Buying a company to prevent even a hint of competition seems like quintessential antitrust. Over the last few decades society has really dropped the ball on antitrust.
I completely understand your feelings regarding a lack of control and agency. Modern politics now essentially revolve around outrage. No politician wants to vote on something at all controversial, every vote they take is liable to outrage one half of the population or another. Every time they do they halve their voting base until it's an irrelevant tiny minority that agrees on everything. So they have outsourced their job to the supreme court, federal agencies, and the parliamentarian. If you can cause enough outrage you will find that they fold relatively easily.
There's plenty of things governments could be busy doing that aren't controversial, but managing the existing state doesn't have nearly the glamour (or reelection PR) of changing it.
How many of us here on this board specifically work at Google or choose to work at companies that integrate with Google or otherwise use their services.
Please elaborate. Many of us avoid the services of the four entities you mention, completely or almost. Their «servers», or their intrusion (monitoring) more difficult, requires strategies, but there are ways. Where would those four crucial for one's economic survival?
> Here are the names that are on record publicly as using AWS:
> Aon, Adobe, Airbnb, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Acquia, AdRoll, AEG, Alert Logic, Autodesk, Bitdefender, BMW, British Gas, Baidu, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Canon, Capital One, Channel 4, Chef, Citrix, Coinbase, Comcast, Coursera, Disney, Docker, Dow Jones, European Space Agency, ESPN, Expedia, Financial Times, FINRA, General Electric, GoSquared, Guardian News & Media, Harvard Medical School, Hearst Corporation, Hitachi, HTC, IMDb, International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, International Civil Aviation Organization, ITV, iZettle, Johnson & Johnson, JustGiving, JWT, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lamborghini, Lonely Planet, Lyft, Made.com, McDonalds, NASA, NASDAQ OMX, National Rail Enquiries, National Trust, Netflix, News International, News UK, Nokia, Nordstrom, Novartis, Pfizer, Philips, Pinterest, Quantas, Reddit, Sage, Samsung, SAP, Schneider Electric, Scribd, Securitas Direct, Siemens, Slack, Sony, SoundCloud, Spotify, Square Enix, Tata Motors, The Weather Company, Twitch, Turner Broadcasting,Ticketmaster, Time Inc., Trainline, Ubisoft, UCAS, Unilever, US Department of State, USDA Food and Nutrition Service, UK Ministry of Justice, Vodafone Italy, WeTransfer, WIX, Xiaomi, Yelp, Zynga and Zillow.
Just AWS (as of 2020, per the artice). Apple could even be included in that list, according to CNBC. How many more are on Azure or GCP? I would argue you're not completely avoiding their services if you're still a 'customer' of their customer, they're just getting a much smaller cut of your (or the advertiser's) money at the end of the day.
> Where would those four crucial for one's economic survival?
(Sidenote, I'm adding Microsoft. I assume your solution isn't "everyone should move to Azure")
I assume that most of us work in tech which, if it doesn't require actually working on software that is hosted by one of those five (or for them directly), requires looking at projects that are controlled by them. Do you use React or Angular? Maybe backend work in Go or C#? Ever use LinkedIn to network (or FB/IG), or use WhatsApp/MSTeams/Skype/GoogleChat to coordinate telework?
And 3/5 of those control all the major consumer OSes. Sure, maybe you run Linux as your primary device, but you probably have to develop stuff compatible with Windows, iOS or Android. So you need those to at least test.
Here's one article, probably not the best, of people trying to blackhole the major cloud providers and how that destroyed the internet experience.
I mean you can hardly buy a car now without it including shrink wrap terms of service for google or apple software. Or 3rd parties that share data with them.
I do it, daily, for several years now. In fact, I’ve left the industry entirely as a result of what I personally view as a complete lack of ethics on the part of every tech company.
You being defeated isn’t the same as being unable to live without FAANG.
Being pedantic, I know. But this distinction does matter a lot in this context.
From Europe, where we have our own issues and politics is not better; just different. But where anti-trust cases against American companies is taken serious, both EU wide and by smaller local governments. And where many of us can vote for a myriad of parties, some with "taking large US monopolies down" as a primary point. (pirateparty, Volt, that I know of). Parties who make real chance of taking the lead or getting people in parliament.
> a work stop was all of not opening laptops for 35-40% of the country
Strikes are social events, you don't do it alone. There's usually a minority of agitators/organizers that are respected/trusted among workers and that call the shots/organize the fun. So working from home is very much anti-organization and hinders strikes. It isolates workers.
The problem is "mob dynamics". A visible picket line, a blocked street - that creates attention and draws more workers into the strike. On the Internet, these crowd dynamics don't work nearly as effective as they do in the meatspace.
Amazon and Google will notice but your local news station will not. Without press coverage forcing the company to negotiate employees have very little bargaining power.
You seem to be of the opinion the stoppage of e-commerce supply chains would be a quiet little event no one would notice?
I don’t care whose grandpa did what 80 years ago. I don’t owe deference to a figurative identity they want to carry around if it’s also literally abusive to the species as a whole.
What I’d like to see is a coalition of companies pitch in and develop an open platform to dethrone Android and iOS. If every big corporation with an app contributed to Mobian, say, it could be done.
I don’t care how we get there but I’d like to see a pic revolution of sorts for phones. I’m continuously let down by how quickly modern computing is being locked down. Unfortunately the opposite appears to be happening, PCs are becoming more phone like.
It all comes down to concentration of the industry. Open standards thrive when one company isn't able to just roll their own stack from the hardware all the way up to the applications; in-housing and locking-down thrive when one company is big enough to just do everything itself.
