After gunning for Microsoft’s antitrust practices in its homeground, Moscow-based antivirus maker Kaspersky has today published a blog post affirming that it has now gone ahead and filed similar complaints against the Redmond giant in the European court.
The Russian company alleges that Redmond has been using its dominant position to market its own antivirus software, Windows Defender on Windows 10. This anti-competitive tactic has proven to be harmful to its competitive software products, who’ve been pushed out of the picture. Talking about the same, CEO Eugene Kaspersky in a statement said:
We see clearly – and are ready to prove – that Microsoft uses its dominant position in the computer operating system (OS) market to fiercely promote its own – inferior – security software (Windows Defender) at the expense of users’ previously self-chosen security solution.
Earlier last month, Kaspersky had temporarily redacted its antitrust complaint against Microsoft saying that it would be in constant dialogue with the company to push them to make certain changes to the anti-virus software and operating system. It seems that the antivirus maker is till not satisfied with Microsoft’s practices and has decided to expand the scope of its complaint beyond Russia on this occasion. The blog post mentions:
As you’ll probably be aware, late last year we turned to Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) with a complaint against Microsoft. And just recently, we did the same thing in Europe – filing complaints with both the European Commission and German Federal Cartel Office.
Kaspersky still isn’t satisfied with Microsoft’s Windows Defender-focused practices and says that the company has been wiping off its software off the operating system when users upgrade their PCs. It replaces the antivirus solutions a particular user has chosen and replaces them with the default Windows Defender offering, which is switched on by default and comes baked into Windows 10.
Also, it has been seen that the native antivirus doesn’t completely shut down and cannot be replaced with a third-party software. It has even alleged that Microsoft stops pushing Kaspersky license expiration notifications — which are used to remind users to extend their memberships and doesn’t provide competitors enough time to full test out the compatibility of their antivirus softwares before pushing out an update to Windows 10. Further, talking about the same, the blog post continues to add,
We want Microsoft to stop misleading and misinforming our – and not only our – users. We want to see all security solutions being able to work on the Windows platform on a level playing field. And we want to see users being able to decide for themselves what they want and consider important to them.
Besides, we want fair and healthy competition, which has always given excellent results everywhere – no matter in which industry or market.
We’ve contacted Microsoft for more information on the said complaint and will update you once we hear back from them.
