By forcing the kernel to be untamperable, Microsoft can arbitrarily enforce ANY policy they choose on your PC. They could spy on every single piece of network communication. They could ban any given software from being able to run on Windows - maybe Chrome, maybe Steam, any competitor at all. They actually could easily enforce laws on banned content too - any given website, book, audio or video could be impossible to consume, and an attempt to try could be reported to Microsoft. They could stream the contents of your display and mic and camera at any time to anyone they choose. There is literally nothing they cannot do with complete control over the kernel. And since the kernel and Windows itself is closed source, there are ways to hide all of it so you would never even know.
Security is great but it also goes hand-in-hand with control and surveillance. Every capability to increase security also increases the amount of control those providing the security have.
Exactly this. As soon as governments (or lobbyists) discover that this level of control is available to them, they will introduce whatever remaining laws they need, banning E2E encrypted chat apps, or Tor, or bittorrent clients.
I suspect that, like civil asset forfeiture, or running commands on botnet-infected devices[0], these actions will have only the thinnest veneer of "due process" applied to them. After all, if your computer is running "illegal" software, why should the government wait for your permission before deleting that software, or even tell you that it had done it after the fact?
[0] https://uk.pcmag.com/security/139675/us-disrupts-cyclops-bli...
IIRC, this was the reason Valve created SteamOS: they feared Microsoft would use their control over Windows so that the only viable software store on PCs would be Microsoft's own store.
Hopefully we get the digital markets act over here for similar protections
Particularly now that heterogeneous computing is making it big, video decoding can easily just be made not to work unless this tech stack okays it--regardless of the OS.
This chip could all out disable other operating systems if they don't provide the spyware telemetry that Microsoft requires.
Disabling other operating systems would be done by the BIOS if manufacturers locked down the configuration of existing secure boot functionality, doesn't need any new features.