Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them

celmit@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 639 points –
Painful day for tech titans as EU finally sinks its regulatory teeth into them | John Naughton
theguardian.com
95

You are viewing a single comment

I mean, we got this "choose your default browser" screen for a few years. That solved it, right?

It actually did, solve it, unironically. The concern was that Microsoft was going to de facto take over the HTML standard and make it so that you had to use Internet Explorer and proprietary Microsoft extensions if you wanted to browse the web, eliminating all competition.

Now, more than 20 years later, Internet Explorer is defunct. Microsoft's current browser is built on Chromium, an open source engine that was created by one of its competitors. If anything it's Google that's now the problematic one.

This happened in 2009, when IE had a market share of 56% and declining. IE is (arguably) defunct because it sucked, not because of a one-time, court-mandated popup.

IE sucked since the beginning, that's not the reason it died.

Everything sucked back then.

Then Mozilla started not sucking, then in 2008 Chrome came out and in 2009 when the popup was mandated, IE had declined to 56% market share from 90% highs years earlier.

It happened in 2001, you're off by 8 years.

Back then Chrome didn't exist and they didn't implement the pop up, just assigned some overview and opened some APIs.

However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor did it prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.

The popup came in 2009.

Seems to me they continued to take actions in 2009 as a result of their loss in 2001. "Some overview" continued after the case was decided. Unless there was a subsequent court case I'm unaware of?

The 2009 dispute was in the EU, to begin with.

The didn't cause the browser popup then

Why bring it up then?

Why did I bring up a regulation that the EU imposed on Microsoft, in the comments of an article about regulations that the EU wants to impose on tech giants?

You're right, totally out of context.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
1 more...