brucek
Posts: 2,071 +3,338
I agree on the big picture, but that sort of corruption works best when it is hard to see.Microsoft is one of the richest corporations on the planet and has almost as many US members of congress in its pocket as the US healthcare industry. I seriously doubt that anything will be done to them, not because of what they do, but because of who they own.
Take for example the oil company that can write an obfuscated tax law change deep in a thousand page bill that few Americans will ever see and even fewer will ever understand, and sure enough they can run off with billions with no one the wiser. Even better when you can hand the politicians some complicated economic talking point about how this is really beneficial for everyone along with the bribe, and have some people believe it.
But it works a lot less well when the damage is on the front page of the newspaper. If the result of Microsoft stranding tens of millions of devices that consumers and some businesses feel they have strong economic incentive to keep using anyway, and the result is lots of voters getting their computer ransomwared, and then pipelines and hospitals shutting down, and police stations going offline, and maybe some members of congress getting their files hijacked, and also some of the jury members that hear some of these cases, and all because Microsoft refused to either keep giving out security patches for Win 10 or let these older computers run Win 11 officially (even though they run it just fine when hacked) then that political & legal cover is not going to hold up against that for very long. At least I hope.