 I remember the early days. Do you? For years, the cruel William Gates III reigned as the undisputed King of Internetia. But then, from the Dark Continent came two brave warriors. 99% no more! They cried. And banished him to the fiery bowels of Mount Antitrust from whence he came. But the monopolistic King wasn't truly dead, only sleeping. And now that he's returned with an edge sharper than before, our suffering will be truly great. What are you doing? Oh, I'm making a video about how Microsoft's back to their pushy ways of trying to force us to use their browser, and like, anti-competitive and antitrust, that sort of thing. And I'm also telling the people about our fine sponsor, Hetzner! Hetzner offers high-performance cloud servers for an amazing price. With their new US location in Ashburn, Virginia, you can deploy cloud servers in four different locations and benefit from features like load balancers, block storage, and more. Use code LTT22 at the link below for 20 bucks off. Anyone running Windows 11 right now knows the pains of edge all too well. Want to open a PDF, follow a link, or view just about any type of image file? Until you've changed out the default browser for every single one, Windows 11 is going to default to edge. It apparently wasn't bad enough in Windows 10 when edge not only installed itself as part of a Windows update, but then set itself as the default browser and pinned itself to the taskbar. Now, if you like edge, more power to you. That's certainly an improvement over Internet Explorer. But I'm not into it. The default search engine is Bing, more on that later. The default vertical tabs take up a ton of screen real estate. Yes, we know you can hide them, but even hidden they're bulky, and you can't uninstall it even if you wanted to. Then in 2020, they added some shopping extensions to the browser that would price match for you and add coupons or promo codes to online purchases, which sounds great, but you didn't ask me first. And then more recently, there's been controversy surrounding integration with Zip, a buy now pay later service that has been criticized as predatory for the way that it might tempt people to spend money that they do not have. Now, don't get me wrong. Having a web browser on your PC right out of the box is a better customer experience than a few decades ago. Anyone still got an AOL CD lying around? No? All right. The problem is that Windows has been the dominant operating system for so long that Microsoft gets ample opportunities to leverage it for an unfair advantage. And that is why we need antitrust laws now more than ever. To demonstrate, we're going to do a fresh install of Windows 11 to show you just how bad it is. You can find the links down below for the parts we're running on our test bench. One moment, please. Lately, it seemed, Microsoft has aggressively ramped up their efforts to make their store the one-stop shop. Windows comes with Edge, their browser, and Edge defaults to Bing, their search engine. As for why that matters to them, you need to look no further than Google's business model to understand just how valuable your search data, along with your location, the apps you use, the games you play, can be to a company like Microsoft. There it is. There's your tailored experiences and advertising ID. Take it all. You will, anyway. Then once you hit the desktop, we can make jokes about how Edge only exists so you can download another browser. And most people do it, but because of Microsoft's position, they can force you to open it at least once to do that. And when you do, you'll notice it's front and center, top left right here. The new startup wizard prompts you to give it a crap ton of data. Stay up to date by regularly bringing in browsing data from other browsers. What? That's the default? They know they can't make you keep it, so they're going to take your browsing data from elsewhere? How about we say no? Express yourself. Do you like light or dark mode? What colors do you like? Like, I got to wonder, what am I telling Microsoft when I say, look, I really like the bubblegum color scheme? This actually was not nearly as bad as it used to be. Well, kudos. But not that much kudos. Now that I've got another browser, I don't need Edge anymore. So I'm going to go ahead and just remove it. And then, right? I just stop it. Repair. That's my only option. Like an average user is not going to know that you have to change dot HTML to default to a browser. This could only be like this to make it more difficult. Let's go ahead and just search for something and. Perfect. That launches an edge even after you've changed your default browser. So unless you're willing to put the time and effort into absolutely purging Edge and anything that it relies on from your system, you're going to end up using it once in a while, even if it's just out of laziness. And is that so bad? I mean, it's not like it doesn't work. So is this even a problem? And has it always been like this? To answer those questions, we need to go back in time, in time, in time, in time. Hey there, buddy. It's me, your favorite Canadian YouTuber guy. Yeah, boy, I sure do love chopping wood, craft dinner and LGTstore.com. OK, that's going to get annoying fast. Anyway, the point is back in 2007, Opera Software filed an antitrust complaint alongside the European Union complaining about Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. Mozilla and Google quickly joined forces with them. And in response, Microsoft offered to basically add a toggle switch to turn off or on IE. But that wasn't good enough. By late 2009, they agreed to instead add a browser choice screen, giving users the option to pick what they prefer. