If after the ‘The Passenger’ and “You sexy thing” anyone decides to play ‘Bid it’, it hits the Achilles tendon. The potential of “anyone” growing to “everyone” creates the competition issue.

What I love about internet is that you cannot really tell if it is going to grow.

Vincent, consumers didn’t cross my mind at all, such a snob! I suppose you’re right, no harm done if you look it this way. Why did I go off with all these stories then?

In addition to appealing directly to consumers, I believe that Microsoft has actually transformed its browser as a ‘content control tool’. In a way MS is trying to reinforce its power in the value chain. I believe that it hasn’t done it earlier (like Firefox) collecting hahas because until now it was a B2C issue of customer relationships. But now internet security is passing as a priority in the policy makers agenda. Viviane Reding (‘agenda setter’ according to many) and EU commissioner on ICT issues has brought up security several times, the one that captured my attention was during the World Economic Forum, the latest was in June.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/08/336&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

So in my eyes Microsoft actually declares that its platform has all it takes to facilitate “Access to creative and informative contents” blocking away the rest of it. And this is an argument of civil law (check me on this please). And a path of B2P (policy) and B2B reinforcement in the value chain.

Google, depended on the platform, can claim that this design undermines its operations.

Yes In Private Blocking will be deactivated by default.

But, it is also triggered automatically if certain levels of pollution are detected in the feeds (stated in the Note in the presentation)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/features/browse-privately.aspx?tabid=2&catid=1

The time-recipe is secret!

And this is a Google argument under commercial law. Even without an agreement it still offends competition principles.

Law relationships are apparently hierarchical. Bottom up: Antitrust is a topic of commercial law, Commercial Law is a domain of Civil Law. Whether and when you can reposition a case it is still a mystery to my geek eyes.

The other, of course, is browsing pr0n. Everyone knows how suspicious a empty web history is, so it solves this problem.

I don’t think ads are any issue. Also, I’ve not used Safari’s or Firefox’s similar feature at all, but IE8 desperately needs to play catch-up. My guess is that this is mostly a marketing ploy – Microsoft selling features for the sake of having “features”… no matter if they are relevant to anyone. (Microsoft Vista being a prime example)

About legality issues, first, the me-too feature isn’t default behaviour (and 99% won’t use it anyway) and secondly, there’s no agreement between content provider (ie. webserver) and client (browser) that how the latter has to render the website (sans ads or otherwise). But sure, this doesn’t stop starting lawsuits in the land of the brave.

But what we can be pretty sure of is that it will be disabled by default, and only really be turned on by the type of person that doesn’t click on adverts anyway. Win-win for Microsoft?