When Google was small it embraced an open OS, the open web, email, RSS, etc. Now it's big enough that it doesn't need (and therefore doesn't want) open technologies.
We need a way to manufacture our own computer hardware at home. We need hardware manufacturing to be as easy and democratized as free software development. Until then, we'll forever be at the mercy of these corporations.
How much of the HN bubble is already comfortably employeed by these giants at golden handcuff level salaries? I don't think I'd look for disruption to come from here.
The HN bubble has intellect and skill, but certainly not the 10's of billions it would take to make a viable android/iOS competitor. At this scale only the government has the power to effect change.
People connected to "HN Bubble" controls hundreds of millions if not a few billions of dollars.
Not every of those dollars are liquid, far from that, but, in addition to the raw monetary value of certain people here HN also commands a lot of attention.
I wouldn't oversell HN either. Arguably the value of HN lies in how relatively few users it has compared to FB or Reddit. Bringing to market a competitor to android/iOS that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions. HN doesn't have that much clout, nowhere close.
You keep saying this as if it was somehow true or relevant. At this stage, we have no real need for an OS that grandma will want to use. That can come later. She can stay on iOS/Android for the time being.
> that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions.
We need a name for this, the classic "someones parents can't use it and therefore it can't work fallacy".
My parents don't use Mac.
In fact most people don't, including me.
Doesn't prevent Mac from being a huge success and a viable platform for developers.
Same with a good number of applications: A few hundred or thousand hard core users. Bonus if one of them is an oil giant, a defense giant, the armed forces of a wealthy country or something.
At this stage, contributing to Mobian is not a matter of writing "apps". It's more of a boring job of hardware enablement and bringup on existing devices, probably best coordinated via postmarketOS (which has a successful history of upstreaming support to the mainline Linux kernel). The differences between pmOS and Mobian are comparatively trivial, so any work done on the former can easily benefit the whole FLOSS ecosystem.
While I love the FLOSS ecosystem I don't see how it's anything but a rounding error for consumer electronics. Unless there was a massive societal shift I don't see any future that includes a plurality of users owning FLOSS PC's or phones. The best place to start would be to get software freedoms included in the school curriculum.
We don't need a plurality share of the market, we just need it to be useful for power users, like FLOSS operating systems on PC are today. That will make for a great starting point already - disruptive innovation will do the rest.
OS's success is almost entirely defined by network effects. This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it. It wasn't better in any way, that came later. 'Disruptive innovation' in software is a myth.
'Power users' on HN are 95% software developers who have a very good experience with FLOSS because everything from the OS to the apps is written by them for them. This is absolutely not the case for anyone else. The number one reason people don't use FLOSS is because they can't get Adobe and MS Office. Without users FLOSS will never get these. Until FLOSS products are the plurality available on store shelves it will never reach the mass market. No one who isn't a software developer is switching to FLOSS and without a massive restructuring of society that will remain the case. I just wish we could be more realistic and work on finding strategies that would actually move the needle. Chiefly by lobbying governments.
> This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it.
Right, which is more than you can say today about Android given the reality of current mobile hardware lifecycles. Make Linux-for-mobile available today, and people will gladly use it to extend the usability of their otherwise "obsolete" devices. The overall setting is in fact remarkably similar.
The companies in the best place to do this would be the chipset vendors, who essentially do all the work for Android already. However I don't see the incentive, there are probably legal obstacles, and finally companies generally fail at trying to replace their customers.
> who essentially do all the work for Android already
They don't, that's the whole point. They do the bare minimum of booting up a barely-usable, heavily hacked downstream kernel, and call it a day (or rather, move to the next device release). "Proper" support is left to the community.
Look, I kind of agree with the sentiment, but I think your comment doesn't paint a very realistic picture of the situation. I'd estimate that there are above 3 orders of magnitude more people working on Android at the chip vendors than there are people working in the community. Which, these days, includes quite a lot of user space work, as well as the kernel.
Essentially, any phone vendors other than the big names expects to get a fully-working Android image with their chipset to ship with the phone. And Google also punted a bunch of lower-end userspace work off on the chip vendors as well. Chip Vendors don't just ship drivers in that market. Not if they expect to sell any chips.
OK then, replace "kernel" in my previous comment with "kernel plus a bunch of lower-level userspace". If anything, this makes things worse not better. It means we're re-introducing the possibility of duplicated effort and gratuitous breaks of compatibility in that lower-level userspace, which is exactly what we were trying to get away from via AOSP.
This makes it more important rather than less to work on an AOSP alternative that's far more in line with existing Linux practices in the mainstream, non-embedded ecosystem. And let's face reality, the chip vendors aren't doing it.
Sure. But what happened in non-embedded was that a lot of the chip vendors were eventually persuaded to lend their support to the Linux ecosystem. If that doesn't happen in mobile, the community faces an uphill struggle.
> Buying a company to prevent even a hint of competition seems like quintessential antitrust.
Then someone else will buy them then, given that Google was about to buy Twitch but dropped it due to the same reasons and instead went to Amazon.
Won't be surprised to see them do it again or another >$1TN company do this. Who knows, maybe one will create a bill which prevents >$100BN companies from out right buying out other multi-billion dollar companies. Oh wait. [0]
30% of every sale is extortion, but even worse, and further proving the point, is that they prohibit taking payments through any other channel. How is it not illegal for the platform to force the use of their own payment service? Isn't this classic misuse of a monopoly?
This is either ignorance or delusion. Brick and mortar stores take a lot more of a cut than that, and it isn't like Google's distribution infrastructure is free or something. It's a bit like saying developers demanding 6-figure salaries is extortion.
How the hell did we get to this point? Where ostensibly reasonable people feel entitled to shove their crapware on any storefront they want without paying for it?
> but even worse, and further proving the point, is that they prohibit taking payments through any other channel.
How so? Unlike with Apple, You can deploy Android applications without the store, or distribute on a different storefront for Android.
> How is it not illegal for the platform to force the use of their own payment service?
Companies choose what methods of payment they'll accept all the time. I can't buy a pizza with XBox Bux[0] or whatever the fuck either.
> Isn't this classic misuse of a monopoly?
No. For one, Android and the Google Play Store are not a monopoly. Android doesn't even have a majority market share in the US.
I generally agree that giant corporate conglomerates like Google are a bad thing for basically everyone, but I don't think that diluting the meaning of "monopoly" helps anyone, and neither do silly entitled arguments against paying a commission for distribution.
[0] As an aside, it is especially silly to me that people claim Google Play Store and Apple Store are bad but seem completely fine with the exact same practices on their game consoles.
> This is either ignorance or delusion. Brick and mortar stores take a lot more of a cut than that
This is a completely false equivalence, for two reasons.
A) stores have very limited shelf space they need to allocate. They also carry the cost of logistics, keeping inventory and the risk of bad sales. The cost to app stores for reviews and distribution in comparison is tiny per unit and easily scalable. The only context where this could apply is highlighting of apps, but that is handled via separate advertisement.
B) The high fees do not apply only to app sales but also to in-app transactions. This is where the cost is truly ridiculous and can be called extortion.
Credit card companies, for comparison, charge a few percent. The EU has even limited the maximum interbank exchange fees to 0.2% in 2014. Visa and Mastercard seem to be doing just fine with that cut... (there are additional fees, but it still only a mounts to a few percent)
The equivalence would be Walmart getting 30% for every in-game transaction for games that were bought at Walmart.
On Android you can at least use other payment providers, but on Apple you have to use Apple Pay.
> No. For one, Android and the Google Play Store are not a monopoly. Android doesn't even have a majority market share in the US.
They are a duopoly. Many concerns that are relevant for monopolies apply to duo or oligopolies as well. The companies split up the market and arrive at a comfortable equilibrium where they can milk the customers. They might squabble for market share, but they also coordinate (directly or indirectly) to not hurt each other too much. This can be seen in the matching of the cut they take.
The only reason the stores get away with their pricing is because there is no practical alternative for the average consumer for Android, and no alternative at all for iOS. The Google/Apple situation is indeed a classic economy textbook duopoly.
Calling something "ignorance or delusion" is quite a strong statement with such shallow insight.
> This can be seen in the matching of the cut they take.
This is crucial: any efficient market would have them compete on price. Google lowers the fee to 25%, developers move over to Google, so Apple has to follow and lower the fee to 20%. untill we reach the price-point that just about matches the costs made.
Unless you can argue that this 30% is exactly that lowest price-point: just about covering the hosting, staff and some risk, there is the proof that a monopoly is distorting this efficient market.
Proving that the current price is exactly that price-point is probably impossible; we might feel it is far from the actual costs, but we cannot prove it, which is probably one of the reasons this cannot be given as hard proof for a duo/monopoly.
While I largely agree with your points, your comparison to MC/Visa isn't sensible. The EU has limited the interchange fee to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards, but that goes to the card issuing bank anyway. MC/Visa charge scheme fees which were not capped in such a way.
> Credit card companies, for comparison, charge a few percent. The EU has even limited the maximum interbank exchange fees to 0.2% in 2014.
There are fees other than those to processes a credit card payment.
Each card brand has its own assorted assessment fees. Some are percentage based and some are pre transaction. Your payment processor also has fees, typically per transaction.
For small transaction, such as a $1 app or song purchase, those fixed fees bring the processing cost to a lot more than 0.2%.
> Brick and mortar stores take a lot more of a cut than that
But they do not prohibit the producer from selling their goods elsewhere, and they are not a monopoly intermediary, unlike google.
Also, Google has intentionally crippled Android and background app running, so you have to depend on FCM to deliver notifications, and you can't deliver FCM notifications uf app is installed via apk or fdroid or other third-party appstore.
> Also, Google has intentionally crippled Android and background app running, so you have to depend on FCM to deliver notifications, and you can't deliver FCM notifications uf app is installed via apk or fdroid or other third-party appstore.
FCM could indeed offer support for non-play-store apps, but weren’t background apps on Android leashed in because abuse of the capability was rampant and was torpedoing users’ battery life? I remember this being a pretty big Android issue for less technical users and an annoyance to more technical users.
If the user hides it, the app loses background capabilities.
Also, notification area becomes unusable if there are too many persistent notifications. Syncthing, VPN, xmpp client, and you almost have no space for regular notifications, they become stacked.
> weren’t background apps on Android leashed in because abuse of the capability was rampant and was torpedoing users’ battery life?
This should have been addressed by giving the user a capability to determine power usage by each app and either allow it if he needs the app, or restrict background running.
The way it was done is far from adequate. Also, many manufacturers (samsung, xiaomi, huawei) cripple android even further. See https://dontkillmyapp.com
> How the hell did we get to this point? Where ostensibly reasonable people feel entitled to shove their crapware on any storefront they want without paying for it?
