Microsoft ends 10 year fight with EU.

[WereKitten]

Jereel Hunter said:

WereKitten said:
@loves2splooge

The problem comes from the combination of the following points:

1) browsers and the internet in general are such an important part of everyday life in work and out of it, and more variety in browsers is demonstrably good for the average consumer when it comes to accessibility, security, standard-compliance, content availability.
2) MS Windows has a huge marketshare, resulting in almost a de-facto monopoly when it comes to the "desktop" users. The choice of the OS is not even a known issue for most users, let alone an option.
3) most users are not literate enough to even know that there are alternative browsers, let alone download and install them.

Put those three together, and you have that a "special" treatment for MS is deemed as a necessary practical solution for the better good of the net ecosystem. Imposing on them that during installation a variety of browsers can be installed and set as default is ad-hoc, but the marketshare split is such that trying to stick to general rules as if we were in a really free market when it comes to OSs is irrealistic.

That may have been true once, but it isn't not. If we go back 5 or 6 years, MS had the market, 95% or so marketshare. They have since lost around 40% of that share. Why? Because products that people liked came out, and they decided to use them. The fact is, the EU isn't trying to keep MS from being a monopoly. MS's marketshare in IE is only about 60% and falling... they are trying to prevent it from even being a market leader. That's an abuse of power.

Maybe I wasn't clear. The monopoly is in the OS market, not in the browser market, but MS always exploited their position of advantage in the OS market to push their other product lines.

Now it's great that Firefox and to a lesser extent Safari, Opera and Chrome have been chipping in the browser space, and in the case of Firefox even became first-tier players. It's a testament to the dismal quality of IE6 that Firefox could make the inroads it did.

But even the most entrenched fans of laissez-faire in economic matters know the dangers of exploitation of a monopolistic position to hamper competition in related fields.

In that sense, I think it could be a pragmatical necessity to push for ways to level the field when it comes to browser choice, as it's arguably the most important piece of software when it comes to most users, and at the same time one that is transparent to most of them.