There is no line, because if something is not stated in their policies, it doesn't mean that they are not doing that something. It all depends on the person in question, and whether he / she is willing to trust an international corporation or not.

About the second part, this has been happening for a very, very long time now with other media, and the Internet is no exception.
Which is wrong, how? Nothing to do with Microsoft in particular, I personally think a company should be allowed to do whatever it wants with its products. I mean, come on, Microsoft is just an example, but if we start doing anti-monopoly and anti-trust crap for every company, they will all... burn.

If one company is not allowed to integrate multiple products into one, all shouldn't be allowed. But we all know that isn't going to happen.

Damn these politics and crap, not for me. :)

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

I'm sorry, but that's bullshit.

It's not even grey area that bundling unrelated products to force your way into other markets is illegal. It's been illegal for like a hundred years at this point. It doesn't matter whether people can install their own alternatives, it's the fact that there's a barrier to doing so in the form of illegally bundled utilities.

As for Google and FB, the law would handle it just fine, were the courts not stacked with corporatist judges. What they're doing is clearly not based upon any sort of legal contracts, it's being done behind the scenes where there's no reasonable expectation that your information is being collected by a single entity and shared.

It's not really private, but it's not like the cameras you see in stores, these are hidden cameras where they don't even belong to the owner of the property. For which you can't exercise any informed consent.

I'm aware that this is the same shit, different object. History repeats itself, even novels were considered a waste of time and a source of potential corruption at one time.

As for the first part, what I mean is this is something people really need to start thinking about. This is a conversation that needs to be discussed at some level.

Because it violated the Clayton Antitrust Act. You cannot use your market position to harm the competition or the bludgeon them into submission.

I realize that you're an MS fanbois, but seriously, you'd have to be either way too young to remember the proceedings or hopelessly naive to not have seen the damage that was being done by MS' embrace, extend and extinguish strategy.

They bundled purposefully incompatible software to drive the competition out of business. It wouldn't have been as big of a deal had the software not been integrated into the base install. But it was, which meant that people had to opt out of their ecosystem. At the time MS had roughly a 90% market share, if not higher.

And there are degrees of violation. The implication that they shouldn't all burn or that they aren't all in violation is a bit silly. Of course many of them are guilty as sin, but it's the apologists that are ultimately responsible.
I like George Carlin's quote on that. Imagine how stupid the average man is. Now realize that half of men are stupider than that.

Wait, what? When you buy a kitchen knife set, do you rage quit because all knives are made by a single manufacturer and packaged together?

And what is wrong with using only what comes with the OS? Jesus, seriously, what's wrong with that? If it fulfils the users' needs, then the OS developers have done a great job. Its when they don't do a great job that you have to look for alternatives.

We'll never be on the same page here, so I agree to disagree. :p

That's a straw man.

They don't typically include things like wrenches for working on the car, soap for the washing machine and tooth paste in the same bundle. Which is what MS was doing. They were bundling a lot of things not reasonably related to the OS knowing that they would have a practically guaranteed majority of the market place.

What was worse is that a lot of it wasn't compatible with the competition, which meant that if you chose to use somebody elses software you would have to give up features that people were assuming you had and couldn't properly interoperate with people who were using the bundled software.

And of course we're not going to agree. I'm right and you can't admit that you're wrong. The behavior you're sticking up for is illegal with good reason.

> Wait, what? When you buy a kitchen knife set, do you rage quit because all knives are made
> by a single manufacturer and packaged together?

"When you buy our kitchen knife set - and we're the only makers of kitchen knives, so you don't have much choice - you also get our washer and dryer set for free! (Ignore the fact that kitchen knife sets cost $2000 each - the washer and dryer are free, they really are!)"

You could add in blurbs about all of the detergent being formulated to only work properly in that one brand of washer and dryer, and how other brands won't function in your house unless the "free" set is also fully plugged in, and so on.

Sure, this is a more comical rendition in the household goods sector, but it's representative of what MS was doing in the software market.

How were people supposed to be able to download another browser without a default browser to use? Especially, since most people are not that savvy with the command prompt to know how to download using it (I'm taking a moment to ignore the ballot box option). How is it Microsoft's responsibility to inform other people of what else is being offered? As long as Microsoft isn't taking any action to prevent other people from downloading from their competition I don't see how what Microsoft is doing is wrong.

However, I do agree that Microsoft crossed the line with embedding their programs deep into the operating system and trying to strong arm people in adopting their standards. I suppose the ballot box option is harmless for the user at least.

Although, I think a good happy medium is to have something like a software distribution center a la on Ubuntu and Mint. No comment on what their app store is like.

Now, I am not a fan of Microsoft's monopoly by a long shot and I'm actually happy that Apple is giving Microsoft a run for their money. I think a little "encouragement" to the manufacturers to start offering other operating systems for the general market such as Mint, Ubuntu, BSD as an option instead of just Windows would go a long way to refresh the market. But this is a rant for another day.

This is definitely a legitimate concern, but probably overblown.

You do it the same way I get network drivers onto my computer when they aren't included in the base install. I either plan ahead or ask the shop to provide them for me on a disk. Same here.

Or you go the route that the EU took and have a balloting program which downloads the files for the browser.

It is something which has to be planned for, but in truth because MS was permitted to keep bundling IE we won't really know how it would have worked otherwise. IE is mandatory for all practical purposes, even if you're just using it to download updates or a new browser.

I think that if they hadn't been engaging in that behavior that just bundling IE would have been legal. Or at least it would have been a more difficult sell to the jury as an antitrust violation.

Funny that this topic comes up now, because it has JUST become an issue for me now... over the past couple weeks or so.

I feel like there's just way TOO much info out there.

Good news is that when I google my name, virtually nothing comes up.. but still google has all of this info and is expanding further than I am comfortable with.

Between that and facebook, it's just out of control.

The only reason I'm worried here is that I make a nice amount of spending cash each month from AdSense. So I could get rid of that but I'm not sure what other ad platform I can use...

I don't begrudge Google for doing what they have to, in terms of making a profit and such. Previous posters have said that Google provides free services and thus info collection and aggregation is their 'fee'. I agree.

However, that doesn't mean that we have to 'buy it', so to speak. There are alternatives...
So one way to create more competition is to... make sure no one is 'too' competitive? :P

Reminds me of:

Price too low? = Evil company is engaged in 'monopolistic practices'

Price same? = Evil company is colluding with other evil companies!

Price high? = Evil company is gouging!

So basically, it is easy for a company to avoid being subject to legal action in this area.. All they have to do is make sure their prices aren't below, equal to, or greater than those of the competition. Simple.

I know, I know.

:laugh: :D

This sort of bullshit is why we can't have nice things.

It's easy to avoid violations in this area by not violating the various antitrust rules. There's no law that says that you can't have high prices or low prices, but when you control the market, you give up a lot of the normal freedoms.

For God's sake, if you're going to have an opinion on this, at least do everybody a favor and actually do some research. Being a large company isn't illegal, using ones size to harm the competition is.

EDIT: Also for collusion to be proven in court, they would have to show evidence that there were discussions on the pricing policy, not merely that the prices were the same, but that there was active discussion to make it so.