Apple and Google have a duopoly with their respective app stores, they hold the keys to the majority of the customers since the customers only buy through their platforms. So it's different in at least that way. It's not as if I couldn't host my own downloads, take my own payments and give my own authentication, but no one could install my app without a long-winded process they are very unlikely to go through.
It's not like they don't provide services for their cut, I get it, they host the infrastructure, maintain the platform and so on, but I only have to use their services because otherwise I'm selling to a void, a void that they created. This would not be the case had they not captured the entire consumer market with their app stores, and had all their default OS settings on their market leading phones default to only accept their app stores.
If there was a vibrant ecosystem of third-party installer capabilities, say the ability to install something from a website easily with all my own infrastructure like in the wild west days, it wouldn't be an issue (customer easy, not tech wiz easy).
But they lock it all up and funnel everyone through their stores, and so as a seller you're coerced into their ecosystem and they get to take whatever cut they want. We have no negotiating power, we are locked out of customers if we don't participate, and we are regularly screened and bullied by the app approval processes, so the comparison to extortion isn't as far-fetched as you're making it out to be.
Here's a thought experiment, whenever someone complains about the app store banning their app and them losing all their income, tonnes of people reply with "You shouldn't have put all your eggs in one basket!" so okay, where are the other baskets? Where else can I sell an app? And be reasonable, be sensible, it's nowhere. There are no other options for a real business operating in a commercial reality. You can technically sell elsewhere, but I can technically sell chocolate bars in the desert, that doesn't make it a reasonable option.
> I generally agree that giant corporate conglomerates like Google are a bad thing for basically everyone, but I don't think that diluting the meaning of "monopoly" helps anyone, and neither do silly entitled arguments against paying a commission for distribution.
Google and Apple very much represent a duopoly, that's just calling a spade a spade.
Nor did I see anybody here argue they should just distribute other people's apps for free.
The issue is over the size of the fee they demand and how they also demand to exclusively use their payment services, so they can extort their 30% fee on every single transaction even past the original distribution.
To apply that example to a brick and mortar store would be the equivalent of the store getting a cut off attachments/replacements the customer directly orders from the manufacturer because the customer bought the original device in the brick and mortar store.
One small point: profit on retail games are at most 7% and frequently no higher that 3 to 4%. We often saw brick and mortar stores lose money on new releases as advertising and try to upsell electronics. Clothing, toys and electronics do have much higher margins. Toys are at least 40% and I worked with a team dealing with eletronics, if they couldn’t make at least 50% they didn’t want to deal with it. Gaming console is the exception, here margins are 0% or less.
For both game consoles and phones (mostly on the iOS side) the post-sale revenue is part of the overall profit scheme - PS5 hardware is sold very near-cost but all the money Sony makes off PSN and their cut of game sales becomes profit. Apple makes up-front margin from the hardware but also expects profit from in app purchases - if that wasn’t guaranteed, they might raise prices to make up the difference. Is it anti-consumer? Probably, for both the game console side and the phone side since the consumer ends up indirectly paying more after purchase.
I stand corrected. I was only second-hand aware of the kinds of markups you see on physical goods like toys and electronics you see in B&Ms and didn't realize that software was different.
> It's a bit like saying developers demanding 6-figure salaries is extortion.
Developers don't typically make that much in any country except the US,
and that seems mostly attributable to protectionist immigration laws.
So I would agree with your analogy
in that Google and US software developers are both
in an unfairly advantageous bargaining position
that one might call "extortionary"
with some degree of hyperbole.
I do think there is a big difference between Apple and Google.
I also think there is a difference between consoles and general purpose devices that have not being properly explored by anyone and at some point should be identified by the law.
That being said, digital rights are a disaster right now, it will take ages before it's fixed.
Consoles might need to be fixed too: for some reason, digital items cost the same or more than the physical counterpart, but provide you with less (can't re-sell, can't lend). And this doesn't take into account yet the fact that digital libraries will disappear when people die (can't leave to family your account, in theory). So consoles are not a good example, they are the most abusive ones.
> I also think there is a difference between consoles and general purpose devices that have not being properly explored by anyone and at some point should be identified by the law.
I disagree and would say that today the difference between these devices is arbitrary. Game console manufacturers don't allow Outlook or Google Docs or whatever on their stores, but there's no reason they couldn't be there. Their absolute control over their platform is no different than Apple's except that Apple is less restrictive.
> Consoles might need to be fixed too: for some reason, digital items cost the same or more than the physical counterpart, but provide you with less (can't re-sell, can't lend). And this doesn't take into account yet the fact that digital libraries will disappear when people die (can't leave to family your account, in theory). So consoles are not a good example, they are the most abusive ones.
I am by no means defending this practice in consoles. I'm objecting to carving out an exception for them. If you believe that phones should be more open as platforms then you should also believe that the consoles should be too.
"Brick and mortar stores take a lot more of a cut than that"
And feudal lords used to take even more. Apple is neither the former nor the latter. They dont maintain a physical supplt chain, or need to raise a fyrd
This may sound like I'm nitpicking, but if anyone reading this wants to save some money and pay devs more: Google/Apple absolutely do NOT prohibit taking payments through any other channel.
I know plenty of apps where one can buy the subscription at a significant discount directly on the service's website instead of through the stores and it works perfectly fine.
I think the restriction is on obviously advertising that fact in your app. So I'd recommend checking if the subscription you're about to buy through the app can be bought on the website instead.
It is not a monopoly a per law definition across most jurisdictions.
Additionally playing sales commissions is a traditional practice in most markets.
Finally, maybe devs would appreciate to pay the 80 to 90% that used to be common on the Symbian, J2ME, BREW and Blackberry shops from mobile operators, about 15 years ago.
