[masklinn]

> It's completely crazy.

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...

[zura]

Then why stop at browsers?

Why not do the same thing with AV, audio players, text editors, file browsers, CD/DVD burners, etc... ?

[masklinn]

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.

[qntmfred]

they did on iOS (for a while). Safari is bundled with iOS

[masklinn]

> they did on iOS (for a while).

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.

[toyg]

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.

[ricw]

Apple never had a monopoly in either the tablet or phone market. And it doesn't look like it will.