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar, buddy. You know, you're right, 2007-linus. It does. In 2001, the United States also won an antitrust case against Microsoft for, you guessed it, monopolistic practices, including bundling Internet Explorer with their OS and making it impossible to uninstall. After all, why should I waste time and money buying Netscape Navigator when Explorer is already right there? Now, Netscape had already switched over to a free model by 1998, but the damage had already been done. Internet Explorer had 99% market share. Making matters worse, Microsoft lied when they said that removing IE would make Windows run slower. Their evidence ended up looking rather fraudulent, to put it mildly. And they even altered the API to favor Explorer over third-party browsers. The good news, though, is that this was the first time that Microsoft had engaged in this kind of manipulative nonsense. I'm just kidding. All the way back in 1994, Spyglass Inc. created a unified version of the Mosaic browser that could work on any platform. This was then licensed out to resellers who sold either an unmodified version or one that utilized their code base. One of these became Internet Explorer. The original deal with Microsoft called for base quarterly fees plus royalties from any Internet Explorer revenue. But how could there be any royalties when Microsoft would just bundle the Internet Explorer product with Windows for free? Very clever, Mr. Gates. But the lawyers didn't seem to think so, since Microsoft ended up settling with Spyglass for $8 million after they threatened legal action. That's a lot of money for you to not learn your lesson at all. Have you noticed that none of the things that Microsoft was punished for or agreed to have actually been implemented in Windows 11? So let's talk about why Microsoft is so determined for you to use their web browser that they would treat multimillion dollar fines and settlements as just cost of doing business. We live in a world where data is as good as gold. And the more people using Edge or, by extension, Bing, the more data Microsoft can accumulate. And the more that they make it harder for the consumer to avoid their software, that is the very definition of anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior. Now, to be fair, according to netmarketshare.com, Google Chrome actually has the highest market share by a long shot at roughly 69% at the time of filming, with Edge sitting at a meager sub 8%. Nice. But what's not so nice is the way that Edge is bullying their way into the runner up spot. Microsoft got to first place by being a strong competitor and running creative ads like this one. Microsoft, strong armed rather than sweet talked, leaving us where we are today. And there's more to this than web browsers. You probably don't remember Novell or WordPerfect, but there are leaked memos from Gates in 1994 trying to hinder competition again. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes and WordPerfect to achieve and which will give Office a real advantage. We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect Novell without this. In 1996, Novell assigned rights to Caldera, which sued Microsoft and won $280 million, which to remind you, taught them absolutely nothing. Now, let's be clear. Google and their Chrome browser are not the white knights that it might feel like we're making them out to be. They're owned by Alphabet Inc, who has been involved in their own set of antitrust lawsuits and have been accused numerous times of monopolistic practices, tax avoidance, among other things. I mean, just about every browser is running on Chromium now, the basis of Chrome, and Chrome is the most widely used browser by a long shot. But that's a story for another time, maybe once they've surpassed Microsoft in terms of market cap. Now, these days, you'll see Mr. Gates doing philanthropic work with charities and nonprofits. But don't let the PR fool you. He and by extension, Microsoft got to where they are today by ruthlessly sabotaging and tricking the competition. So the next time you see someone using Edge because it's already there, remember this classic Simpsons line lampooning bill. Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks. Nope. A better way to get rich is to receive checks like the one I got from our sponsor, Grammarly. Thanks to Grammarly for sponsoring this video. Communication online through email, Slack or Discord can easily be misinterpreted and can become a huge time block. This is why all working professionals need a tool like Grammarly. Grammarly is an all in one writing tool that helps you with grammar and spelling suggestions. Simply install the free desktop app, log in and start typing, baby. There's also Grammarly Premium, which provides more in depth feedback on your writing so you can understand. We recommend checking out the tone transformation and clarity tools. They help you by rewording phrases to make you sound more confident. And they remove unnecessary jargon to help you get your point across more clearly. Work smarter, not harder. Go to Grammarly.com slash LTT today and sign up for a free account and get 20% off a premium Grammarly subscription. Anyway, thanks for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out the tech quickie we did about how everything is just Chromium now.