On the Microsoft vs. EU matter: Microsoft is the provider of a widely used operating system as well as the developer of application software. The quasi-monopolistic position of Windows allows Microsoft to promote any of their own application or security software by tightly integrating it into Windows, providing functionality and quality that third-party developers cannot achieve. Therefore, the goal of the EU legislation is to make the market fairer and strengthen third-party application developers.
As a consequence, Microsoft then just opened their API to the world without any guardrails or precautions that would prevent misuse or crashing the system. This is bad practice. Whenever you provide an interface to the public, you must do your best to avoid use cases that break or compromise your system. This occasion now gives Microsoft a case to point to the EU and tell people: “see, regulation is bad”, when in reality, it’s Microsoft’s neglect that caused this situation.
This reminds me of the recent Apple case. When the EU tried to force Apple to open their operating system to other browser engines and app stores, they did their best to implement these regulations in a way maximally inconvenient for users and developers, so they have effectively no other choice than staying within Apple’s closed ecosystem.
The EU is far from perfect, but blaming them that this could happen is a false narrative in my view. They want to demand a level playing field. MS could just have opted to stop their own product using that access. Or implemented a system that can disable non standard drivers in case of emergency. And let’s be honest if it wasn’t crowdstrike chances are MS would have caused something like this themselves. They have a reputation for shipping rather destructive patches afterall.
Also the DMA is a european law. It doesn’t have power beyond the EU so they could have limited the opening to only allow windows systems within the EU. Which they chose not to do so their arguments have some rather big holes in them.