> We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time
We've accepted that browsers are necessary, the EU seems to have not accepted an OS natural monopoly can be leveraged into a browser monopoly. Sounds perfectly sane, and a good thing.
> what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
The EU did in fact do the same with media players (Microsoft had to bundle "Windows XP N", a WMP-less version of WXP). The rest has precious little importance in the grand scheme of thing and their regulation is thus pretty pointless.
No. Apple never had a super-majority (or even a majority) of the smartphone marketshare, let alone in the EU where Symbian and BB historically held strong marketshares during iOS's tenure.
iOS's best has been 30~40% in some european country (not even EU-wide). Although it does capture the vast majority of profits, but that's not really relevant to antitrust-type cases.
I believe Samsung currently has a bigger share of the EU market than iOS. There never was a case of monopolistic abuse from apple in the EU, because they never came close to a monopoly.
One has to wonder whether the whole "elitist" strategy from Apple isn't, in fact, a way to avoid the sort of responsibilities Microsoft took on, both towards developers, the "enterprise" community and the wider population.
This fine is the outcome of repeated failures on MS’s part to properly implement court-ordered reparations, rather than a direct fine required by the original judgement.
As has been said N times elsewhere, this is about the fact that MS stopped OEMs from bundling other browsers, even though they were allowed to bundle other software.
No politically motivated as in a small European browser maker that't always had the smallest market share on Windows decided to make a complaint over something completely ridiculous i.e. MS bundling a browser with the OS
When Apple have a monopoly, they will be part of these rules as well. As soon as you enters monopoly status in the EU, there is certain rules and regulations that you need to comply with.
There's nothing crazy about it.
> We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time
We've accepted that browsers are necessary, the EU seems to have not accepted an OS natural monopoly can be leveraged into a browser monopoly. Sounds perfectly sane, and a good thing.
> what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
Apple does not have a monopoly marketshare, which lead to the original decision which Microsoft then broke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...