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Comment by djbusby | Hacker News Reader

Neat! But why not respect the users choice everywhere on earth?

Because they do not respect you as a user anywhere out of choice.

Regulations that were passed in the EU but not e.g. the US.

The announcement is talking about EEA rather than EU though, which smells a bit weird. I'm not sure what regulation they're trying to resolve the conflict with that is not EU wide but rather EEA and targets the usage of default browsers.

The EEA is practically “EU + a handful of countries that apply EU rules but don’t get to participate in decision making for historical reasons”.

That’s why Britain didn’t even consider joining the EEA after they left the Union. From their point of view, it would still be the regulatory burden of EU membership without most of the benefits they enjoyed as a full member. When they’d decided to take the economic impact of leaving the free trade area, it wouldn’t really make sense to stay on worse terms than they already had.

There are some benefits. The article that we're commenting about, for example.

Yes, getting Microsoft's disrespect was worth it.

No, they get the benefit of tariff-free and non-tariff-barrier-free trade in goods and services with EU members. That's a huge deal.

I phrased my previous comment wrong (and should edit it). There’s of course a benefit to adopting the regulations and following the rules — you get to participate in the free trade area. But without a say in how those regulations and rules are formed.

Thing is, now the UK doesn't get to participate in the free trade area, but is a rule taker anyway:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/01/uk-eu-safet... - UK to retain EU safety mark in latest Brexit climbdown

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66394235 - Post-Brexit import checks on food delayed again

But tariff free trade for goods benefits the EU more as the UK service sector is bigger than their goods sector. UK services companies (especially regulated services like finance, law, etc) are at a disadvantage to EU companies because the UK companies don't have equivalency (i.e. the either need extra checks (costs) to operate in the EU, or need to open a corporate office in the EU).

And, the UK recently decided to forgo their UKCA mark to replace the CE mark as it would cost UK businesses too much to support both.

And lastly the UK has yet to impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary rules on imports into the UK because it would cost consumers in the UK too much (UK food inflation is still higher than just about all EU countries even without the checks). But the EU does impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary checks on food imports to the EU from the UK. So, in net the EU benefits from this as well.

So in balance the UK doesn't benefit. And it's a huge deal.

> UK food inflation is still higher than just about all EU countries even without the checks

Have you considered that UK food inflation is higher precisely because they're not in the single market?

I don’t anyone here is arguing that leaving the single market was a great idea. Rather that it doesn’t make much sense to stay in it if you want to leave the EU.

That was my exact point; it's somewhat more expensive to import food into the UK now because of Brexit. And far more expensive to export (in relative terms to EU sourced food in the EU).

EEA still has the four freedoms which was not acceptable to the UK.

A smart person who has read up on EU/UK and some European migration situations will note that migration to e.g: Denmark/Switzerland is still difficult despite being part of those four freedoms. This is because they bothered to mitigate migration within the parameters of the law; since the right to work under EU's four freedoms only applies for 6 months.

It’s strictly the regulatory burden of EU membership without any of the benefits of the club.

That's not really true if you are living in one of those countries (I live in one of those countries). In general, we get the protections that the EU gives its people and I get free travel within the zone. Lots of little things like my phone working without outrageous charges when I travel to most places here, too.

>like my phone working without outrageous charges when I travel to most places here

Just don't get anywhere near Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Andorra, Monaco with your roaming enabled :)

Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland are EEA members, and roaming is fine for those.

Switzerland has its own arrangement, and the roaming deal doesn't apply.

Andorra, Monaco, the United Kingdom, the Faroe Islands, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Belarus, Russia, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova are not in the EU or EEA.

EEA countries get freedom of movement with the EU, among other things. An EEA citizen can work in an EU country without any other requirements.

Well, you could plausibly argue right this moment that those strict regulatory burdens are a benefit of the club - since in this case they're benefiting from those regulations curbing abuse from international companies

Something which almost certainly wouldn't happen if they passed these laws by themselves, rather than as part of a much larger economic area.

