Where were they when AT&T joined all of the Baby Bells back together? It was ok because the competitive landscape changed during the decades in which AT&T was broken up. Same here. Microsoft has nowhere near the power over general computing that it once had. What they did with IE back in the day was only a problem because of their dominant market position. Others doing the same from a minority market position would have been fine. Now that the majority of devices are running something other than Windows, it's more difficult to claim Microsoft dominates the market unless you define the market very narrowly, in which case, lots of other companies would also be in trouble.
The only thing that changed was that other companies started doing the same evil stuff Microsoft was doing when they got in trouble, except instead of regulators going after those other companies too, they've... idk, disappeared?
So in a weird way, I agree that it's unfair that Microsoft can't do unfair things while all the other companies are doing unfair things. That puts them at a competitive disadvantage!
They've been shy about it because of their history, but I predict Microsoft will eventually lock Windows down in the same way Apple and Google lock down their operating systems. Or, knowing Microsoft, they'll probably take it as far as they possibly can.
> Others doing the same from a minority market position would have been fine.
So where's the interest in slapping billion dollar fines on Google for bundling Chrome and Google Search with Android? They own the majority market share for both mobile operating systems, web browsers, and search engines.
I guess they probably get away with it because they bundle it with Google Play Services instead of Android, but you could make an argument that GPS is fundamentally a part of Android given it is necessary to provide the features generally associated with the OS. It's not rock-solid, but it's at least a better argument than any of the other big-tech monopoly cases the US has been pursuing.
This kind of stuff has been going on for years as well; it's not something new. I don't normally use Windows, but a few years ago when I got a new ThinkPad I figured I'd have a looksie around with the pre-installed Windows 10 just to see what it's like out of curiosity since I never used Windows 8 or 10, and it displayed all sorts of stuff trying to force Edge on people, including "ads" that just pop up; see [1].
I'm not sure what I find more objectionable: that they're trying to push Edge so hard, or that they feel this is so important to pop up unprompted notifications for it distracting people from the actual work they're doing. I've been using Linux or BSD for a very long time for the simple pragmatical reason it just works better for me, and this sort of user-hostile behaviour only strengthened that.
The difference, I suppose, is that IE/Edge doesn't have the position it had in the past with >95% market share. Both macOS and mobile platforms removed a lot of teeth from Microsoft compared to the early/mid-2000s. Still, the actual behaviour is worse, even if the effects are less bad.
Where the hell are the regulators who handed out billion dollar fines just for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows?