Of course we can - an ISP is paid for by the customer, whereas Microsoft in this case is paid by the advertiser. As soon as you are paid by the entity producing the content you are no longer a "dumb pipe", and are de-facto curating that content.
Tangent to the publisher/platform debate, but can we stop for a moment to appreciate that Windows is a paid-for product?
The fact a paid-for product has ads in it is fucking nonsense.