Ctrl+Alt+Choose: The Fight for Your Browser Choice

• The Browser Choice Alliance

My name is Gerardo Proaño and I work with FTI Consulting. We support the browser choice alliance in their endeavors to ensure that the market functions well on Windows devices. Bruce alluded to it. There are a lot of issues that are happening in the worldwide web, but desktop was an environment that used to be regulated. Microsoft was told by the Department of Justice back about 10, 15 years ago.

The European Commission also imposed what we call commitments or remedies into the market. They forced Microsoft into sit at the table and say, "You need to allow for browser choice." You remember maybe some of these functions that ensured that the market flourished without the emerge, Opera emerged, and a whole bunch of browsers that you may have not heard about emerged. But then about three, four years ago, some browsers start experiencing some issues.

Oh, my customers start complaining that this doesn't work. Like my PDF used to work simultaneously, and open in Wavebox, which by the way, is a UK browser. And now it doesn't work anymore. And they started just thinking, "Look, what is going on? Let's look into our coding. Let's try to solve this issue." And all of a sudden they realize, "Oh, that doesn't come from us."

And then other browser, WaterFox, found exactly the same issues. So about 2 and 1/2 years ago, these group of browsers gathered together to say, "Mm, there must be something going on at the operating system level. There must be something going on that we cannot control and that is driven by Microsoft." And again, this is about trying to educate the regulators into what is to do. So Bruce talked about the Digital Markets Act.

I'd like to maybe pause a little bit and make this a little bit more interactive. Do you know what it actually is? Have you heard of it? You have? You have? So for a long period of time, antitrust has been seen as this overarching principle that ensures that the market functions correctly, where intervention ensures that competition benefits consumers.

And the premise there is to say, with choice, consumers benefit. Why? Because when you have to compete for your attention, for your clicks, you want to improve it. And so you have one browser that may have an amazing feature for gamers. And maybe another browser will say, hmm, maybe I'd like to focus on education and ensure that PDFs work to the benefit of students.

And so antitrust rules were designed to capture market failures emerging from attempts to monopolize the market. Those principles are spread across the globe. But what happens if there is a systematic effort to limit competition in markets? You need, in some instances, regulations like the Digital Markets Act or like in the UK DMTC, A, that essentially captures some of these issues into one bucket of dos and don'ts.

And so the browser said, oh, great news for us. We can actually hope that that regulation immediately produces some effects in the market because simply, Microsoft will have to abide. The reality was not there when the Digital Markets Act became into force about two years and a half ago in March 2024. So out of frustration more than anything else, they decided to become public. Let me just take a step back because I think a lot of these grievances, which by the way, are well-documented on our website.

You may have seen some of them if you use Windows, but let me just take you through the user journey. So how does that work when you buy a new computer powered by Windows? It comes with a bunch of apps pre-installed. So in and of itself, that could be beneficial for the user because when you buy any computer, you expect to just open the box, plug it in, push the button, and then work whichever app that you want. But what happens with browsers?

There's no one single computer worldwide that has been chipped with any browser other than Edge. And then you have to wonder, but how come? So there is this program called Jumpstart that Microsoft deployed a number of years ago that essentially means that Edge is the only browser pre-installed as it comes as a package with Windows. Whether it's financial incentives or technical roadblocks, the mere fact of that being pre-installed exclusively is the first step that browsers have to circumvent in order to get the user's attention and get potentially some user research on their side.

That's the first thing. And then once the user downloads a browser, what happens? So first of all, they have to find a browser. Bruce kindly showed one screenshot, which is also on the website. Maybe I can just click on it hoping that it works. When you click on Windows's search bar, you want to type, I want to download an alternative browser of my choice, for example, Vivaldi or Opera.

And then you get a bunch of pop-up messages. Now, some of them may think, well, that's only publicity, but what if it's in a continuous manner? And what if it says something that is a bit misleading? You know, things like claiming that is safer than or equal than, and there's no way to prove it. That kind of leads to the user to thinking, okay, maybe I don't need to download an alternative browser 'cause I actually have already one pre-installed. And what if there's some self-promotions within that user journey of downloading the alternative browser where you say, well, why are you downloading an alternative browser if you also have Edge here?

And then even more so, what if you have manipulative banners that says or that suggest that the extensions work better on Edge? All of that compound makes the user discomfort, makes it a little bit more fatigued about the fact that I'm not gonna use an alternative browser. We have also documented barriers to setting defaults. These barriers are both within the Edge browser as well as within the centralized default browser settings. And again, this is not incidental.

You're decoders, I work on policy in Brussels, but you tell me if this is something that incidentally you made a mistake in coding, or you actually program the software to behave in a certain way. So here, for example, you can set all of the applications that the browser opens as a default and all of the protocols and standards that the browser opens as a default in one single click to Edge.

But if you want to set up a default browser, like Vivaldi or Opera or another browser, you don't have the same experience. You have to manually select some of these protocols. And these tactics change across time. So when we set up the alliance, we realized, hey, we need browsers to tell us more in order to help you, because in fact, nobody knows about these tactics. And it seems that the digital market's act is not delivering the promise that it was set up for.