But otherwise... I mostly agree with you. Lots of laws, not much representation.

Sure they get benefits, just they get no influence on what those benefits are.

The regulatory "burden" is also a benefit, in general, which a lot of people fail to understand and is also the reason Brexit Britain hasn't significantly diverged from EU rules.

Yes, it's hard to explain to people just how much of a saving being in the EU makes on regulations. It outweighs having the odd regulation that you don't agree with. If the UK does move away from EU regulations then they'll have to duplicate a lot of effort.

Northern Ireland is still de-facto part of the EU. So unless the UK rejoins the EU or recognises United Ireland - they are stuck in this limbo.

It's because people also think of directives, which are the EU thing of "do this, but write all your own slightly different laws." All the EU stuff in total is not as useful as you're making it sound. It's getting better now, but it's taking a long time.

And the UK follows EU regulations anyway, by not controlling imports (latest climbdown, delayed food checks until 2024, 5th time of delaying) and indefinitely accepting CE certification mark (meant to be superseded in the UK by UKCA).

True, but in this case I suspect that since the UK isn't n the EEA then MS Windows won't honour the user browser settings in the UK (even if the UK voluntarily follows some EEA / EU laws).

Northern Ireland is still de-facto part of the EU.

Only for goods, not services.

Yes, that changelog entry is basically "We will do the decent thing only when forced to."

We don’t police tech monopolies in the USA, they are actually in charge because all of Congress owns the SP500, which is dominated by tech. We have to find a way out of this dystopia spiral.

That's not quite it.

The US doesn't, in general, give any extra rights or protections to its people without a bit of force, and then one is lucky.

Hence, no real consumer protection (which would include this). No signing of a thing giving rights for children, and so on. The rights folks legally have were grand enough 200 years ago, but have become substandard over time with little upgrading.

It wasn't that long ago when Microsoft got sued (in the US) for not allowing people to uninstall and replace Internet Explorer.

Something has changed since then that has made US anti-trust much "lazier".

As I recall, there was an election during the trial, where Bill Clinton was replaced by George Bush, whose administration was not as keen to prosecute monopolists.

I had a call yesterday night from a West Virginian friend, and surprisingly the US just extanded worker protection? Or something, at least that was the first time he was exited by US politics since I met him.

In case you're getting downvoted:

https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-...

https://campaignlegal.org/update/stock-act-failed-effort-sto...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...

To be fair, they also don't respect your choice in the EU, it's just that they can't legally act on their disrespect in this particular way.

Because fuck you, that's why

Microsoft decided they would rather to extract more value from their captive users than the users are will to hand over if the law doesn't make it too expensive.

I love Microsoft, but I hate whoever is controlling all these awful choices for their OS. Lets be real its probably a marketing team trying to sell office and whatever else. I just want a version of Windows for actual professionals with no nonsense on it. Slim it down, make it feel like I'm on a 2023 machine with the minimalism of like idk Windows XP or Windows 7. No nonsense.

You can’t “love Microsoft” as if it is a homogeneous entity whilst carving out sections of it for the purpose of attributing everything you’re against. Not only is this simply a sign that Microsoft is a bloated old tech company like a bunch of others, looking to make more money, but it is also consistent with a pattern of Microsoft’s behaviour over the last few decades.

I can appreciate the good utilities they build can I not?

I love Visual Studio, and I love .NET which went way more open source than I thought it would, I for sure assumed it would be licensed under the MS-PL which is far less demanding than the GPL but not as a free as MIT, but no, they went straight for the MIT license.

https://github.com/dotnet

Every single repo is MIT licensed.

I also appreciate VS Code, I know some people will still find some reason to hate on it, but its blatantly clear that it has taken the industry, the number of times I meet a developer who loves using it for programming is much higher than the number of developers I used to see using literally any other range of editors, it all seems to be uniform towards VS code. If you take away the OS, Microsoft still builds amazing products.

