Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default.
Same for Apple and Microsoft.
Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on.
Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wield unfair power over hundreds of markets.
Don't even get me started on how you now have to pay to protect your brand name in search across these platforms. The fact that you might appear fourth in search for your own brand name in the App Store or on Google is absurd.
The DSA and the DMA doing what they are designed to do (in Europe)
It's unfortunate that the regulators and legislators will have to fight over every one of those services individually for a while until mega corps get tired of their games and retreat to making train- instead of boat loads of money.
Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?
Indeed, a lot of people don't remember but back when spell checking was a new thing, there was genuine concern over whether bundling it with word processors was anticompetitive.
Or if Word and WordPerfect should be sold without spell checkers, and they'd need to interoperate with third party ones.
I find these kinds of rhetorical "where exactly does it end" comments really limp. Life is full of choices where there are grey areas. Lay out a bunch of desirable criteria - like not allowing a single entity to monopolise a market -then pick a starting point and iterate until you get a decent balance between the criteria. Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing after throwing your hands up into the air and whinging about the fact that it's complicated.
I understand your frustration, but it's genuinely not that easy.
You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.
The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.
> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing
That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.
I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
That's exactly what Microsoft would say about Teams though, so it's probably better that we err on the side of caution and ban curl bundling. At least until curl can prove that it's not anti-competitive.
Browsers are particularly tricky because they are also a software development platform which needs to be reliable as the OS is. In some browsers like ChromeOS they are even the primary one.
Chrome on Android is a completely different issue. It isn't that Android comes with Chrome or any other browser by default. It is that Googles PlayStore licensing outright allows Google to retroactively brick any phone by a manufacturer that fails to make the official Google Chrome binary the default browser on all of its Android phones. It is the reason Amazon had a hard time getting its Kindle productline of the ground since any manufacturer operating in the west was already bound by this shitshow of a license.
On another hand, Android respects the user choice of browser. I have not seen it forcefully start Chrome on me once I set Firefox as default.
I cannot say the same for Windows and Edge. Teams open links by default in Edge regardless of OS settings as far as I know (but it can be adjusted in Teams settings). Searching from the start menu also opens Edge and Bing rather than my choice of browser and search engine.
Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default.
Same for Apple and Microsoft.
Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on.
Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wield unfair power over hundreds of markets.
Don't even get me started on how you now have to pay to protect your brand name in search across these platforms. The fact that you might appear fourth in search for your own brand name in the App Store or on Google is absurd.