Big Tech anti-trust actions finally aim at correct target

Given the actively evil toxicity of Facebook, and the overtly anti-competitive tactics which Amazon was using to wreak havoc on the entire retail sector of the developed world, it seemed odd to me that so much focus was on "don't be evil" Google. 

It's not that Google weren't also abusing their monopoly position to do anticompetitive things, because it certainly looks like they were and still are, it's just that of all the problematic, amoral Big Tech firms, Google just wouldn't have been high on my priority list, if I were calling the antitrust shots. Even Apple, whose stance against right-to-repair and obsession with trapping consumers on their "ecosystem" for all time are more problematic to my mind than Google giving Android licenses away for free, would have been pretty far down on my antitrust hit list.

Well, apparently someone in the EU has woken up to reality, because they're finally starting to move against the real Big Tech problem children. From HuffPost:

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators have filed antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of using data to gain an unfair advantage over merchants using its platform.

The EU’s executive commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, said Tuesday that the charges have been sent to the company.

The commission said it takes issue with Amazon’s systematic use of non-public business data to avoid “the normal risks of competition and to leverage its dominance” for e-commerce services in France and Germany, the company’s two biggest markets in the EU.

[...]

Amazon faces a possible fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue, which could amount to billions of dollars. The company rejected the accusations.

Better late than never, I guess.

The EU, for their part, claim to have been working on this antritrust case since 2018, in which case I just have to say, OMFG, get a handle on that bureaucracy, folks! And Amazon, naturally, "disagree with the preliminary assertions of the European Commission," which it pretty standard boilerplate for this sort of thing, and should surprise almost nobody. Odds are not in Amazon's favour, though; the EU typically don't bring antitrust actions unless they can prevail, which is the typical outcome, so look for Amazon to face big fines and strong restrictions in the not-too-distant future.

Whether this is a sign of emboldened officials around the world finally find the stones to reign in all of the Big Tech firms remains to be seen of course. If the EU takes on Facebook, in addition to Amazon, Apple, and Google, we'll have our answer. Don't expect that to happen until early next year, though, at the earliest, because... I mean... 2018? Damn.

Is this the beginning of the end of Big Tech?

After months of hinting, and alluding, and leaking, the US Department of Justice has finally decided to actually piss, rather than just sitting on the pot.

As reported by Reuters, via Huffpost.com:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.

[...]

Coming just days before the U.S. presidential election, the filing’s timing could be seen as a political gesture since it fulfills a promise made by President Donald Trump to his supporters to hold certain companies to account for allegedly stifling conservative voices.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a vociferous Google critic, accused the company of keeping power through “illegal means” and called the lawsuit “the most important antitrust case in a generation.”

The federal lawsuit marks a rare moment of agreement between the Trump administration and progressive Democrats. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sept. 10, using the hash tag #BreakUpBigTech, that she wanted “swift, aggressive action.”

The 11 states which joined the lawsuit all have Republican attorneys general.

Google, who have only just seen the lawsuit themselves, did not respond to Reuters, and will probably let their lawyers do the talking now that the matter is before the courts. I expect that the very pro-Microsoft/ant-Google crew at Thurrott will be gloating about this in a matter of minutes, although I seem to have spotted this one before they did, this time around.

So, the question of which Big Tech firm would be the first to face the US DOJ's antitrust ire has been answered, In spite of the destructive impact and overt evil of Facebook; the profoundly more anti-competitive activities of Amazon; the fact that Epic has been trying to preempt the DOJ and force an antitrust finding against Apple; and the fact that Microsoft are still abusing their position as Windows' gatekeepers to continue loading unwanted Microsoft-branded content, and ads for the same, onto the devices of Windows 10 users, it will be Google who will face official government antitrust action first.

The partisan nature of this action, coming just weeks before an election which Republicans look likely to lose badly, and backed by Republican senators and Republican governors, will likely form the backbone of Google's defense here; the fact that Elizabeth Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech firms like Google will likely not be as much of a factor. I think that's a solid defense; the prosecution case will rely mostly on the fact that Google actually is guilty of doing exactly what they've been accused of, and the matter won't be resolved for years, so for the time being it's business as usual.

Nonetheless, this is something of a watershed moment. The Big Tech firms (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have mostly behaved as if laws do not apply to them for years; what the DOJ has announced today is an intention to apply the laws to them, and I don't expect that Google will be the only one to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit in the coming months; Apple and Google are already facing multiple antitrust actions in the EU. 