So we started talking to the regulator. We started making submissions. And I like to echo Bruce's point that the regulator needs to hear from the real experts. They're also coders. They don't code software. They code legislation. And that legislation may have a bug. And that bug needs to be fixed with your input. And so what we have done for about two years is knocking on the door of the regulator consistently and saying, it isn't working, it still is not working, still not working.

So I'm happy that today I can say that 60% of the dark patterns identified have been removed. There are other rules in the EU that are not these kind of dark patterns that have also been applicable to date, like the ability to uninstall Edge. That's tremendously helpful, why? Because once you uninstall Edge, there's no way that this is applicable. So it kind of removes a whole bunch of design architecture features that essentially generate frictions to the user experience and allows the user to simply have a browser or multiple browsers of the choice.

I personally use three browsers. And that is the main principle that we want to defend with the DMA. But these issues are global. And we also noticed that the DMA doesn't solve the issues. I mentioned at the beginning jumpstart. That's not something that the DMA solves because the DMA was designed to cover these sort of features. So where do we stand in the UK? So the UK had the same reflection.

It said like, we may need something like the DMA, but not as constrained with a set of do's and don'ts. We need something a little bit broader that is similar to antitrust, but it takes less time. And so they built this DMCCA and they started an investigation on Microsoft. I would like to just say thanks to the browser choice and the work of Bruce, but also Waterfox and Wavebox. They listened to those claims. Now, I know that the first question that you may ask when it comes to enforcement of regulation is like, what about the politics?

And it is true that when the DMA launched the investigation, they launched it on a very specific set or features within the window space. They focused on business ecosystem. The reason being that the UK wants to remain open for business. And in fact, part of this process is about convincing the regulator that what they're doing is pro-business. It's not just helping the users, it's helping businesses to emerge.

And the competitive process necessitates an intervention when there's a company that holds nearly 90% of the market being Windows or being Office 365, which most companies use. And so the first thing that we did with the CMA is provide information and allow them to have all of these tactics well documented so that they can investigate further. What's next in the UK? Well, they need to go further in the regulatory process, get a decision where they can identify the areas that they want to regulate and put specific provisions that can remedy some of these issues.

Now, if you think about the world, and Brazil also alluded to, there is Japan that put a law into place. In the US, there was also some intervention. There are also some jurisdictions that are very interesting to explore, and we did it with the Brazil Choice Alliance. So we went to Brazil and we supported Opera in a complaint, antitrust complaint, that they put before the regulator.

This antitrust complaint had three features. They complained about the existence of jumpstart, so again, tackling something that nobody else had before. They complained about the darn patterns, and they complained about a feature that in a similar fashion of what Apple was alluding to, security. Microsoft programmed this feature called S mode, whereby you essentially have an environment that is more protected and more secured, but where no alternative browser was really allowed unless it was in the store that is also controlled by Microsoft.

And so in essence, when they complained with the regulator, and thanks to the submission that we did, they opened an investigation, and as a result of that investigation, Microsoft stopped S mode on new devices globally. So why is it important to talk to regulators? Well, first of all, because they need that first-hand experience of market participants. They need to understand how the web works. They need to understand also the impact in the market.

So what is it that is changing for the browsers? And so things like usage, if you track them, if you don't, then how does that impact your ability to grow? And then ultimately they need remedies. Coming with a solution-oriented approach is beneficial to the regulator and to the market. How do we tie all of this together? So regulators talk to each other. So part of our time we spend going to events, talking to them, bringing people from the browser members to talk to the regulators, to share their experiences, to see, well, this worked in the EU, but what about your jurisdiction?

Or this worked in Brazil, but what about your jurisdiction? And that's how you get them to also set the standard for other regulatory authorities to take issue. In this context, we still have a lot, and I know we have been active for about two years, so we still have a lot of ground to cover. In that, and super important, I think, for everybody, and it's a little bit of a scoop here, we're preparing some research. So partnering with a research team, behavioral economists, we're trying to model the way in which human behavior is being manipulated through these tactics, because for the regulators, it's not obvious that this is impactful.

Some of them can see, as I said, as publicity, or maybe if they're bored, the user just gets to use edge, and so what? And so here what we're trying to say is, all of these tactics which are deliberate have an actual real impact on the user experience. And if you look at certain demographics, it's even worse. If you look anecdotally at older people, they don't necessarily have the time or the willingness to click seven times to download Opera, where we have seen, at least in Opera, that number of frictions when they try to download an alternative browser.

And if you have certain things that are specially configured for your own life, or simply because you happen to have a certain degree of disabilities and so on, that's even more aggravating. And so the job of the Browser Choice Alliance is to educate the regulators about these issues, to raise awareness, and to bring it to the right political level so that we call them to action.

This is also a call for the community to make sure that you share your experiences whenever you see these tactics. The importance of having a website and having videos and so on is to make them live for the regulator. So if you ever have the, let's say, impetus to talk to the regulator, that's something that they really welcome. And a lot of the things that you see on the website will be developed through this research project that we are conducting at the moment, whereby we're connecting the dots about this reality that we're seeing, at least in the UK.

So I wanted to keep this talk interactive and have maybe you guys asking questions and the world that we see in Brussels, and from a regulatory perspective, is very different from the ones that you naturally seen. We were talking early on about that. Maybe open the floor for any reactions or questions.