I also enjoy Azure more than I do thinking about what half of AWS services mean or do. I seriously have to google a service every time someone brings one up just to remind myself what its for. I rarely do that with Microsoft services, some of it is I'm used to them, but some services have blatantly obvious names as well.

I'm in the same boat; I want to love Microsoft, but it seems internally split into two very opposing groups with very different ways of thinking.

I swear by a lot of their developer tooling and open source work but abhor the Windows ecosystem

> I hate whoever is controlling all these awful choices for their OS.

That’s Microsoft. They control their own software.

I mean, I work for a company that has amazing developers, but its all marketing driving things at the end of the day. So no, it's not as simple as blaming the company. There are people who are literally dreading as they write the code to features we all love to hate.

Remember back when Nadella took over Microsoft. HN was all over it like the second coming of Jesus. I complained that it doesn't change the organisation and this is just marketing. I was completely right. I remember being downvoted over and over again suggesting this is the end game of the takeover and the push that was promoted.

Microsoft wants to be a subscription company and will try and funnel you down any route to keep that revenue. Shareholders and management are driving this because the platform was the product and the product is worth absolutely fuck all at the end of the day. Ergo now it's a subscription delivery mechanism for Office, OneDrive and Edge etc which are all data gathering mechanisms themselves.

Being downvoted doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, it can also mean that people just didn't like what you wrote. In the light of some positive news, keeping the same negative attitude towards an entity may invoke dislike. If later it becomes clear that you were right doesn't make that first reaction unjustified. Being downvoted is for me usually an urge to rethink how I'm saying things rather than what I'm saying, although, as always, YMMV.

I mean, you were wrong and he was the second coming of Jesus in many ways. The Microsoft of today isn't the Microsoft of yesteryear.

It just doesn't change the fact that they're in the advertising business, and that the advertising business is really lucrative so they started pushing for it hardcore.

> I love Microsoft, but I hate whoever is controlling all these awful choices for their OS.

“If only the tsar knew!”

Not a marketing team trying to sell Office. They're trying to grow in the advertising sector, which means funneling people into Bing, since search ads are really profitable.

Because companies only ever respect user choice for two reasons. 1. it coincidentally makes them money, 2. they're forced to by government. In the US it's interesting to see that state governments are increasingly pushing on several issues (albeit sometimes for dubious reasons), but the federal government is somehow chronically AFK.

I can tell you that it's because in the US, some people have vested interest in a dysfunctional government.

Because other places have thriving tech industry which can’t waste time checking what browser to run

Not supporting major browsers doesnt feel like "thriving tech industry"

Sounds like cheap ass startups or poorly executing corpos

Yeah mine was a citation of those saying EU hasn’t big tech due to regulations

Your argument doesn’t hold at all. The functionality is already there, so ask yourself, why are they depriving people outside of the EU this functionality when it’s already there?

Mine was a sarcastic joke, but to reply seriously to your questions, it's not about the effort to implement the functionality imho, it's more about missed revenue, Microsoft is using Edge as a way to monetize windows users traffic, so this is going to affect somehow their profits

Apologies, I totally missed the sarcasm. And I get what you mea. Personally sick of companies forcing things on users for the sake of profit.

Microsoft is determined to make users use Edge + Bing.

For lack of a better response, as a customer I'd like to tell them to fuck off because both are terrible user experiences. It's like wading through trash.

Telling them to fuck off means using linux. It's a hard step at first, but I highly recommend giving it a shot.

After learning the basics, I can't go back to windows anymore because I know how a proper OS works and can see how terrible windows actually is as an operating system, not just in terms of user experience. That alone keeps me motivated to push through any difficulties I face with linux.

Or a Mac.

This is a very good thing for Linux on desktop. I wish MS was way more aggressive here, hopefully it's just the begining.

It's not. The huge majority of users simply doesn't care.

the goal isn't respect, the goal is to leverage their position to try to trick you into something against your interest but in theirs.

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