Comment It's About Intention and Competition (Score 1) 748
You have to look at the intention of the monopoly and the competition they face. When the bundling of IE happened, there was no desktop OS competition. All they had was the competition of moving the desktop into the browser, and MS wanted to be sure that they controlled that migration and limited it to their browser. Their competition was Netscape and their intention was to eliminate this competition by bundling and keeping their product "free."
When you look at the AV space, MS doesn't face competition from the AV vendors, they are helping their product work safer. Their competition is from Apple in the consumer space, Linux in the server space, and Google in the mobile and cloud space. Adding AV to their OS is an attempt to compete in the market, not to eliminate their competition of AV vendors.
That said, it will be interesting to see if and how 3rd party AV vendors will be allowed to replace the built-in AV.