Kaspersky Complaint Reopens an Old Antitrust Wound

Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky has dredged up a familiar argument from Microsoft's terrible antitrust period. Sadly, he may have a point.

"That's it. I've had enough!" he writes in his personal blog. "We think that Microsoft has been using its dominating position in the market of operating systems to create competitive advantages for its own product. The company is foisting its Defender on the user, which isn’t beneficial from the point of view of protection of a computer against cyberattacks. The company is also creating obstacles for companies to access the market, and infringes upon the interests of independent developers of security products."

Mr. Kaspersky's complaint extends far beyond a blog post, however. He's also formally requested that antitrust regulators in the EU and Russia---the latter is Kaspersky's home base---require that Microsoft change its business practices.

Anyone familiar with Microsoft's lost decade---the time period during which antitrust action in both the United States and EU hamstrung the software giant, leading directly to the rise of both Apple and Google---is probably wincing at this charge. And wondering whether such a thing is still relevant in today's world, where Windows is no longer the dominant personal computing platform.

There's a great discussion to be had there. But let's examine the complaints first. Mr. Kaspersky is very specific:

Windows 10 replaces third-party solutions with Microsoft's applications and services. "In the name of better ease of usage, security, [and] performance," Windows 10 "changes settings, uninstalls user-installed apps, and replaces them with standard Microsoft ones," he writes. This is true of many services---"[web] browsers, gaming hubs, image viewing, processing of multimedia files and PDF documents"---and it's now true of security products as well. The worst part? Microsoft solutions are almost universally not as good as the solutions they replace.

Windows 10 deactivates "incompatible" security products, including Kaspersky's. "When you upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft automatically and without any warning deactivates all ‘incompatible’ security software and in its place installs---you guessed it---its own Defender antivirus," he notes. He then complains that Microsoft gave security companies "one week" before the release of the Anniversary Update to make their products compatible. "Even if software did manage to be compatible according to the initial check before the upgrade ... Defender would still take over," he claims.

Windows 10 warns users against turning off Defender even when third-party anti-virus/antimalware is installed."Even if users have compatible protection from an independent developer already installed, Defender appears with an alarming window," he writes. "Pressing the big ['Turn on Defender'] button [that appears] will also deactivate your existing AV." And that change is noted only by a tiny and hidden window, he says.

W...

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