Is it really price fixing or just copying strategies? There comes a point where the optimal strategy for a firm is to simply do what every one else is doing. Price fixing requires an element of collusion.
Competition requires players to remain in the game. No one is required to make a profit-losing decision realized or unrealized. If they do make such a decision, they're one step closer to going out of business. Survival is an incentive to taking the correct actions.
In an iterative prisoner's dilemma, the optimal solution is most often tit-for-tat or some variation of it. It's logical for one firm to do the same as another until it can obtain a strong hold on a profit-making activity that gives it more degrees of freedom with regards to its strategies. At that point a firm can move from merely surviving to experimentation or it can continue to milk the opportunity for all its worth.
Your cartel argument requires more than sameness of strategy. It requires motive and direct action towards achieving a forced equilibrium (e.g. willfully punishing other market players in concert to dissuade the use of alternative profit-making strategies).
I never brought up banks. What do they and the 2008 recession have to do with online stores and 30% cuts in 2021?
"direct action towards achieving a forced equilibrium"
Do you expect the head of Apple and Google to sign a public document "hereby we form an illegal cartel"?
At a minimum the competition and market authority should take an interest as to why there is no competition. If they botheresld to investigate, maybe we would actually find out if there is any wrongdoing.
No. But I don't take a 30% cut as an indication of cartel-building when it has existed since Jobs first announced the App store in 2008 [1] and was done at a time where the Walmarts and Best Buys of the world charged 70% if not more. Quite recently Apple sought fit to reduce it's revenue share to 15% after the first year on the store store. Google has done the same. I wouldn't call putting more money in the pockets of developers a lack of competition.
While i agree with you that playstore is not a 100% monopoly, if anything it is a duopoly (Apple/google). But on the Marketing/AD's side it is definitely a monopoly, that should be addressed first i believe.
I'm not quite finding the angle here to state my thoughts clearly, but there seems to be a definition of monopoly at play in some of these threads that means something close to "I would make more money if Apple/Google made less, plus they already make lots of money so it isn't fair!".
Google/Apple having gained the trust of the market and acting as middlemen to sell access simply isn't monopoly activity. In the same way that renting out space in a commercial complex isn't.
There is no question they are running these stores to make an outrageous profit. But the monopoly would be expressed by how the gates are closed to alternate App Stores, or in Google is unfairly pushing competitors to their own Apps off the store to make a profit - which given that they generally provide their Apps for free is a hard argument to make. Nobody seems to be making either of those arguments. Particularly the first one would involve more references to Samsung being made.
Suppose google's chrome started charging websites 30% of their revenue to be accessible in their browser. Is this an abuse of monopoly? Yes.
The issue is HNer's are still living in the "website era" of the internet -- that's ending. We're now in the app era. And devices are the browsers.
Their app stores are monopolies on their devices; in that the person who controls the road is a monopolist, despite the existence of air travel.
That android devices compete with ios devices is irrelevant, in as much as comcast/et al. can say, "go to a different state". The app store is an iOS monopoly -- the hardware apple provides is a road/telephone/browser device for access apps -- the new predominant mode of social/economic communication & infrastructure.
It isn't though. That is my point, monopoly doesn't just mean big market share + you don't like it. Half the web would go dark to Chrome and everyone would dump the browser in a couple of months if they pulled a stunt like that. Because they don't have monopoly. They only have a very high market share because Chrome is the best browser.
If the best-browser part stops being true there is not reason for the highest market share part to stay true.
Well I take 'monopoly' to be a pretheoretical concept tied
to the moral concequentialist justification of markets: aggregate social benefits.
Ie., a monopoly is whatever situation gives rise to a situation where a company can set prices without regards to legitimate competitive market processes. Where 'legitimate' is effectively a concequentialist constraint
concerning aggregate consumer benefit.
There are many theories of /when/ a company is a monopoly; including very narrow case law definitions around pricing.
The pretheoretical use of the term however is taken to permit a broader scope.
And lets be clear: a 30pc surcharge on all our economic activity (whether that be a mastercard or an apple) given no market justification has no justification.
Let there be many app stores on the iphone-- and we shall see what the market price on an app store. If
it ends up being 30% then theres no objection.
> They only have a very high market share because Chrome is the best browser.
This is very much a matter of opinion, not something you can reasonably state with a straight face. A large part of Chrome's large market share is the fact that it comes installed as a default on more than half the world's phones and that it's heavily marketed by the world's largest search engine and video hosting website (owned by the same entity!).
It also good enough, for now.
It has nothing to do with it being the best, though.
"So buy another device, a feature phone, give money to Jolla, FairPhone, whatever."
You are peddling a fantasy - my bank has mobile only access, and the app wont work on any alternative you lifted. The UK goverment app to apply for riggt to resde for European immigrants won't work either.
>>How is it not illegal for the platform to force the use of their own payment service? Isn't this classic misuse of a monopoly?
>It is not a monopoly a per law definition across most jurisdictions.
It's not so relevant whether the stores are a monopoly or not. They're doing anticompetitive behaviour and misuse of market power, that's illegal regardless.
You could argue that it is the way they pay for the distribution channels. I can't exactly go in and take a product in Wallmart and then pay target for it.
The way I see it, Apple and Google made the platforms worth something, made the stores, made the development tools, run the stores (which can't be cheap).
They could charge you a flat fee of several thousand dollars per app, but that would stifle competition too much. Instead they charge a percentage of what the app developer makes and ensures that as a user I can always trust the payment option to be save and, if I buy a subscription, to be easy to cancel.
