I'm still to see the doc where MS is forced to give ring-0, certified, boot-start to everyone.

JUST LET US BE A MONOPOLY!!!!

I blame their parents!
And video games!
And satanic music!

There would be no reason to adhere to complicated EU rules everywhere else globally.

But there are a ton of websites that do adhere to complicated GDPR rules even though they serve 99.99% US based clients.

I think this has nothing to do with EU and it's just some far fetched bullshit excuse from Microsoft.

This argument makes zero sense.

My guess: Because they reviewed and signed the kernel space code which calls code that is unreviewed and unsigned (or, at the very least, pulls directly from files that are unreviewed and unsigned without proper validation or error checking), calling out CrowdStrike's failure puts them on the hook too.

They aren't, it's more "it's the EUs fault for forcing us to allow businesses like cloud strike to write kernel level antivirus, because we already have our own."

Exactly, wtf.

Msexit

They should, but then they'd be replaced by other US multinationals. So they won't.

The EU (and not just the EU by the way) loves US tech. It can't get enough. They both play a cat and mouse game with each other for the public but the EU aren't going to force MS out and MS aren't going to leave.

Put it another way, of the EU wanted to be principled and demand fairness for EU citizens they'd take away MS (and other US multinational's) tax breaks via Dublin. But they're not going to do that.

This doesn't have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you'll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.

Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could've argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that's what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they're using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn't have Defender, or they'd have done it without that type of access it'd have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.

Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn't implement a low privilege API as well, which would've prevented this whole mess.