Kaspersky complaint leads to Microsoft anticompetitive investigation.
The founder of the antivirus developer company Kaspersky Lab, Eugene Kaspersky has complained about Microsoft’s Windows 10 anticompetitive bundling of the Defender antivirus with their OS. This led Kaspersky to file a complaint with competition authorities in both Russia and the EU.
Most industry experts speculated that the regulators won’t act soon enough to make a difference in Microsoft’s policy or that their action won’t compel any considerable changes. However, it seems that the Russian antitrust authority known as the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has opened an investigation last Thursday into Microsoft’s policy.
More specifically, the institution is trying to determine if Microsoft’s actions in bundling Windows 10 with Defender and making the installation of third-party antivirus software harder, was a violation of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition.” More specifically, the Part 1 Article 10 of the law which forbids companies which have a dominant position in the market to engage in activities that prevent, restrict or eliminates competition as well as infringing on the interests of other actors, be it companies or consumers.
Kaspersky apparently issued the complaint with the anticompetition authority after he spent several months in talks with Microsoft, attempting to address the issue directly with the company. Unfortunately, all his effort proved exhausting and fruitless.
Kaspersky made his frustration public in a blog post, in which he also stated the main issues he has with Windows 10 and how it treats third-party security software developers. First, when a user upgrades to Windows 10, other antivirus software is recommended to be uninstalled as part of the process. The program won’t be spared even if you select it to be kept.
Second, Kaspersky criticizes the fact that Microsoft allows third-party developers only a period of six days to adapt their software to new Windows 10 versions compared to the two months they had on previous operating systems. This isn’t anywhere close to sufficient time for Kaspersky to provide their quality service and they risk losing customers to Defender.
Finally, Kaspersky also claims that Windows 10 conceals when a license expired or its signatures are out-of-date in order to automatically switch back to Defender. Additionally, the Kaspersky complaint also mentions the below average quality of Defender as a security system.
What do you make of the Kaspersky complaint?
Image source: Wikimedia
Michael Turner
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