It's because Microsoft is not a consumer company, it's a B2B service provider. They couldn't care less about retail users in general, to the point that it's been their policy to turn a blind eye or even tacitly support the blatant piracy of Windows among Home users across generations.

For those who don't know, there's an open-source script that automatically enrolls your Windows 10 copy for Extended Service Updates, which increases its life by another three years: https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU

Shouldn't talk about things that you don't know much about so confidently

This is actually not uncommon in most of the world. American 1A is actually an extremely novel concept most other countries still haven't caught up on.

American 1A is as strong as it's proving to be right now and increasingly proving to be stronger and stronger by the day, since January this year!

Many other countries have protections like that, "on paper" (!!!) - but the point is in how it is used or misused, or rather completely ignored - directly or indirectly, like in the USA currently and many other countries in the world.

Novel in what sense? Are you familiar with the hisory of free speech in e.g. the UK, Sweden, and France?

The UK, where the government has literally smashed printing presses in the newspaper age when magazines were thought to be publishing embarrassing news about the Crown? Where the government's legal authority to do so is still intact? That UK?

So many threads but all missing the point.

Windows is not a consumer brand - at least anymore, if it ever was. It is predominantly a business product for enterprises. And their current service model to their clients requires interoperability with cloud services and user profiling for easy authentication and telemetry, which is what they are getting by enforcing Microsoft accounts. That is why there is no contradiction in their POV with this.

Does it suck for you retail "Home" users? Yes, but you were never the target customer base; at best you are a marketing platform. There is a reason why Microsoft has been giving away the product virtually for free has been turning a blind eye to its piracy (heck, MS's own Github hosts multiple cracking tools for it) when it comes to retail customers. They have abandoned you as a serious market segment.

Switch to Linux.

Anyone who's actually used Copilot won't be surprised by this. It's garbage, even the free tiers of other LLMs are better in comparison.

American English prefers more slang in general. The context here is largely American.

who on earth is using Meta AI in the first place?

Everyone using any sort of meta product? This is honestly just a dumb question.

Single .txt file in Notepad++