law

Microsoft used their fundamental advantage as an incumbent software leviathan to bypass the terms on which we wanted to fight them. With very few exceptions, they didn’t steal our customers. Our customers loved Slack. But they tapped the massive market they already had and greatly reduced our chance to ever reach them. A company that was already paying a steep premium for the essential tools of Office 365 got Teams “for free” and it seemed fine to them.

That's sounds like 🎩 to me. Winning an antitrust case in the EU in 2024—filed in 2020—seemed to be too little, too late.

Filed in 2020 and resolved in 2024, the suit alleged that Microsoft had used its monopoly power to bundle Teams into the Office suite and give it away for free, thereby undercutting competition and unfairly skewing the market in their favour. In response, Microsoft has agreed to unbundle and charge for Teams.

Microsoft seems to pushing Copilot to its Microsoft 365 users for an additional $3 per month unless the users switch to the "classic" plan before the next billing cycle. Leonard French, in his YouTube video, comments on the implications this could have for confidentiality in healthcare, legal and other similar industries. This was prompted after Kathryn Tewson started a thread on Bluesky on the issue after speaking to Microsoft support. She writes:

1. It is impossible to disable Copilot in OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint, or Windows itself.
2. It will not become possible to do so for another month AT THE EARLIEST.
3. While they couldn't be sure, they think it's likely that Copilot ingests organizational data via the systems and applications it's embedded into even when not invoked.
4. They were unable to determine if such ingested data would "bleed over" into files other than those it was sourced from
5. They were very clear that organizational data would not be used to "train foundational models," but couldn't rule out the possibility that it could leave our organization in some way and pass beyond our custody and control.

Wendover Productions along with LegalEagle are suing PayPal in a class-action lawsuit. I first discovered this from Leonard French who reads through the document providing his commentary. At the time of writing this LegalEagle has also uploaded a video addressing the lawsuit which has to do with Honey hijacking referrals from creators as discovered by MegaLag.

The YouTube commenters on all videos pointed out that this was a form of cookie stuffing, which according to Wikipedia:

... is a deceptive tactic in affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing, individuals (affiliates) are compensated for enticing consumers to buy products through specially crafted URLs that set cookies on users' browsers to track which affiliate referred the user to the site. Affiliates engaging in cookie stuffing use invasive techniques, like pop-up ads, to falsely claim credit for sales they did not facilitate.

The FBI together with eBay went after Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning for cookie stuffing using the eBay affiliate program where they both pled guilty to a single wire fraud charge.