Sure, but that's essentially it's current state, and everybody knows that. But some people do want to experiment with a microkernel still, and so here we are.

Well, a large company has more senior and chief managers, too. Obviously one guy cutting his paycheck wouldn't make much difference, but several dozen just might.

Well, the standing hypothesis for domestication is that it wasn't really conscious, it just happened to be beneficial for both species - but for wolves first. Presumably they started by scavenging on edible remains left in the vicinity of human camps. The wolves that were less shy (so they approached the camps more) and exhibited less aggressiveness (so they would be chased away less) had an evolutionary advantage in that population, and so they bred for those traits. At some point that could have produced a wolf tame enough for people to take notice and try to consciously domesticate and breed them from there, presumably as hunting companions initially (or maybe even that was originally just a natural symbiosis).

Speaking of MS OpenTech, people just don't understand what it is (or rather, was) about. Back when MS was still in the "dark ages" wrt open source, but slowly coming out of them, OpenTech was set up as an independent org that could work with open source without the fear of "contaminating" MS proper - remember, this was back when Ballmer with his "GPL is a virus" notions was still around, and lawyers were super-paranoid about people copy/pasting some code snippet and inadvertently exposing the code to some OSS license, or a patent claim or something like that. They were even more paranoid when people wanted to contribute something upstream; with a few exceptions, this was something that you had to go to OpenTech to do.

Now that this is no longer the case, and regular devs inside MS are allowed (in fact, actively encouraged) to use and contribute to open source, the legal separation that was the whole point in the first place has lost its relevance. Notice how the announcement specifically notes that this is not about laying people off, just closing down the legal entity.

Yes - and this was based on the assumption that EU commission conclusions were valid. Seeing how they were valid in the past (in e.g. the Microsoft case), it's a reasonable assumption. If not, then that's what we should be discussing.

Note that the guy to whom I initially replied didn't dispute that at all, he just said that they should be able to do whatever the hell they want because it's their product. That was the point I was addressing.

I'm not saying that what they're doing is wrong. I'm saying that, if EU commission findings are correct, then regulating them is the proper course of action (as opposed to "free market will just sort it out").

The consumers are harmed because they end up with fewer choices to pick out of than are actually there. Worse yet, they may not even be aware that the choices they know are not all that is there.

It's truly a horrible sight. The screams of young company branches as they are separated from their parents, the lifeless carcasses of the slaughtered companies as their stock price slowly dribbles down to the ground...

I don't know, you'll have to ask the EU commission about that. TFA says that they have found "potential bias in Google’s search results, ..., agreements with advertisers that may exclude rival search-advertising services, and contracts that limit marketers from using other platforms". I assume the details are in their report.

It doesn't matter how easy it is or not if people aren't doing it, and Google is taking advantage of that. You can achieve a position of market dominance entirely by fair means - by being better than all your competitors - but once you do that, regardless of how it happens, you have to play by some special rules to prevent that dominance from infringing on freedom of competition in other areas.

No, but Google needs to be forced to not abuse its position of dominance.

That's exactly what Microsoft was fined originally in the first place.

Who said anything about search engines? But if, say, they score Google Play higher than iTunes Store and Amazon when searching for MP3s...

(Note, I'm not saying that they do. I'm not familiar with the details of the case. Going by the /. summary of it, though, apparently the EU commission did find something like that.)

On mobile phone markets, definitely not - last I checked Android was dominant there.

I can't say about the digital music market - if I had to guess, Apple is probably #1 there with iTunes, but not to the extent where they can control it.

You can if they are shown to have abused their dominance position, e.g. by using tie-in to promote their other products, or by excluding their competitors. It doesn't really matter how they've gotten into that position in the first place, the damage is the same.

The bigger problem is not for people who use the engine to find things, it's for owners of things to be found. When a single search engine has 90% of all traffic, whether your business shows up in its search results or not, and if it does, then how high relative to its competitors, can easily become the single biggest determinant of your success. If such placement is not fair (whatever that means), there is an issue.

You sound like a laissez-faire unregulated market proponent, so let me put it this way. Such markets, presumably, work fine when all actors are rational and base their decisions on facts. When a single company becomes in charge of delivering those facts, to the extent that most people implicitly trust them, it becomes trivial for it to skew the market by selectively withholding facts or downplaying their relevance.

I assume it's because Apple isn't in a monopoly or market-dominant position.

Your problem is that you're talking in terms of national identity to begin with. The moment you say something like "what Turks are" - painting the entire people with the same brush - you discredit yourself as an unabashed nationalist.

BTW, you do know that Greek army also practiced ethnic cleansing during e.g. the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-20? Names like Gemlik-Yalova, Manisa, Alasehir ring a bell?