[notgood]

Exactly; they are the gatekeepers of their iOS ecosystem but got no backslash like Microsoft did with Windows (circa 2001); so now they know they have a free pass and are trying to be the gatekeepers of the Web [for their users] as well.

[Jtsummers]

The backlash against MS began in the 90s with the start of the anti-trust trial. It was preceded by MS achieving a greater than 90% [0] market share. Apple has nowhere near that and so will not see that sort of legal backlash for them for a while.

Microsoft used their position to do things like:

Spend over $1 billion to advertise a free web browser to compete with Netscape (fear of cross-platform applications that Netscape could support).

Embraced a fucked up version of web standards where they literally did the exact opposite of what the specs said in order to make sites compatible for their users break (without serious dev effort) for everyone else.

Convinced Compaq (memory fuzzy, I get them and HP mixed up now) to not release computers with BeOS. If they had, MS was going to eliminate their favorable Windows licensing costs. This would have driven them out of business as they could not achieve competitive PC prices with reasonable margins (PCs already being a low margin business at that point). They tried similar, though less aggressive, pushes against companies that later wanted to release Linux workstations.

There's a whole litany of MS's abuses of its monopoly position in the anti-trust suit, it was actually fascinating reading if you care about economics, business, politics.

[0] Precise numbers failing me, I believe they got close to 97% at some point.

[greglindahl]

iOS is not a monopoly product.

As a user, I welcome Apple's new feature, and I'm fine with it being the default.