They could allow you to pick your own payment provider, but then companies would still have to pay the 30% tax to Apple/Google, so what would be the point?
>they charge a percentage of what the app developer makes
What seems perverse to me is they don't tax you on your profits, I am sure Google and Apple won't like the governments do the same to them.
Btw I understand it is super hard to implement a tax on profits only so it would make more sense IMo to give the developers a choice, pay on what you use (pay for bandwidth, for reviews, for dev tools licenses, for advertising) OR pay the tax. The small devs could chose the tax , the big developers would chose the first one , Apple will have less money from this giant devs but they could keep their high walls for a few more years(I prefer if Apple and Epic don't get a secret deal and this fight continues so judges and us uncover more data about this topic)
The work done by the app stores isn't linear wrt to the purchase price. Clearly they shouldn't be taking a percentage cut.
Together, GA has a duopoly on app stores and they have set their fees to be the same. That one of them would consider buying the trouble maker on the other platform is just ... telling.
I considered the option of pay for what you use, but those prices would have to be massive (tens of thousands of dollars per dev) to even start to make up for it. It would essentially be a monopoly gift for the biggest developers.
- bandwidth is not that expensive , so only if the giants would screw you over with inflated prices. You could force the giants to reveal how much it actually costs(though I seen that even in the face of a judge the bastards pretend they are clueless and avoid answering questions)
- app reviews, You pay per review or per hour, maybe you submit a game to Sony or MS and they want a review dude to play it all to ensure is not broken.
-ads , only if you want, this should be an auction system
- dev tools, you should only have to pay for Apple signing your stuff, compilers, SDKs, IDEs should be always an opion for the dev to chose.
Btw, I am including all stores in my critique (including Steam,Sony's Play Station, and Microsoft)
I don't think anyone is arguing that Google/apple shouldn't be able to charge to use their stores. What is wrong is the amount they charge and the lack of options if you don't want to pay that fee.
In a non-monopolistic market you can take your business elsewhere. If you don't like apple and Google's cut, you have no options.
You are welcome to create your own store or sideload on Android. I will agree with you on Apples store, I wished there was a way to override it hidden well within the settings.
Both Gab and Parlor would have done fine if they had been allowed to create their own platform. I am assuming here that paypal will not dump a google competitor, nor will AWS.
Yes, they are running in the same sense that Xerox is a modern prosperous company and not a shadow of its former glory. It's beyond me how normal people push for centralized monopolies that can end you on a whim.
I have written a long-ish post but deleted it. I just wanna say this new left-capitalist doctrine really scares me. Communism all over again except instead of woke comrades at the Central committee censoring things we got young programmer thought police at trillion dollar companies cancelling you over usage of "blacklist", "master" or not respecting preferred pronouns in a git repo or email.
Don't worry, I'll check my privileges to become sufficiently woke and be a plus plus good warrior for justice.
You probably should have kept the older comment, as this one is a single vaguely on topic assertion followed up with a pseudointellectual word salad of snark and anti-progressive memes. I'm sure that's verysmart content on the forums you're used to but we try for something better here.
From what I can tell, Gab is the same cesspool that it always was. I assume the same about Parler but I don't know, since I don't have an account. Both still seem popular with Trumpists, QAnon and the alt-right, so I don't know what Xerox-like "former glory" you believe these platforms have lost, but Xerox is still a billion dollar corporation so...
And if having to abide by the terms of service of app stores, social media platforms, ISPs and the actual laws of the land are too "Communist", there's an entire dark web out there that will let anyone do or say just about anything.
> I assume the same about Parler but I don't know, since I don't have an account. Both still seem popular with Trumpists, QAnon and the alt-right
I asked some other dude on this website - do you really want a country with one party in the control of everything (Congress, presidency, governors...)?
I am not from the US, but this is so bizzare to watch. Half of your country voted for Trump, and you just hand-wave them away as "Trumpists" as if they were nutjobs who should be censored. That's half the country which opinions you have just dismissed.
> And if having to abide by the terms of service of app stores, social media platforms, ISPs and the actual laws of the land are too "Communist", there's an entire dark web out there that will let anyone do or say just about anything.
Funny how no one mentions this in posts about China, North Korea, Iran, Syria or Daesh. They have just set their own rules, why should they be labeled as tyranical or authoritatian countries?
>do you really want a country with one party in the control of everything (Congress, presidency, governors...)
No, but if I have to choose one, I'm not choosing the one that believes in Satanic pedophile cults and Jewish space lasers, and that gathers neo-nazis like flies, so simple math says I have to choose the other one until my country gives me a viable option besides "lesser of two evils."
>Half of your country voted for Trump,
A popular bit of propaganda, but no, Trump never carried the mandate of half the country. In 2016, only about 56% of the voting-eligible population - already a subset of the entire population - voted. Between them, Trump and Clinton each got about 27% of the possible vote, and while Trump won the Electoral College, he lost the popular vote.
In 2020, 66.7% of eligible voters turned out to vote. Biden won with 51.8% of votes cast, against Trump's 46.8%.
>and you just hand-wave them away as "Trumpists" as if they were nutjobs who should be censored
It's common to refer to followers of a particular social, religious or political movement - particularly those associated with a cult of personality - by the name of their leader. I refer to the unique blend of populism, neo-reactionism, persecution complex and conspiracy theory that makes up Trump's politics, and that of his followers, as "Trumpism" and them as "Trumpists" in order to draw a distinction between them and the Republican and Conservative ideals they supplanted.
