To limit exposure under common carrier safe harbor, and consequentially insurance premiums, most ISPs maintain only sparse activity logs and flush those on a periodic cycle.
These policies may also differ radically due to compliance with municipal and state laws (CALEA is federal) and/or private contractor facilities where "sensitive, classified, etc." work is undertaken.
To use an analogy, the phone company doesn't/can't record your conversations on a routine basis, merely the initiating and terminating routes. Still, they must have the "capability" of complying with a wiretap's mandates if called-on to do so. Don't get me started on the "warrant less wiretaps" fiasco.
I suspect that Microsoft could just as easily have an open WiFi network, but fine-grained policies go hand-in-hand with their corporate culture. Some would argue that Google's course-grained policies create their own set of problems. For a similar example, look at how hardware provisioning and technical support is done at both companies.