Why do you say it was a fiasco ? It seems to have worked as expected, browsers are much better than IE from those days due to competition.

Time they did anything, the problem/market had sorted itself out.

You believe the (very public) inquiries had no effect on the market?

I don't - I think a better product came along, one that was aggressively pushed by the dominant search engine that swathes of the internet used each day (which is not in and of itself a good thing either, FWIW).

Microsoft couldn’t employ their standard anticompetitive playbook on Chrome due to the antitrust process. So that gave it a chance to become viable.

Maybe you’re right in this case, but I find it impossible to believe that apple would allow third party apps ever, if not for regulatory intervention. Given that the existence of Android has not caused that to happen naturally yet, there’s basically no other chance that any other market player would be able to reasonably upset that. Same with google search, Bing and Baidu have a laughably small market share in search, despite both being multibillion dollar companies behind them. And forget small players like DDG or Pinephone, they don’t even register on the charts.

So yeah, market regulation is necessary here, I’d rather roll back useless regulation later than continue with the status quo.

I don't remember any public inquires having any kind of effect. I remember Chrome being much better and people switching because of that.