kiltedgreen

chasm said:

The European Commission works very hard at making Europe really unattractive to non-EU businesses. Apple is no angel, but the obvious bias in favour of Spotify is kind of ridiculous, but luckily they don't have a leg to stand on if this case goes to court, so my prediction will be that Apple will eventually prevail in this particular case.

How much longer the company will put up with the constant anti-Apple antics of the EU when Google is SITTING RIGHT OVER THERE VIOLATING EVERY EU DIRECTIVE ON PRIVACY remains to be seen. Apple would hate to give up the EU market but I have a feeling the loss of some products and services in the EU because of untenable regulations is going to be part of their future, which makes me feel bad for innocent EU consumers.

Weren’t pundits saying that the EU was anti-American businesses? Is it now only anti-Apple but they love Google and MS?

anonymouse said:

Well, you are all forgetting that this is Apple in Europe, where all the courts become kangaroo courts and deliver their verdicts based on the desired outcome, not the law. These plaintiffs will prevail because the EU will want them to prevail.

Grow up please.

I would love, love, love Apple TV to let a programme run until its end and then STOP.

If I want to watch the next episode I will do it in my own time thank you very much.

ianbetteridge said:

ssfe11 said:

The EC once again shows how clueless grandstanding politicians can cause havoc. The EC taking lefts and rights from Apple, Meta and now Microsoft. The only way to beat these ignorant folks is to band together and that’s what looks like is exactly happening. Nice!

It seems odd to come to AppleInsider and find people  repeating Microsoft PR talking points, but here we are. Strange times indeed.

To understand what’s going on, you need to go back to the 1990s, when Microsoft was unconstrained by any thoughts of antitrust or monopoly law, and spent quite a lot of time and effort decimating the third party software industry. It had a massive advantage over the likes of Novell, Lotus, WordPerfect and the rest because it could create and use APIs that were private, while making second-rate APIs public.

It could also deliberately break third party software with Windows updates. While “DOS isn’t done till Lotus won’t run” was a myth, the truth was that if an update broke a competitor’s app, that was good news for Microsoft. And they definitely weren't going to go the extra mile to fix something that affected 1-2-3 if it didn't affect Excel.

Eventually this got the attention of regulators including the DoJ and EC (European Commission). It’s EXACTLY the kind of behaviour that you are absolutely not allowed to do under antitrust law. When you have a dominant position – and no one doubted, or doubts, MS has this in operating systems – you just can’t get away with it.

In 2004, the EC case was pretty-much over. Microsoft agreed it had been bad, and offered to publish its APIs, and apply a level playing field – which meant its own applications weren’t allowed to use special “Microsoft-only” APIs. Anything Microsoft’s apps could do HAD to be available to others.

Did Microsoft stick to this agreement like a good little boy? Of course it didn’t.

So in 2006, a group of software companies complained it to the EC, through a coalition called the European Committee for Interoperable Standards (ECIS). Despite the name, ECIS was largely US companies, including IBM, Adobe, Oracle, and McAfee. By 2007, the EC had investigated and found that yes, Microsoft had failed to live up to its agreements. It got fined, and the EC asked Microsoft to propose new, specific remedies to make sure it didn’t happen again.

In 2009, those agreements were signed. And in them, there is a specific part – section C (42) – which deals with security software. Now you might get the impression from what Microsoft is saying now, something that’s being repeated by people who can’t be bothered to look up agreements AKA “pundits”, that this mandates kernel level access for third parties.

Reader, it does nothing of the sort. It simply states that Microsoft has to make available – and document – whatever APIs its own software uses. The company could do what Apple has done and move access for EDR (endpoint detection and response) software out of the kernel. It has chosen not to do this.

So no, Microsoft hasn’t been “ordered” by the big bad EU to do anything other than stop its old tricks of giving its own applications advantages that no third party could ever have. It hasn’t moved EDR out of the kernel because, at least back in 2009, the Windows kernel was a mess and developing equivalent APIs was going to be expensive.

Do I blame Microsoft? Not really: Windows is what it is, and keeping it secure is hard. I don’t believe its the platform vendors fault if, using legitimate methods, a third party messes up a patch. That’s entirely down to Crowdstrike.

But is it the EC’s fault? Absolutely not. Stopping companies like Microsoft from destroying competition not by better products but by leveraging ownership of a platform is exactly the thing antitrust bodies are set up to do. It’s what the DoJ did to IBM in 1956, and without that judgement we would all be still using mainframes from Big Blue.

OMG! Someone who knows what they’re talking about instead of the uninformed knee-jerk anti-EU drivel purveyors who have read too much online “comment”. Thank you Ian.

This talk about the EU attacking American companies is rather silly. The EU legislation is targeting the behaviour of mobile OS strategies and when it comes to mobile phones on sale in the world, who are by far the main suppliers of mobile operating systems and associated apps? Google and Apple . Any European companies? No. So the companies affected by definition will be American ones. They are not targeted because they are American but because the ones who between them probably control 99% of such OSs in the world are American.