According to Rules of the Internet § 12 “if I find something to be annoying, objectionable, or wrong it surely must be illegal.”
Comment on Is this even legal?
Chozo@kbin.social 10 months ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would this be illegal?
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 10 months ago
MS literally got in trouble for bundling IE with the OS 20 years ago… This is so much worse.
If you canmot understand why people are rightfully upset… LEARN YOUR FUCKING HISTORY.
sfgifz@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Those days are long gone. Else we’d see Apple and Google getting in trouble for bundling their own apps for everything on their devices.
robbotlove@lemmy.world 10 months ago
yes officer, this comment right here.
FoxBJK@midwest.social 10 months ago
It’s not, that’s why they’re doing it.
DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is illegal - they’ve already been taken to court and lost over similar practices 20 years ago.
It’s just not enforced anymore - and that’s why they’re doing it.
SomethingSomething@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Because OP is a crybaby.
lustrum@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Anti consumer and anti competitive. Using their position as the OS to bug the living shit out of you to use their services
Chozo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I'm not so sure how it's either of those things. I mean yeah, it's annoying (especially if it's popping up while you're playing a game), but I don't feel like it's crossing either of these lines. If you click "Don't switch", it goes away, and it's not changing anything without your permission. I've never seen it pop up again on my devices. I forget where in the settings it would be, but I seem to recall there being an option to disable suggestions like this, as well (although an argument could be made that this should be opt-in instead of opt-out).
I know this community has a (largely justified) hate-boner for big tech companies, but not every annoyance is a crime. If anything, I'm just glad to see that they're at least respecting the user's consent these days; in the before times, Microsoft would just revert all your shit to what they wanted, whether you liked it or not, permission be damned. I lost track of how many WinXP updates would reinstall that Bing Bar (or MSN or whatever they called it back then) without asking me.
Unless there's another angle that I'm not seeing, I don't see how this is that much of a problem. If anything, it's a good advertisement for Linux.
andallthat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not even remotely a legal expert and I don’t know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is “could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch from Edge to Chrome or not?”.
If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking “Yes” only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push Chrome or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.
If that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking “Yes” directly changes Chrome’s settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to convince more users to switch to their own browser from a competitor’s. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.
sfgifz@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Google already does this - use Google Search or Gmail on a non-Google browser and it will “suggest” you use Chrome
Elderos@lemmings.world 10 months ago
I think this sentiment come from the long history of Microsoft repeatedly breaking and then failing to address antitrust requests. At this point people just assume bas faith.
I remember maybe a decade ago how it seemed a big deal anytime they used their OS monopoly to fuck with 3rd parties alternatives. But yeah, I don’t think every popup and annoyance is a crime. There’s a fine line they walk to still push their first-party garbage.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Using a dominant market position as leverage against competitors, is per definition Anti consumer and anti competitive.
Apart from that, they are basically hijacking a competitors product to show this, which I think if not already illegal, it absolutely should be.
Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.
E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …
I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.
squiblet@kbin.social 10 months ago
Anticompetitive is a matter of antitrust law. Microsoft doesn’t currently have a monopoly on operating systems in the way they did 25 years ago.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 10 months ago
Looking online in January they had a 74% share of desktops.
Linux is certainly dominating in the cloud but that doesn’t really make much difference here.
avapa@lemmy.world 10 months ago
74% market share for desktop OS is actually a lot less than I thought. Guess macOS had a solid comeback