Microsoft is shoving Edge down people’s throats, like it’s the bad old days again

As system administrators have been repeatedly noting in a fiery Reddit thread (reported on by The Verge), this disrespecting of users’ browser choices is a real blast from the past. 

Back in 2007—the year Apple released the first iPhone, though it was still very much a PC-first world—the Norwegian browser firm Opera complained to the EU antitrust authority about Microsoft bundling its internet Explorer browser with every copy of Windows. Microsoft had recently had an expensive run-in with the regulator over its bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows, so, in 2009, it settled the browser criticism by agreeing to give people a choice of browsers that they could set up as their default when firing up a new copy of Windows.

The Microsoft that kept getting nailed for anticompetitive practices was meant to be gone now—a relic of the combative Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer days. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft was supposed to be a cooler, calmer entity. But the company is increasingly giving off retro vibes.

The most obvious indicator of Microsoft’s new phase is its aggressive, arguably impetuous behavior in the A.I. space, where it’s become locked in a desperate race against Google that the latter company doesn’t seem to want to be part of, just yet. But there are also signs of Redmond returning to its old, anticompetitive ways.

British regulators are sniffing around both Microsoft and Amazon, worried that their terms for cloud customers are designed to discourage switching to other providers. The U.K.’s antitrust authority just nixed Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard because it thought Microsoft would use the deal to dominate the nascent cloud-gaming market. The European Commission is reportedly considering a fresh antitrust probe over Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with its Office suite (Slack complained) and is also looking into a separate complaint (from Amazon and others) about Microsoft’s terms for running its software on non-Microsoft clouds. 

On its own, Microsoft’s move to shove Edge down the throats of Outlook and Teams users is annoying, but perhaps defensible if you consider that it enables a new “side-by-side experience” that lets users see the emails or chats that contained the opened link in an Edge sidebar. However, in the overall context, it’s another small blow to the notion that Microsoft is a different, friendlier beast these days.

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David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman. 

NEWSWORTHY

Senior TikTok official to leave company. Just months after a promotion, Eric Han, the leader of TikTok’s U.S. trust and safety operations for years, will depart this month. The Verge reports that in December, TikTok combined its global trust and safety team with its U.S.-based trust and safety group, which Han had led from Los Angeles. Han had wanted a role leading that combined team, former employees say. Instead, he was given the role of head of trust and safety for the new U.S. data security team. The team was made to address national security concerns, but Han reportedly felt it left him vulnerable to being a scapegoat.

Amazon Web Services installs hiring controls. All potential hires for Amazon’s cloud business must now be filtered through Roster, a headcount management system that ensures they are matched with a specific open position. And in a separate internal recruiting tool, Amazon is enabling more features aimed at preventing offers unless there’s a match in Roster, a memo viewed by Fortune says. The move comes as Amazon faces its lowest level of sales growth in years and CEO Andy Jassy looks to A.I. for a boost of the cloud division.

DeepMind CEO shares optimism on AGI. Computers with human-level cognitive abilities could be achievable within a few years, says Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. Some top A.I. executives such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have shared their aims to develop the technology while others don’t see a possible route to achieving it. But during an event held by the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Hassabis said it’s possible it could happen within the next decade with cautious development using the scientific method, “where you try and do very careful controlled experiments to understand what the underlying system does,” Hassabis said.

ON OUR FEED

“Using Zillow and any assumptions you need to make, find me the best place where I can renovate a house to add a Giant Mech Fighting Battle Dome. These will be really giant mechs fighting with giant rockets.”

—Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick, who was one of the select users to try out ChatGPT’s new plug-ins, which include the real estate website Zillow. ChatGPT gave Mollick three sites in rural Nevada.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Chegg’s shares tumbled nearly 50% after the edtech company said its customers are using ChatGPT instead of paying for its study tools, by Prarthana Prakash

DeepMind cofounder’s new A.I. chatbot is a good listener. And that’s about it. Is that enough? by Jeremy Kahn

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak isn’t scared of A.I.—but he believes it’ll be used by ‘horrible people’ to do ‘evil things,’ by Eleanor Pringle

Charles Schwab’s daughter thinks Americans need to know more about money—and is cautious of crypto, by Anna Tutova

The top 3 lessons Bill Gates taught this former Microsoft VP, by Eleanor Pringle

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wiped out over $10 million in student loans for an entire graduating class. A year later, 3 grads share how it changed their lives, by Jane Thier

BEFORE YOU GO

Google rolls out passkeys. Everyone with Google accounts can now use passkeys, which allow users to sign in to websites and apps using biometrics or codes used to unlock devices. It comes a year after Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the FIDO Alliance announced they’re teaming up so that users can log in without passwords.

It’s been an aim for Google long before then. In a release announcing the news, Google said the launch is “a big step in a cross-industry effort that we helped start more than 10 years ago, and we are committed to passkeys as the future of secure sign-in, for everyone.” While passwords are still optional, passkeys work so that devices can only share a signature with Google websites and apps, and not with phishing intermediaries. That way, users don’t have to be as watchful with where they’re used as people are with passwords or SMS verification codes. The data shared with Google is the public key and the signature, which don’t contain biometric information.