Russian antitrust body opens investigation into Microsoft anti-competitive practices
14 Nov 2016
Russian antitrust authority said last Thursday that it had opened an investigation into Microsoft's alleged abuse of its dominance in the antivirus software market.
The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) will investigate whether the tech giant had violated Part 1 Article 10 of the Federal Law 'On Protection of Competition', under which companies occupying dominant positions in the market are prohibited from engaging in activities that result or could result in "preventing, restricting, eliminating competition" and/or "infringing the interests of other persons (economic entities) in business activities or consumers at large".
The investigation was launched at the instance of Kaspersky Lab, which complained of having spent "months of fruitless discussions and multiple exhausting attempts to resolve the issue directly with Microsoft".
According to the Moscow-based company, Microsoft had significantly reduced the period for independent developers to adapt their antivirus software for the Windows 10 operating system to just six days, as against two months for earlier versions.
Further, when a Windows user upgraded to the latest operating system, the user's antivirus software was disabled, with Microsoft's Windows Defender system taking over by default.
Other user-installed apps suffered the same fate in cases where Microsoft had a competing offering within its ecosystem, according to Eugene Kaspersky's blog post.
According to Kaspersky, Windows automatically uninstalled unsupported antivirus software when users upgraded to the new OS, regardless of their settings, and would sometimes revert to Defender even if they passed an initial check. Also, if users' third-party antivirus tool was compatible, users still got a warning that Defender was off with a "big juicy" button to turn it on.
Kaspersky pointed out this would not to be so bad if Microsoft were to give independent developers more slack. Third parties do not get much lead time before new releases (just a week in one case), so they were left scrambling to make their apps compatible.