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A few years ago, including a browser with your OS was an antitrust violation. What happened?

What was actually an antitrust issue: leveraging a 98% market share as a cudgel to move into a new market by

1. Including a free competitor in a hot new market

2. Threatening hardware OEMs with financial penalties (not getting OEM copies of Windows) if they continued the practice of bundling the primary player's product (Netscape)

Back then, Web browsers were something you went to a brick and mortar store and paid good money for a disk to get. They weren't just handed out for free online. Microsoft flattened the competition in a market they were not previously in by leveraging their dominance in another market.

> Back then, Web browsers were something you went to a brick and mortar store and paid good money for a disk to get.

Who did that? You could just grab an installer for netscape over FTP, IE came on every windows system by default, and if you really wanted a CD or floppy with a browser on it, your ISP would send you one. AOL CDs were sent to every mailbox in the country repeatedly and totally unsolicited and those contained browser installers. Nobody I've ever known went running to the store to buy a web browser and I know people who paid for pkzip

>Web browsers were something you went to a brick and mortar store and paid good money for a disk to get

As a person who was on the internet since 1993, they were? Maybe if you wanted Netscape Gold with the editor, but I never paid for a browser and never remember any prompts urging me to do so or having to reinstall a shareware copy of anything.

Microsoft at the time had a virtual OS monopoly (around 90% market share if I recall), and the court found that they were unlawfully leveraging an existing monopoly for advantage in a different market (web browsers). With less than 50% share, Apple does not have an OS monopoly, so the same logic does not apply.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of enacting laws to protect freedom on the web platform. But the Microsoft fact pattern just doesn't apply.

In a way it would be better if the android platform didn't exist because then regulators would be able to open up ios. We were all better off after Microsoft was forced to allow other browsers. The government's ability to regulate monopolies makes them preferable to stable cozy duopolies.

I could be wrong, but I think that was only if you were a monopolist.

Microsoft are somehow getting away all sorts of dark patterns pushing Edge, on top of it being included, default, and hardcoded for some links from system apps.

Excellent take! What happened? What Microsoft did with Internet Explorer is nothing compared to what Apple does now. This whole App Store thing needs to go away.

Monopolies are good if they're Google's, apparently.

Are you suggesting that ChromeOS is in a monopoly position of any fashion? That seems to stretch any definition of monopoly I can think of.

The MS antitrust ruling was that MS can license Windows to Dell, but Dell ultimately gets to configure the OS for their own customers, including replacing the web browser. This doesn't apply easily to Apple who does not license their OS: Apple is both MS and Dell in this analogy.

It applies to Google through Android. Amazon sells a Fire TV, which uses AOSP; but now Google's licensing forbids Amazon from also offering an Android TV product.

Perhaps Apple should face antitrust action, perhaps not, but the MS ruling doesn't really apply as Apple does not license their software. The ruling was meant to empower OEMs and Apple IS the OEM.

What do you mean? ChromeOS is literally the embodiment of that idea and is a widely popular product.

They mean Microsoft daring to give Internet Explorer away for free and integrate it into their desktop shell, as it undercut Netscape's business model at the time: to convince ISPs that their customers needed Netscape--which cost $40 (at a time when you didn't buy software "for life": later versions would have upgrade fees)--and so their Internet subscription price should include the cost of Netscape (which you might recognize as Microsoft's business model for getting PC manufacturers to license Windows; hell: Netscape was even refusing to implement CSS or open their DTDs while throwing in tons of Netscape-specific extensions and features in the hope of achieving lock-in on their platform! both of these companies sucked and neither was sympathetic). https://vimeo.com/310654342

20+ years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Operating Systems didn't always come with a browser. We used to have to go to a store and buy copies on floppy disk or get a copy from a friend or download from a BBS. Hell, sometimes we had to install TCP/IP support since it wasn't part of the OS. So when MS included a browser in Windows the groups that also made browsers cried foul. Downloading and installing software was a painful thing and a real barrier to adoption.

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