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Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

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Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#371

Post by afh1 »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #349
osrec wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would replace government with people: people should collectively demand what you have described. This ultimately is a function of education, which will get better as technical knowledge becomes more widely and freely available. As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.

> I would replace government with people This is... The entire point of a government. Yes, they're flawed, but they're meant to exercise the will of the people, especially in terms of regulating entities that have outsized power vs. an individual citizen (corporations, wealthy magnates, etc).

Government has by far and wide the most "outsized power" v. a corporation or wealthy citizen... It does not "exercise the will of the people", it forcefully imposes that of their rulers.

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Nozick.pdf

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#372

Post by [deleted] »

cafed00d wrote: post #368
isk517 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft could easily avoid a lot of legal hassle and earn a lot of goodwill if they just offered a version of Windows with nothing but the most basic stuff pre-installed. Hell, just go the typical/custom install that a most other programs have during the initial start up, most people will just select the option that installs Office and the other crap anyway. The people that don't want it will never use it and curre…

How does one decide what constitutes "basic"? Is a password-manager a "basic" feature? If so, then is "Passwords.app" bundled by Microsoft into Windows an unfair advantage because of distribution when compared to "1Password.app"? Ok, then, can Microsoft make a button called "Passwords" in their "Settings.app" and that qualifies as a non-competitive "basic" "Settings" feature?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#373

Post by adam_arthur »

kernal wrote: post #318
adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

>Would YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? Would those YouTube clients offer a subscription service to pay for the data they download, or did you expect Alphabet to cover all the costs?

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service?

YouTube is evidence of that already.

A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators.

Bundling becomes anti-competitive at a certain network size, because there becomes no meaningful way to create a competitor network. The essence of what makes capitalism effective is competition driving costs lower, and in many areas in tech we have very little competition due to large network effects.

Keep in mind Capitalism != Free Market. A fully free market is a form of Capitalism that has no laws, and no impediment to monopoly formation. Competitive Capitalism with minimal laws to encourage competitive where large network effects or monopolies form is far more societally beneficial in the long run.

Decoupling client/data has already been done many times in the past in analogous situations, e.g. when movie producers were not allowed to own the theaters where the movies were played, giving a much more equal footing to smaller content producers.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#374

Post by naikrovek »

paweladamczuk wrote: post #266

Maybe a push to eliminate proprietary operating systems and file formats from government-supported processes would be more effective? It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this just seems to me like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.

Here’s the thing, though: Linux as a desktop is absolute trash and it doesn’t matter if you have been using it as a desktop operating system for 30 years, it’s still absolutely trash for anyone with an idea of what a desktop OS should be.

It is trash in the exact same way that GIMP is trash compared to professional tools.

The quality just isn’t there, and the quality will never be there so long as design decisions are made by anything resembling a democracy.

The open source model works for code. It does not work for design, and open source developers somehow believe they are as good of a designer as they are a developer, and that has never been true for anyone, ever.

Asking that someone be forced to switch to Linux from Windows or Mac is akin to forcing them to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, and if that sounds like a perfectly fine thing to you, you are blind to some very important things. Being blind to those things is fine so long as you’re aware of that blindness.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#375

Post by tpmoney »

adam_arthur wrote: post #373
kernal wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? Would those YouTube clients offer a subscription service to pay for the data they download, or did you expect Alphabet to cover all the costs?

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that already. A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators. Bundling becomes anti-competitiv…

They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#377

Post by ClassyJacket »

colonwqbang wrote: post #342
crowcroft wrote: post #190

What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences? If this is anti-competitive, is it anti-competitive for Apple to bundle music features/up-sell into the iOS UI, or provide an interface for headphones that no other manufacturer can integrate with?

Apple still charges extra for the Apple music service, right? Spotify costs $12/month, Apple music costs $11. If that's true then it seems market competition is working decently in that area. If you could launch a competing service and charge $10 you might have a chance. What Microsoft did was, they said "Hey we have a monopoly on office software. We should have a monopoly on chat too". And they started giving away T…

I'm not saying MS don't do shady stuff, but why single this out? YouTube is a monopoly on video and they bundle Music with Premium. Just seems like this is happening everywhere all the time.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#378

Post by adam_arthur »

tpmoney wrote: post #375
adam_arthur wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that already. A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators. Bundling becomes anti-competitiv…

They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?

Yes, there are many ways to do it, one of which I described above.

You can disallow bundling a video client with the video data provider, thus forcing the data provider to monetize by charging the clients to use the data. The clients make money either via subscriptions or ads, and selling new video data back to the provider.

e.g. Google would have to spin-off or re-org YouTube to split client/data and give same pricing terms to their client branch as to other third party clients

This is a lighter touch/market based solution, which I prefer to being overly prescriptive.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#379

Post by ClassyJacket »

EasyMark wrote: post #250
sunaookami wrote: post #73

I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.

Don’t these “actions”usually include separating the products out the way the EU wants them?aka don’t include Teams in EU installs of MS office or don’t even include office at all? Otherwise a fine is useless.

Does make much difference if all their competitors are already dead.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#380

Post by [deleted] »

adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

[deleted]
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