The appearance of impropriety here, with the pre-election timing and largely partisan backing, are unlikely to alter the fact that these companies are behaving like the abusive monopolies that they mostly are, or to change the fact that they are now all faced with a new reality: that their ethos of disruptive innovation has run as far as society is willing to let it. They will now be required to stop disrupting society, and start helping to stabilize it, or at least pay for cleaning up the mess they've made.

Again, it will be years before this finishes playing out, and while Alphabet Inc. might end up looking rather different, I don't expect that Google itself will change very much. But with the conversation now officially underway, there is finally hope that these corporations (and, by extension, all similarly-sized corporations) might finally have reached the end of the era of limitless permissiveness for their largely lawless, corrupting, tax-evading ways. And that can only be a good thing.

This week in Facebook: It seems that "Criticism" was putting it mildly

It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about Facebook's nascent culture, doesn't it? Probably because it was yesterday: specifically, yesterday morning.

By yesterday afternoon, the story had already evolved, as reported by The Huffington Post:

Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” Monday in protest of the social media company’s failure to address President Donald Trump’s use of its platform to spread incendiary content.

It’s unclear how many of the company’s 48,000 global employees are participating in the walkout by taking the day off. Many of Facebook’s employees were already working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A number of the virtual protesters said they planned to use their time to attend the physical demonstrations against police brutality around the country.

Wow. Just... wow.

Again, I have to emphasize just how much of a culture shift this represents. A year and half ago, Facebook's rank and file were talkingshop using burner phones to avoid having managers overhear, and complaining about the unfairness of Facebook's media coverage. Yesterday, they staged a walkout to protest Facebook itself.

Victory! Microsoft surrenders and PC users win

File under, "It's about fucking time," I guess.

As reported in Forbes:

Microsoft has a major announcement today: Windows 10 will no longer automatically install those big feature updates every six months. Home users can pause smaller updates, too. In fact, Windows will even let you pause updates after checking for them!

This is huge. It’s Microsoft’s biggest change in Windows strategy since the company released Windows 10. Microsoft is giving up on “Windows as a service” that is automatically updated outside of your control.

[...]

Microsoft is giving us—and PC users—a lot of what we asked for here! We said Windows wasn’t a service and Microsoft should give PC users more choice. We called for Microsoft to test updates more thoroughly than the botched October 2018 Update, which deleted some people’s files and had other bugs. We warned people not to click “Check for Updates”because Microsoft would treat you as a “seeker” and force updates on your PC before they had gone through testing. We said Home users should get more control over updates, including the ability to pause updates when desired.

Microsoft's insistence on treating Windows 10 Home users like guinea pigs was one of the most contentious issues that still plagued the OS, and was a big part of the reason that I decided to switch to Linux instead. I'm still switching to Linux instead, of course; Microsoft's belated move in the direction of what they should always have done with the OS is just too little, too late, at least for me. But for the millions of Windows 10 users who felt like they had no choice but to adopt Microsoft's new OS, or who were switched after repeatedly refusing the "upgrade," this is definitely good news.

Facebook's very bad year gets even worse

It turns out that Facebook couldn't even make it through one more day before getting hit with more bad news. This time, though, it's not news of their incompetence, or their outright malice, that's wrecking their week; rather, it's news of actual consequences for Facebook. Finally.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States -- a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, “likes” and other data from the social site without users’ permission. The incident, which affected more than 87 million users beginning in 2014, came to light this March, sparking investigations around the world.

The opening salvo from the D.C. attorney general ended a protracted silence on the part of many U.S. regulators, who have faced immense pressure -- from members of Congress and average web users -- to discipline Facebook for what many see as a reckless disregard for online privacy. Some of Silicon Valley’s toughest critics have urged the government to slap Facebook with severe fines and other penalties that might force it to rethink a business model that monetizes the most intimate details of consumers’ lives.

“It’s about time,” said Christopher Wylie, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica controversy through reports in several news organizations.

[...]

The D.C. case threatens to develop into an even worse headache for Facebook. Racine told reporters that his office has “had discussions with a number of other states that are similarly interested in protecting the data and personal information of their consumers,” though he cautioned there is no formal agreement for them to proceed jointly. And the attorney general’s aides said they could add additional charges to their lawsuit as other details about Facebook’s privacy lapses become public.

Hello, again, Christopher Wylie! I'd honestly forgotten that he even existed. But I digress...

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Has Microsoft finally stopped trying to make "fetch" happen with Cortana?

