The rotting empire resorts to separate desperate measures

Summary: A glimpse at Microsoft's latest ugly moves against Google, which is a Microsoft Nemesis in the generation of Linux/Android and services

Microsoft seems to have censored Free software which runs on Windows, reveals strong evidence. Microsoft goes further by trying to do that at Google. OpenOffice could be vanished due to a bogus DMCA notice from Microsoft. As put by Swapnil Bhartiya: "Most of the time most open source players including the Apache Foundation provides the software via torrents as it's a better technology than direct download and these torrents are then shared across the torrent sites. These are legitimate torrents. But NSA friendly Microsoft goes ahead and terminates these links not only from its own Bing, but also from Google and other search engines.

"I think there should be some penalty for sending wrong DMCA notices to discourage the abuse of the already flawed system."

That's a tool Microsoft habitually abuses, as we showed before. And as part of the resurrected "Scroogled" campaign Microsoft will try to accuse Google of what Microsoft is doing.

As the above author put it:

If you are a long-term GNULinux user you would love to see Microsoft in this position. IT world and competition has suffered quite a lot under Microsoft's abusive monopoly which killed many competitors in the bud, before iOS and Android happened.

While Microsoft's legal team may not miss any opportunity to brag about signing bogus patent deals with Android players over undisclosed (and thus can be assumed bogus) patents, it has no respect for the work of others.

Microsoft's Windows Phone has a very very tiny market share, and thus it's not a viable platform for Google or any other player to create any app for Windows Phones. Looking at the popularity of YouTube, Microsoft who never bothered to create any of its apps for GNULinux, went ahead and create its own YouTube app. For the obvious reasons the app did not meet Google's terms and conditions as it offered a download option (and removed ads) to cut the revenues of hardworking content creators who publish their content on YouTube to monetize from the ads.

Microsoft had agreed to remove the app and the two companies were supposedly working together on the problem (nice to see Microsoft getting the same treatment it's been giving to Linux for decades).

Microsoft is now excluding Android from apps and also accusing Google of being sloppy on privacy (look who's talking). The Microsoft-esque PR from Consumer Watchdog seems to have been more bogus than we realised. As Lauren Weinstein's blog shows, there might be fabrication. Google never said what it's claimed to have said. As Weinstein put it:

"There was (I like believe) a time when supposedly reputable news-oriented organizations made the effort to try independently verify "news" -- at least to the extent of verifying easily available materials -- before writing about or republishing items likely to inflame passions and falsely damage reputations."

[...]

We've just been treated to another vivid example of this, courtesy (initially) of reliably Google-hating "Consumer Watchdog" and Putin's propaganda channel "Russia Today (RT)."

This sorry sequence began when Consumer Watchdog breathlessly proclaimed that Google had been caught in a legal brief proclaiming that "Gmail users have no expectation of privacy." RT picked up the story, and sites that we normally would consider to be reasonably reputable started echoing it without further investigation, playing on the current climate of government surveillance furor (and in many cases, related hyperbolic and unjustified paranoia).

[...]

I don't really expect any better from Consumer Watchdog or Putin's RT. But it seems reasonable to at least hope for more sense from mainstream news and other websites who portray themselves as accurate sources of information.

This JoinDiaspora discussion about it has AJ saying: "it is kind of sad, that not a single investigative reporter took the time to verify this quote

"the reason i say that is because the actual quote is sufficiently absurd, there was no need to change it :)"

Will Hill replies:

Gates gets the press he pays for. Here's a recent example of analyst and press manipulation. You can get a small glimpse of how big the microsoft controlled press is by reading their training manuals carefully.

the financial analysts particularly carry a lot of weight. We may think that, you know, Christine Comerford and Jesse Burst and other people who write in the Windows magazines are important, but the most important analysts are the guys who work for, like, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and the other financial analysts. ... everybody reads PC Week, but the VPs and above, those guys are reading the Goldman Sacks analyst reports. They’re the guys, you know, really making the decisions

There are two kinds of developer conferences. There’s those that are controlled by the platform vendors, such as our PDC. We control everything that goes on there; nobody says nothing that we don’t approve beforehand ... At independent conferences, subvert them. Find the people who choose who goes on the agenda and ... Just suck up to them so hard your face collapses. I mean, those people…those people are so valuable to you, it’s beyond belief, because they control who goes on that session or not.

There’s lot’s of independent programming journals. You want to infiltrate those. Again, there’s two categories. There’s those that are controlled by vendors; like MSJ; we control that. And there’s those that are independent. The ones that we control, you use. ... The ones that third parties control, like the WinTech Journal, you want to infiltrate. You want to get yourself onto the advisory committee that picks out which authors are published and which ones aren’t, or which topics are covered and over these special issues, things like that Just be so helpful that they can’t do without you, and then make sure that things go your way. ...that was actually my first claim to fame before I started doing presentations and forming users groups and so forth, was that I was really good on the Internet. And the main thing I did was that I was very formal and polite.

and so on and so forth. Those jerks never quit.

Microsoft, in the mean time, is also using antitrust against Google. Here is a response to this dirty trick:

Microsoft and Nokia protest "price predation" and play at being prey.

[...]

Practically, however, predatory pricing turns out to be controversial and difficult to establish. This is particularly true for predatory pricing claims against free software. An alleged predator is highly unlikely to recoup "losses" caused by free distribution, since free software’s four freedoms allow competitors liberal entry into the market. Moreover, free software licenses (including GPLv2 and Apache v2) arm these competitors with the power to redistribute royalty-free, making any alleged effort at monopoly pricing unsustainable.

[...]

Of course, Microsoft’s complaint is a bit hypocritical, since the Department of Justice and 20 states accused them of predatory pricing when they distributed Internet Explorer without charge. Recall their response at the time: That a market participant – Netscape - had already set the price for browser technology at zero. Does that sound familiar?

And by their accusations, Nokia displays ignorance about its own history with free and open source software. Speaking about Google at a recent legal conference, Nokia’s head of competition law wondered aloud: "If you make a multi-billion-dollar investment as Google has done in the Android operating system, why would you just give it away?" Presumably Google sought the same benefits as Nokia when Nokia open-sourced its own mobile operating system - Symbian.

The outcome of FairSearch’s request for a Commission investigation is not yet known. What is known is that the benefits of free software - high quality, high value, customizable, low lock-in technologies cooperatively developed, tested, distributed, and improved by an efficient global-scale community marshaled using the latest collaborative Internet tools – ring true with consumers. And these benefits, along with the disruptive business model that brings them to fruition, should identify free software distributors not as price predators, but as embodiments of "maverick firms," a species of competitor that authorities in both the US and the EU seek to protect, not punish.

Hopefully the Commission will view free software the way consumers do and reject FairSearch's complaint.

FairSearch is just a Microsoft proxy, one of many. We have already analysed the roots of "FairSearch" and "Consumer Watchdog" (deceiving names) before. ⬆