>Funny how no one mentions this in posts about China, North Korea, Iran, Syria or Daesh. They have just set their own rules, why should they be labeled as tyranical or authoritatian countries?
Well, for one thing, you're confusing the laws of those countries and extremist groups with the terms of service of social media platforms. Twitter isn't beheading anyone, and Facebook isn't sending anyone to concentration camps, so attempts to draw some kind of equivalence between them and totalitarian regimes don't really work.
> No, but if I have to choose one, I'm not choosing the one that believes in Satanic pedophile cults and Jewish space lasers, and that gathers neo-nazis like flies, so simple math says I have to choose the other one until my country gives me a viable option besides "lesser of two evils."
Good luck waiting for a viable option. Edit: just realized, not sure if by the satanic pedophile cults you meant the Clintons. You know, the war hawk lady who laughs at videos of beheading while parodying Gaius Julius, one of the biggest mass murderers in history. And the current president, who sniffs children and incestously kisses their grandchildren.
As an outsider, politics in the US is complete shit, maybe instead of participating in tribalism of one side vs another you should seek out ways to hard-reset the system and introduce more political parties, as is common in Europe.
> Well, for one thing, you're confusing the laws of those countries and extremist groups with the terms of service of social media platforms. Twitter isn't beheading anyone, and Facebook isn't sending anyone to concentration camps, so attempts to draw some kind of equivalence between them and totalitarian regimes don't really work.
The end result for me as a user is the same. What's the difference between Facebook and Twitter voluntarily censoring any mention of Tommy Robinson and China censoring anything mentioning Tommy Robinson? In one case its authoritation government doing it, in the other it's some sleazy multinational corp with way too much power doing it. "gO StArT YoUr OwN pLaTfOrM"...
Now tell me, I saw you in a few threads already, usually arguing leftist talking points. Are you an astroturfer? The reason I am here wasting my time writing something that will go completely over you just to get back a response that dismantles my post pedantically point by point is that unfortunately USA exports a lot of stuff. We started getting the BLM/MeToo stuff in Europe too and it's completely absurd.
Well it's a duopoly Apple/Google you need one of the platforms to be remotely functional in today's world, online banking, buying tickets, corona certificates etc...
Some time ago there was comment on /r/gamedev from someone who implemented their own payment system and visa has like $20 payment cancellation fee, imagine someone buying a game skin for $1, then cancelling and you loose $19, suddenly 30% doesn't look like bad deal at all.
There are payment processors that offer chargeback protection for much less than Google's and Apple's 30% fee. For example, both Stripe and PayPal only charge 0.4%.
> How is it not illegal for the platform to force the use of their own payment service?
A) Legislators haven't caught up with how the (digital) world works, so they don't even understand what is happening
B) These "stores" are run by two of the biggest companies on the planet (Apple and Google), so big that they can afford to spend countless amount of money to lobby and influence the legislators so the discussions never even hit the table
C) Both of the above
> Isn't this classic misuse of a monopoly?
Not really. While the App Store has monopoly on distributing apps on iOS, Apple and iPhone are far off from being a monopoly as more people have Android phones. Android phones allow side-loading so can't really claim Android has any misuse of a (potential) monopoly.
Sideloading on Android is not viable.
And Google is working hard to enforce this situation.
This might be a monopoly.
Or at least, I think the current scrutiny from legislators is fully warranted and we should not jump to conclusions because AFAIK the jury will be out for a while.
One major difference is that with an Apple device, they practically control the platform unless you are willing to take the risk and jailbreak - provided that your device is jailbreakable. With Google, you can at least install an external app or even connect an external app store like F-Droid (surprisingly, with time it looks better and better than the official Play Store).
You will of course still have Google insist asking to enable "Google Play Protection" with every app you install or update, without the possibility to reject it entirely.
If you accept, they'll never ask you again. You're only option to reject is "not now".
Distributing apps outside the Play store isn't really viable currently even though you can technically do it because there's no way to automatically update them. They are apparently fixing that in Android 12 but I seriously doubt they would have without Epic.
As much as like F-Droid, it is only for open-source apps, isn't it? However, the majority of apps is still closed source. I would like to see an alternative android app store, which can also serve closed-source apps.
Another problem is a missing alternative to Google Mobile Services (GMS), which are installed on virtually all android devices. For example, if you need push notifications or in-app purchases you are dependent on them as well.
IMO, it is the widespread distribution of GMS (and a lack of alternatives thereof) that make google a quasi monopoly.
Yes, you are right. The real problem is the ubiquity of Google Mobile Services (GMS) though, rather than the app store itself. For example, GMS are pre-installed on all Samsung devices, but Samsung's equivalent is not installed on all Google devices.
This means, that everyone will still use Google Play for in-app purchases out of convenience.
Neither Amazon nor Huawei is selling devices with Google Play Services right now. Both have their own alternatives to Google Play Services. Amazon offers an unnamed collection of APIs (the push notification one is called Amazon Device Messaging) for its Fire devices, and Huawei offers Huawei Mobile Services.
For Huawei this has only been true since the US-china trade wars. There are still a ton of Huawei devices with GMS pre-installed.
A service like GMS would be important for Samsung, too, as there are quite some Samsung devices out there. However, with GMS pre-installed on all Samsung devices, the Samsung Galaxy Store is completely useless as everybody and his brother will use Google Play for app and in-app purchases.
Of course, if you were the ceo of Google and have something like that happen. You would ask your teams, what are the different scenarios we can explore? And one of them would be buying Epic. What people expect?