I've been posting about Cortana, and why it should be optional in Windows 10, for a while now. By turning Cortana on by default, frustrating attempts to turn it off, and forcing all searches through Cortana, including local file searches, Microsoft basically forced users to sacrifice privacy in exchange for the use of a feature that most of them didn't care about at all.

But with Javier Soltero, Microsoft's head of Cortana, departing the company, and Alexa, the rival digital assistant from Amazon, now available on the Microsoft store, it was looking more and more inevitable that Microsoft would start backing Windows 10 away from this sort of forced Cortana integration. With the market having spoken, and saying clearly that Cortana was not a selling point of Windows 10, how long would Microsoft keep forcing its use as WX's default for all search?

The answer to that question, apparently, is "until the 19H1 update," as reported by WindowsLatest:

Microsoft is making some changes to how Windows Search works in Windows 10. With Windows 10 19H1 update, Microsoft is reportedly planning to remove Windows Search from Cortana. It’s a smart move as this could eventually allow you to use the search feature flawlessly even if you don’t like Cortana.

Windows 10 19H1 will separate Cortana and Windows Search, and two different icons will be displayed on the taskbar. It’s a pretty neat change as this would allow Cortana to act more like a personal digital assistant and you can use Windows Search if you’re looking for files, pictures, music and other stuff stored in your local drive.

Screenshots show menus which seem to allow users to hide the new Cortana button -- not quite as good as allowing users to simply disable Cortana, but when combined with the separation of Cortana from search, it amounts to functionally the same thing.

This is a good move. Microsoft's insistence that users must use features and products that they had repeatedly indicated they had no interest in using was one of the most annoying things about Windows 10. Nobody cares about Cortana, or Edge, or Bing, and yet Microsoft was dead set on making them unavoidable, in a display of either monopolistic arrogance, desperation, or simple tone-deafness, which had long since convinced a large number of Windows 7 users to put off the switch indefinitely, if possible.

If nothing else, this latest move explains by Javier Soltero is leaving the company. As someone who'd internally championed Cortana, the prospect of having Cortana de-emphasized in Windows 10, and his own role and career prospects with them, probably made leaving look like a really attractive option. But if Microsoft really are finally learning to let go, to stop trying to force with issue, then maybe that's about to change.

It's not enough to convince someone like me to switch to Windows 10, #Never10, #LinuxShift, but it is, finally, a start. Whether this first baby step has happened in time, is of course, a whole 'nother discussion.

MS tiptoes back from the "S Mode" edge

Well, colour me surprised if Microsoft didn't hear peoples' howls of outrage and walk back a terrible decision before it had even gone live.

From Thurrott.com:

Microsoft now says that it will no longer charge customers who wish to upgrade from Windows 10 in S mode. The revelation comes after a bizarre tweet in which Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore confirmed Thurrott.com’s exclusive story that it would kill Windows 10 S and provide S mode in all mainstream Windows 10 versions.

Now, Belfiore is providing more information and is doing so via a more traditional means: A Microsoft corporate blog.

“We’ve received feedback that the [Windows 10 S] naming was a bit confusing for both customers and partners,” he writes. “Based on that feedback, we are simplifying the experience for our customers. Starting with the next update to Windows 10, coming soon, customers can choose to buy a new Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro PC with S mode enabled, and commercial customers will be able to deploy Windows 10 Enterprise with S mode enabled.”

[...]

Best of all, however, Belfiore now says that Microsoft will no longer try to charge customers to upgrade from S mode. (Today, the upgrade from Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro costs $50.) So you can upgrade from the hobbled S mode in Windows 10 Home, Pro, or Enterprise to the “full” version of whichever OS product edition for free going forward. This is absolutely the correct thing to do.

Microsoft's previous ruminations on their upcoming S Mode, its costs, and its lawsuit-avoidance carve-out for the antivirus software industry, were indeed bullshit, and S Mode is still bullshit, but at least Microsoft won't be charging gamers extra for wanting to install games on their new PCs anymore. So, yes, absolutely the correct thing to do, and it's only taken them three tries to produce an S Mode strategy that the market might actually accept.

Of course, this latest change also makes it even easier to ignore S Mode entirely, now that it's not being rammed down users' throats anymore, so it won't do anything to make S Mode relevant to consumers. Which means that S Mode is still a failure; Microsoft is just finally admitting failure, is all, rather than insisting on charging consumers extra to help cover their failure's costs.

