The Microsoft (and others) "monopolies", 10+ years later

[Ryccardo]

So, Kuwanger said the following words in another topic, and got me to think about them:

True enough. This is the major reason why when the DMCA was drafted and signed into law there was so much protest in the tech community about it. At the time, they feared it'd turn into a dystopian future where Microsoft Palladium would lock out all competition forever, turning them into information gatekeepers. Thankfully a whole host of things, including MS's anti-trust trial and the rise of Google, really undermined that future.

I was 9 in 2004, when the "trusted computing" scandal/paranoia was at its peak, and don't remember much about it - apart from possibly having played a role in delaying the introduction of TPMs in mass market computers (which probably is a lesser reason than allowing motherboard manufacturers to pocket 40 cents more per unit);
but fast forward to the Windows 8 days and, as many of us know, we have the Wintel companies pretty much requiring EFI (which still gets a lot of, in my opinion unfair, criticism) and secure boot (which, for regular PCs and tablets - still the only field in which Windows is strong - must be deactivatable or reconfigurable by the user); not only these changes failed to be an issue for the advanced user, but their criticism distracted from more significant ones (like signed firmware or Computrace)...

...meanwhile, Microsoft got famously busted for unfairly bundling their (nominally free) browser and media player with XP and earlier while leaving the user no (official) way to not install them - only to now bundle with W10 two browsers (one of which the common person can't opt out of, while megacorps who can buy LTSB are discouraged from doing so), one media player and two halves, a cloud storage service, a cloud assistant, a(n actually fairly good and needed) photo editor, forced mystery meat updates... and hardly anyone complains about that?

Multiple years before that, Apple "invented" the "smart"phone (one on which apps could not officially be installed!), also using a notable (attempted) implementation (though hardly the first one) of a series of methods to prevent users from running arbitrary code on it, again with fairly little opposition though, surprisingly for the market category of phones versus PCs, I remember the reactions being louder than in the above case...

And let's not even get started on technical and moral criticism of what Apple's main competitor has been doing for years to both AOSP itself and manufacturers of phones with gApps...

 

[kuwanger]

There's a lot to unpack about it, but generally Microsoft has at every step been fought by one or more groups with the power to have substantial influence to undermine them. After the anti-trust/bundle trials in the US, EU, and elsewhere, OEMs (among others) could argue more strongly that Secure Boot should be disabled because of the rise of alternate OSs like Linux. Web browsers like Firefox coupled with flash meant that people could watch videos without Windows Media Player. The monthly critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and/or Windows XP lead the US government to recommend people not use it. Eventually flash became the next example of horrible insecure software, but by that point Chrome existed and Google had put enough effort into making a Javascript JIT along with HTML5 video to finally move away from ActiveX, Java, and Flash.

The reason smartphones didn't get the same sort of push back is precisely because at the time they weren't seen as real computers, so Apple and Google could both lock down their respective systems. For users of Android, it's obviously turned into a mess because locked bootloaders and non-standard AOSP--which, btw, I'd argue is "Apple's main competitorS" which is why it's such a mess. There's a reason, then, jailbreaking phones is legal if still rather ineffective in many instances. Without government intervention I don't trust Apple or Google through competition to simply do a better job of improving the situation. Even with government intervention, I don't expect the situation to improve much: we still see Apple phones that get updates but are beholden to the whim of Apple but Android devices are mostly one-off Android versions where even though most the main components can get security updates people still have to buy based on the version of Android a phone includes.

tl;dr - One monopoly, of a sort, got replaced with another. The second one, perhaps through general incompetence, hasn't been quite as bad yet. They're getting there, though, in the their treatment of Chrome exclusivity with Youtube and their arbitrary control over Youtube. We're seeing literally the same sort of push back in the same areas today.

Edit - Just a small thing, but the debate rages on in Linux land on how exactly to treat EFI and Secure Boot. Comments still discuss making it clear that lockdown can be used lockholders, not "owners" of a device. As an example:

'Agreed. I think attempting to use "neutral" terminology here disguises the fact that such systems are sometimes used as an instrument of power over the user. See also game consoles, where manufacturers like to say that the software lockdown is a security measure. It's security for the manufacturer, not for the user.' -- jfred

Given that the Linux kernel is used on Android and Google has repeatedly pushed upstream their modifications, it's always good to hear the concerns of developers and other Linux users on the deeper implications of accepting their work or emulating some of their functionality no matter the overall perceived good they've done for open source. Overall, it's important to know who is in control and for people to be really choosing that. Oh, and of course for people who don't to be able to legally bypass that control as much as reasonably possible.