How is this an ad? They are informing you that you can get more out of your subscription. Would it be better that they’re didn’t inform you about this and hid it away in some obscure menu somewhere?

There are lots of reasons to not like Google/YouTube, but I can’t see how this is one of them.

Edit: There is also a clearly visible dismiss button.

I mean, you just have to specify the format of the url that the search engine uses, and then the browser just formats in your search string into that. This has existed for years, if not over a decade, at this point, at least on desktop.

From the article

In parallel, the Commission has opened four market investigations to further assess Microsoft’s and Apple’s submissions arguing that, despite meeting the thresholds, some of their core platform services do not qualify as gateways:

Microsoft: Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising Apple: iMessage

Under the DMA, these investigations aim to ascertain whether a sufficiently substantiated rebuttal presented by the companies, demonstrate that services in question should not be designated. The investigation should be completed within a maximum of 5 months.

Probably is. If they gave you a little too much anesthesia so you didn’t wake up, you would probably drift off the same, and then just not wake up.

28 isn’t that high of a number…

Not trying to defend Microsoft, but making it available to the fraction of a fraction that would actually download it is probably not worth it because you still would have to maintain it, making sure it’s compatible with new windows versions and providing security updates.

It’s a lot easier to just kill it outright, and those that do actually really really want it can find some third party who has uploaded a version of the exe file somewhere.

But that would require 1. The console to support >10 Gbps transfers, 2. Your internet infrastructure to support >10 Gbps in every step of the chain, and 3. The streaming actually using >10 Gbps.

Either one of these conditions is very unlikely to be fulfilled, let alone all of them.

I remember hearing about a study that claimed that backing into parking spaces could have you hundreds of dollars per year, since doing the reversing while the engine is hot uses less gas.

I imagine this is more of a “If we give people the basic stuff for free when they are small, they are more likely to buy our better stuff when they grow and need to update”