Google is a for profit company don't expect them to act like an non profit organization
I don't find it surprising, either. It's just frustrating to find yet another bit of evidence you don't own a device you bought and the manufacturers think you should pay them for any little piece of software you want to run on it.
One missing bit that still hasn't happened - but one day will - is the subscription required to use your device. For now it's optional (called iCloud storage etc.) - you are nagged and so on but are able to refuse, but one day it will become obligatory. It could be 10 years from on or 20, but for sure they're thinking how to do it.
These lawsuit doesn’t really do much about ownership part though. It’s about billionaires deciding how many of them get to rent us software on the platforms that we don’t own.
> Of course, if you were the ceo of Google and have something like that happen. You would ask your teams, what are the different scenarios we can explore? And one of them would be killing the CEO of Epic. What people expect?
Your point is fair, it's reasonable for Google to consider this options and this is why antitrust regulations are needed. In this, it looks like it's time for the gouvernement to step in.
We should be able to start with a clean slate - these companies should delete all user data that wasn't explicitly given by the user in a clear and obvious way (like profile credentials) and start from scratch. Every time any information is collected, the company should obtain consent after displaying the data to the user. A person should be able to inspect all data that had been associated with them, and to delete any or all of the data at any time. Within the personal profile, a the user should be given the option to opt-in to any and all uses of their data, with zero third party sharing unless allowed by the user on a byte-by-byte basis.
If a company violates this a progressive and percentage based fine should be imposed for every day of non-compliance. Something like .01% of the company's net worth per day, increasing to 2% over the course of 30 days, half of which goes to federal enforcement and half to the user. Something painful and crippling, with teeth, and enough to incentivize people to watch out for themselves and to force companies to behave well.
Data beaches should be lethal if data was leaked that wasn't obtained with consent.
Faang is not entitled to surveil the lives of everyone in the world by dint of people merely visiting websites.
Participation in a relationship with a person or business or community should be consensual.
It would be nice if they could take a hint from getting slapped around on anti-trust complaints. Maybe the fines aren't big enough for them to notice? I wonder if CEOs would be more amenable if getting rid of them was a possible sanction for anti-competitive behavior.
No, it would take a company that realizes that they already are flying close to the envelope and that they are in deep anti-trust shit already. That is, a company with some common sense among the leadership who can see where the wind is blowing. As it is, Google and Apple have no political or business allies and lots of regulatory actions incoming. They might have done well financially so far, but they aren't in a good position.
Under your scenario (which I realize matches real life) they would still have to think about it. They wouldn't just have an instinctive reaction without any thought.
It would take a company filled with perfect people to avoid having anyone even think about doing the wrong thing. Part of being human is considering the wrong thing and then doing the right thing. (Or not, sometimes.)
Google flies close to the envelope by existing. At their scale, a lot of what is legal and what isn't is undecided (because no other company had been big enough to raise the question).
How arrogant do you have to be to know a civil suit on anticompetion is inbound, and still email about plans to stifle it? A long time ago a mentor said “never put anything in email that you don’t want to show up in a court of law” and that’s always stuck.
But how monumentally dumb/ arrogant do you to be to not realize these emails and docs would show up in discovery?
News flash: yes, in internal meetings, people suggest all sorts of options. It's called brainstorming. And then they're looked into in varying levels of detail to investigate pros/cons. Research isn't action.
Also, most people in meetings aren't lawyers, so they come up with options before running it by legal. It's not always clear what is or isn't illegal -- lawyers even disagree with each other.
At the end of the day, what matters is what Google does. It you're going to criticize, criticize actual actions, not what was "contemplated".
Criticizing a company for "contemplating" something is as bad as criticizing someone for having a thought. Any responsible company should be contemplating a wide variety of options... and then rejecting the ones that are no good.
I'd take this with a grain of salt for the time being. "Google contemplated" could mean nothing more than a random exec said this in passing or as a joke once to somebody else.
Not to mention no internal and communications are cited in the article.
IIRC Netflix are able to get around this problem by processing subscription payments outside of their app. Wouldn't this solve the problem for some use cases? Or has Netflix got a "special" arrangement with Google and Apple?
You buy things in-app in Epic games. Google and Apple don't let you do this unless you use their payment processing.
Netflix and Office 365 you buy a subscription and then you simply use the app on a multitude of devices.
As an aside - does anyone know if it's explicitly banned to buy "coins" somewhere else - and then use those coins to buy things in the app? This is actually how Epic games works.
An important distinction. Office 365 and Netflix get nearly all of their revenue from subscriptions. Just because Epic offers a subscription doesn't mean that's where it derives >95% of its revenue.
I see “sub coins” on sale in the Twitch app, my assumption is that you can offer them outside the app, but you cannot promote that alternative in the app and you must also sell them in-app (presumably for 30% more)
Anticompetitive behaviour in the global marketplace is so pervasive that it's pointless to even mention specific cases - It only serves to perpetuate the ridiculous illusion that some people in government give a crap about it. Antitrust is a joke.
If Google had bought Epic games, would they have a stronger case against Apple in the Epic vs Apple case? Could Google then claim Apple was practicing anti-competitive practices?
Though I guess Apple could make the same case against Google too.
Google is to still have infrastructure and people working on putting code/binaries on phones but not be compensated for it?
Or is it to get Google completely out of it and let the phone provider do it?
Or just willy nilly and you are on your own?
Or finally will other stores popup instead of Google?
I think if I was Google I would want some percentage of the end revenue or a flat fee every time you push new code out. Maybe force them to lower their fee.
I dislike the idea of there being no store. End users will be tricked into installing god knows what...
