While Microsoft has certainly used unlawful practices in the past to build the Windows empire, I fail to see how Opera’s EU antitrust case was anything more than a thinly veiled (and successful) attempt by Opera—and later additional competitors—to strong-arm Microsoft into directly promoting their products.

Users of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system in Europe who have chosen its Internet Explorer as their default browser will receive in a software update an option to switch to a rival. [NYT]

I understand the chicken-or-the-egg problem in providing users with an unbiased choice of browser on a new system, I guess I’m just uneasy with the idea of governments getting in the business of mandating that a marketplace of software be presented to users of every device that comes with software.

If Windows must give new users a choice of browsers, who decides the options, and why shouldn’t every OS have this requirement? There are many commercial text editors, instant message apps, etc. Why shouldn’t those be presented as options? Apple routinely adds new applications to its standard distribution that greatly reduce the value of existing commercial apps. Should we not let them? Is it in the best interest of average users to have to choose from a continuously growing list of low-market share and potentially poorly-compatible, insecure, or abandon-ware browsers?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this would turn out to be great for the software industry and users (but mostly lawyers), but I think at some point we should sunset the argument that people don’t understand what web browsers are.