zlacker

Microsoft was hardly even aggressive about leveraging their OS monopoly to promote their Internet Explorer browser. All they did was switch from selling it as a separate product to giving it away for free in order to crush Netscape. And Microsoft made IE the default handler for web links. But they never did anything to prevent users from installing third-party browsers on Windows.

>>nradov+(OP)
... and that was enough to completely destroy competition, and get a near monopoly for many years. Clearly amoral move enough that they got slapped with quite a big anti-competition fine from EU for this.

>>nradov+(OP)
I guess we'd have to argue what "aggressive" means here, but what you describe as "all they did" can and has been found to be monopoly behavior and against the law in the US. This is known as bundling and there are a bunch of prior cases which confirm it can be considered a violation of antitrust law. The bundling concept was the basis of the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the late 90s.

That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine.

Sigh.

>>angora+Ia
Describing what Microsoft did as "bundling" seems a little silly in retrospect. I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser. If they had just added IE as a standard feature of Windows from the start without ever selling it as a separate product then they would have had a stronger legal case. It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

>>angora+Ia
It's not bundling because a web browser is a part of a operating system. For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers

>>nradov+(OP)
It was more than that. Microsoft was giving IE special APIs that it wasn't letting others have, and was also deeply integrating IE into the broader OS (eg, embedding it into the file explorer)

Which is also what Apple is doing but then going even further and just outright banning other browser engines.

>>charci+9v
> a web browser is a part of a operating system

This was not at all the case in the 90s during the period of MS antitrust action.

> For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers

There is a robust market (even today) for web browsers, and the makers of browsers make millions of dollars in revenue from their products. Therefore, I disagree, and I believe the bundling concept could still apply today to browsers. Network drivers and schedulers are not at all the same, because there isn't much of an independent market for them.

>>nradov+Ut
> I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser.

This was not that obvious in the 1990s.

> It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

This is absolutely a situation where a bundling case could apply, if a large incumbent uses their monopoly power in one product area to enter another and unfairly compete. IANAL but I don't believe whether or not the product was available separately or not would factor much into such a case.

>>kllrno+sw
Eh, we could still write a browser that interfaced with those special APIs, albeit in a hidden fashion.

And even without them, we could write a browser and distribute to people so they could install it.

That cannot be said about iOS.