In a complaint reminiscent of the battle over the default installation of Internet Explorer nearly 20 years ago, Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft Corp. alleging that the bundling of Windows Defender with Windows constitutes unfair competition.

In the complaint, lodged with the European Commission and the German federal cartel office, Kaspersky claims that Microsoft prevents makers of security software from competing on equal footing. More specifically, it claims Microsoft is using its dominant position in the computer operating system market to fiercely promote its own security software, Windows Defender, at the expense of users’ previously self-chosen security solution. “Such promotion is conducted using questionable methods, and we want to bring these methods to the attention of the anti-competition authorities,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Eugene Kaspersky (pictured) said in a blog post.

Kaspersky details how Microsoft’s bundling of Defender constitutes unfair competition, including that it is hardwired into all versions of Windows 10, impossible to turn off completely and impossible to delete. He also takes issue with the way Windows 10 deals with third-party security software, noting that users are asked at every step if they want to run the program with the addition of a message that reads “You should only run programs that come from publishers you trust.”

“It’s as if users are about to commit a wrongful action that violates the default settings from Microsoft,” Kaspersky added.

In response to the claims, Microsoft said in a statement that its primary objective is to keep customers protected and that it was confident that the security features of Windows 10 comply with competition laws. “We’re always interested in feedback from other companies and we engage deeply with antimalware vendors and have taken a number of steps to address their feedback,” an unnamed Microsoft spokesman added. “We reached out directly to Kaspersky a number of months ago offering to meet directly at an executive level to better understand their concerns, but that meeting has not yet taken place.”

Microsoft was accused of using the market dominance of its Windows operating system to stifle competition in the web browser space by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows in cases lodged in both the United States and Europe in the late 1990s. The U.S. case was resolved with a settlement in 2002, but the EU case ran for over a decade and was only finally resolved in 2013 with Microsoft being fined $732 million for breaching a previous agreement entered into in 2009.

There is legal precedent when it comes to whether bundling software may constitute a breach of antitrust laws. Now it’s up to the EU to consider whether Microsoft’s intentions in bundling Windows Defender with Windows is meant to stifle competition or is, as Microsoft claims, simply its attempt to provide better protection for users.

Photo: itupictures/Flickr