Two decades ago, the EU handed down a fine of over $600 million for not offering versions of Windows that did not come with Windows Media Player preinstalled. Microsoft still has antitrust problems in Europe at the moment, and last year, the EU attempted to block the company’s acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard. But Microsoft has paid no fines this year… so far.

Google famously launched Gmail on April Fools’ Day 2004 — at a time when promising one gigabyte of free storage surely must have been a joke. Google did introduce Inbox a decade ago in 2014 but shuttered that in 2019.

Microsoft released the SPOT watch — short for “smart personal object technology.” Given that you don’t hear that acronym much anymore, you can probably guess that the watch never took off, despite the fanfare over the device’s ability to read headlines, send instant messages, and give weather forecasts. The SPOT watch also wasn’t even the company’s first attempt at a smartwatch: as early as 1994, it partnered with Timex to release the Datalink, arguably the world’s first smartwatch. But here in 2024, it’s been a while since Microsoft tried to make wristwear happen.

In June of 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment. Though it was designed to prevent minors from seeing pornography on the internet, the Court ruled 5–4 that the law itself was too broad. Similar echoes are happening this year, though. Age-verification laws at the state level are blocking porn sites for minors or, in some states, blocking them entirely; and this July, the similarly named Kids Online Safety Act passed with bipartisan support.