Successful tech companies are being punished—for being successful.

Last week, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed designating Microsoft as having strategic market status, which would give the government regulator enormous powers to regulate Microsoft and impose specific conduct requirements on product design. A consultation process has begun, with a decision on whether Microsoft will be given strategic market status expected in February 2027.

If the CMA decides to designate Microsoft as having strategic market status, it could intervene in product bundling (how Microsoft packages Teams, Word, Excel, and Copilot together), interoperability (whether Microsoft should make it easier for competing software and AI developers to integrate with its products), cloud licensing (whether Microsoft's licensing arrangements disadvantage rival cloud providers), and customer switching (whether businesses face unreasonable barriers to leaving Microsoft's ecosystem) in the United Kingdom.

Bizarrely, the CMA's fundamental gripe with Microsoft is that it has made its software so interconnected, convenient, and commercially attractive to buy together that competitors struggle to persuade businesses to use anything else. For example, the CMA says that Microsoft offers customers "technology that is useful, secure, easy to deploy and manage, and available at an attractive overall price." According to its own customer research, Microsoft is seen as "relatively good value for money," and its bundles are "seen as more cost-effective than buying and managing separate licences." Because commercial bundling "makes customers less likely to adopt products from alternative providers," the CMA thinks it must intervene.

Microsoft is not the first tech giant to feel the CMA's wrath for creating products people like. In 2025, the CMA decided Google had strategic market status in general search and search advertising, giving the regulator the power to impose legally binding requirements on how the company operates. Since then, the CMA has ordered Google to use government-mandated standards for ranking organic search results, provide competitors with tools to access users' search data, and give publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI-powered search. (These requirements were imposed without finding that Google had violated competition law.)

"Products working well together at an attractive price used to be called a selling point," but is now "attracting intervention pushed by an overzealous regulator," Matthew Lesh, public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based free market think tank, tells Reason. Lesh is the co-author of Digital Overload, a 2023 report that warns against giving the CMA "extensive, discretionary powers" amounting to the regulator "telling some of the most successful and popular platforms on the planet how to run their businesses."

Lesh argues that including Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot, in the designation is "particularly outrageous." Last year, when Google was designated as having strategic market status, the CMA excluded Gemini because the "AI assistant sector is relatively small, nascent, and highly dynamic." Lesh argues that, with Google, the CMA acknowledged "uncertainty about the market's development," but now "proposes sweeping Microsoft's workplace AI into a designation requiring an assessment looking at least five years ahead."

"Five years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. Anyone confident about who will lead workplace AI in 2031 should be running a hedge fund, not a regulator," he tells Reason.

While European countries have taken a far more interventionist approach to technology, the United States has, at least comparatively, celebrated competition and innovation. But American lawmakers are increasingly flirting with importing similar restrictions on Big Tech.

In June, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would allow federal and state antitrust enforcers to challenge certain practices by dominant online platforms, including favoring their own products and disadvantaging competitors. Jack Nicastro described the bill in Reason as an "atrocious importation of European-style competition policy," arguing that it would undermine innovation and choice. The following month, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) introduced the AI AGENT Act, which would impose new requirements on major online platforms to accommodate competing AI agents.

These proposals are intended to address similar concerns to those of the CMA in Britain. The idea is that established companies outperforming their competitors is somehow evidence of "market failure," undermining the very innovations that made them successful.

Technological progress has always been driven by entrepreneurs and the companies they've built competing to win over consumers. Britain seems to have forgotten this. If the United States wants to remain a world leader in tech, it should avoid the British approach like the plague.

The post Britain Wants To Punish Microsoft for Being Too Successful appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Two hundred years ago, the invention of Braille allowed blind people to read and write. By the 1930s, recorded sound made "talking books" possible. Developments in text-to-speech technology in the 1980s made reading more accessible and widespread. Then came personal computers, screen readers, smartphones, cameras, GPS, voice assistants, and myriad other technological advancements that gave blind people more independence.

Now a pair of sunglasses can read your mail, describe the person in front of you, tell you what is on a restaurant menu, and help you find your way home. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is using artificial intelligence to turn glasses into a hands-free companion. For any person, this technology is impressive. For the approximately 700,000 Americans who are blind, it is potentially life-changing.

In June, Meta announced that every single blind veteran in the United States could receive its AI glasses free of charge. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), approximately 130,000 American veterans are legally blind, and over 1 million veterans have vision impairment that makes performing daily activities difficult. Don Overton, a blind veteran and former executive director of the Blinded Veterans Association, told Meta that he had "lost [his] independence" after losing his eyesight in a bunker explosion. "The moment I put on my Ray-Ban Meta glasses," he said, "I got my independence back."

The V.A. has a history of failing to fully support blind veterans. In 2022, the V.A.'s Office of Inspector General found that claims processors were instructed to contact visually impaired veterans by telephone, but 87 percent of claims showed no evidence of these calls ever happening. A 2022 investigation by the Senate's Special Committee on Aging found that "roughly 90 percent" of V.A. websites were not compliant with federal accessibility requirements. "We feel we've been abandoned by the agency that is tasked with providing our care and services for us," Overton told The Washington Post in 2022.

Meta's AI glasses have come under fire due to their privacy risks. The company was sued in March after Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten reportedly found that Meta's contractors in Kenya were accessing videos by users of their AI glasses. "We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker noted.

Users should be aware of those risks. Still, for blind veterans, companies such as Meta have stepped up to fill a gap that the government has failed to address.

The post Meta Is Gifting AI Glasses to Blind Veterans: 'I Got My Independence Back' appeared first on Reason Magazine.