It's tough to give Microsoft much credit, though, for belatedly doing something the less-shitty thing on their 3rd attempt, and only after the outcry made it clear that their anti-consumer bullshit would not fly. It's tough to even call this a win for consumers; Microsoft may have backed away from the edge this time, but there will be a next time, and a next one after that, so have we really won anything other than a temporary reprieve? Because it sure doesn't feel like a win.

I doubt that the overall goal, i.e. forcing consumers onto the Windows Microsoft Store to buy all of their PC software, has changed, however. With UWP failing, and Progressive Web Apps being a Google-led trend that Microsoft can't monopolize, it's tough to see how they'll be able to force the ecosystem issue, but mark my words: they will try again. Whether on some other ground, or on this same ground once it's swept clean, they will try again.

For now, though, saner heads appear to have prevailed. It's not much, but I'll still take it.

Microsoft makes it official

It looks like the "Diagnostic data viewer" is, indeed, going to be a thing, as Microsoft have announced on their own blog:

To kick off the new year ahead of Data Privacy Day we are giving our Windows Insiders an early preview of the Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer coming in our next release of Windows. Our commitment is to be fully transparent on the diagnostic data collected from your Windows devices, how it is used, and to provide you with increased control over that data. This is all part of our commitment to increase your trust and confidence in our products and services.

This brand new commitment of full transparency is, of course, new - up to now, Microsoft have acted in the privacy interests of Windows 10 users only when threatened with regulatory action, and have consistently done just enough to keep regulators at bay, while continuing to harvest users' data. So, call me cynical, but I have to wonder what regulatory action was in the offing here, that we don't yet know about, and which Microsoft is trying to mitigate by bolstering Windows 10's privacy regime.

Windows 10's "Redstone 4" update (actual name TBA, but hopefully better than Creators Update) should be rolling out in March or April, if Microsoft stay on schedule, and these new changes are supposed to be part of it, so Windows 10 users should get the DDV at the same time that they get Timeline... which was supposed to roll out two updates ago. Moderate those expectations, folks!

That said... this is an improvement, and a long overdue one, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a win for consumers. Now they just need to restore Cortana's off switch...

In a long overdue move, Microsoft might finally tell you what data they're collecting, and let you delete it, in Windows 10

File this one under "It's about fucking time, Microsoft." As reported by TechRadar:

In a move that will certainly please privacy-conscious users, it seems that Microsoft is about to introduce the ability to view and delete the telemetry data that Windows 10 collects, according to new options that have popped up in the operating system’s latest preview builds.

[...]

Last April, after taking what seemed like endless heat on the issue, Microsoft clarified what personal data Windows 10 collects on a basic level (the minimum amount of telemetry data you can elect to send).

But as Ghacks spotted, the most recent preview builds of Windows 10 (released this month and last month) have a pair of new options at the bottom of the Diagnostics & Feedback screen: ‘Diagnostic data viewer’ and ‘Delete diagnostic data’.

At the moment, these are merely placeholders which don’t function or do anything when clicked, but hopefully they will be live for those testing Windows 10 soon enough.

As a result, it’s not clear exactly what their function is at this point, but it seems obvious enough: the former should allow the user to fully view all the diagnostic data being collected on their system, and the latter should facilitate its deletion.

It's important to note that Microsoft haven't announced anything about this themselves, yet, and nobody's seen this feature in action, either, so there's a lot of assumptions in this report. In particular, there's no indication yet whether this functionality would be available to all Windows 10 users, or whether Microsoft might end up restricting it to high-priced SKUs of the OS, as they've previously done with tools like the Group Policy Editor, or the ability to turn off the "Microsoft Consumer Experience."

Still, assuming that Windows 10 Home users get access to these tools, too, it could be a long-overdue addition to the privacy and personal information management tools that the OS should always have included. Honestly, giving users a greater degree of control over Windows 10's telemetry bullshit is the kind of thing that might have convinced me to switch, had they done it back when switching was still a free upgrade.

Now, of course, upgrading will cost extra, which means that I still won't be switching until the time comes to buy a new PC... which won't happen for me until AMD releases new, Spectre-free CPU designs, which is about the only "feature" that I'd really consider switching PCs to obtain (and, no, I'm not even considering switching to Intel). In the meantime, regardless of which version of Windows you're running, you should still be running an anti-telemetry application like SpyBot's Anti-Beacon as well. Don't forget, Microsoft's telemetry bullshit isn't restricted to Windows 10 anymore.