Buy.com today launched BuyMusic.com, which sells downloads of songs and albums--much like Apple's Macintosh-only iTunes site. While the company makes no bones about the fact that its entire service is based on Microsoft technologies, its exclusion of all but Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is likely to raise the ire of standards advocates.
Those advocates argue that the existence of Web standards, set chiefly by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), means that any standards-compliant browser should be able to access and use any Web site.
The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on the site goes on to explain that the site uses a Microsoft proprietary technology called ActiveX in order to unlock Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls that aim to prevent unauthorized distribution.
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