iOS_. It's extremely agressive and just like... why......
yuliyp 5y ago
Interesting, I went back and read the settlement, and definitely did not realize at the time that all of the terms of the settlement have long since expired: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503526/download https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503526/downlo... What's amazing to me is how much platformization has happened since then, especially in mobile, where even though no one company is a monopoly, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are definitely flexing their "we own the platform" muscles quite as strongly as Microsoft did in the late 90s (or stronger), to the detriment of both users and developers.

exodusanon1 5y ago

The last one is not a necessarily true point. If Apple and Android can stop supporting older hardware on their newer operating systems, why can't Microsoft?

ljm 5y ago

It's kind of a problem with such huge companies. The bit of MS that is funding VS Code and other open source dev-tooling has managed to win back a fair amount of good-will through their work. But that doesn't automatically mean that the bit of MS that is dealing with Edge, or Windows, or Teams, is also as virtuous. In fact, they seem purely driven by business analysts who don't actually care about the product, just the metrics. If they did care, you wouldn't get nagged about Teams every time you booted up the computer, and you wouldn't see them trying so hard to keep Edge as the default browser.

skohan 5y ago
It also doesn't mean that the work they're doing with VSCode is "virtuous". It's generally foolish to expect multinational corporations to act as if they are motivated by virtue - the incentive structure is just not set up for that.
- FpUser 5y ago
  Well, small companies do not act virtuous either (with some exceptions of course).
  - skohan 5y ago
    Yeah I totally agree. I think there are some small companies which intentionally set themselves up to forward a particular cause, like sustainability for example. Also privately held companies don't have the same accountability structures as public companies, so it can be the case that virtue is a motivator for that individual but for the most part we shouldn't expect virtue from profit-driven companies, and that would very much be the exception rather than the rule.

shbooms 5y ago

just curious, is there any hard evidence that the telemetry in Windows 11 is any worse than what was in Windows 10 (which was already pretty horrdendous)?

nivenkos 5y ago

EU should really just start prohibiting Microsoft from public procurement and education.

chopin 5y ago
Not only for anti-monopoly reasons but for data-protection reasons as well. It's hard to swallow that any public service uses Microsoft after the Schrems-II verdict.
JTbane 5y ago
I'd agree but there seems to be an epidemic of baby-duck syndrome, as people refuse to even take the first step to learn anything other than Windows. Additionally, there is a lot of legacy Win32 applications still in use by gov't and institutions.
FourthProtocol 5y ago
This (banning MS products in education) is difficult. Schools rarely consider anything else because it's what "business" uses, and so there's a lot of push-back from both students and parents whenever a school suggests moving away from Microsoft. I'm secretary of the parents association of a rather large European school, and face this argument at least once a year.

marcodiego 5y ago

> Microsoft returning to its early 00s attitude. They may have taken some step in different direction when that was convenient or profitable but NEVER changed their attitude.

psyc 5y ago

Maybe in some vague way - but in a technical sense, not allowing the user to implement or install their own protocol handler very much goes against the historical spirit of Windows. But then again, so does ads in the shell. But Windows has always allowed vast, fine grained programmatic read/write access to anything the running user has authorization for, and for admins that's almost everything. Certainly everything in userspace, such as URL protocols.

gentleman11 5y ago

I can’t figure out how to disable internet search in my app search on windows 10 any more. All my privacy settings keep getting undone in updates. It’s messing with my browsers. This OS stresses me out, it isn’t even an OS any more, it’s a manipulator now that refused to get out of your way

maxk42 5y ago
Invest the time into figuring out Linux. It's really a breath of fresh air!

neltnerb 5y ago

I have to admit, this user-hostile stuff is really not making me confident in upgrading the 50+ Windows 10 computers in our facility to Windows 11.

sneak 5y ago

Windows is trash, if you are running PC hardware and not gaming, seems that KDE or GNOME is now more than good enough. It wasn't always this way, but it is now.