> A settlement has been reached with Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited, Google Commerce Limited, Google Asia Pacific Pte. Limited, and Google Payment Corp. (“Google”) in an antitrust class action lawsuit about the Google Play store. The lawsuit was brought by U.S. app developers. The lawsuit alleged that Google monopolized (or attempted to monopolize) alleged markets related to the distribution of Android OS apps and in-app products in violation of U.S. and California law. Google denies all allegations and the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by Google.
That last part has always irked me in settlements like this. Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away". You might say that you're not admitting you're at fault but the conclusion of you paying "victims" what they are "owed", you are admitting you're at fault.
Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD. Then when you try to convince them to give it back because they took it from you, they say "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it", wouldn't you take it as that person actually admitting they took it, although they don't want to confess to it?
>Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away".
Because an admission could be used against you in future litigation, thus defeating the purpose of settling in the first place. Settlement functions as a method of allowing litigants to liquidate their conflicts without wasting court resources and expending exorbitant amounts of money going through all steps of the court mandated conflict resolution procedure.
Even if you don't agree that you are at fault, there is some chance that a judge may not agree with you. If you think that chance is 10%, and the suit is worth 100M + you expect to pay 20M in fees, wouldn't it make sense for you to settle for 10M? Regardless of how the case turns out, you're 10M ahead of your anticipated fee spend and 20M ahead of your risk adjusted expected result, and the other side ends up with the risk adjusted value of their claim.
There is a risk that settling sweeps chronic, bad behavior under the rug. Which is especially bad when powerful actors can use settlement to coerce victims into hiding the truth, and enabling future bad behaviors.
Sure, I think it's clear that settlements work from a game theory perspective, in the sense that two rational actors working for their own best interest can accept one.
But the larger question is about whether this state of affairs is good for society. As citizens of a democracy, we (theoretically) get to have a say in how courts are run, and if the way the courts are run permits wealthy corporations to buy their way of repeated violations and be utterly unrepentant about it, maybe the rules need re-examining.
> As citizens of a democracy, we (theoretically) get to have a say in how courts are run
That’s not the point of civil cases between 2 private parties.
If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation. (Or whichever process your country uses).
Not every proceeding has to be about deciding good vs evil. Things have their place.
That is what the comment is talking about. It says "maybe the rules need re-examining". That is not about a particular civil case. That is proposing exactly what you are saying.
> If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation.
Or they also can post publicly on a forum where people discuss things. Such as this one. As such raising awareness about the issue by bringing it into the public consciousness, thus making it vastly more likely that the issue will be addressed.
You are acting as if that is not a valid use of this forum. As if private letters to your congress person are the only permissible avenue to discuss issues like this.
"You are acting as if that is not a valid use of this forum."
I didn't read it that way. GP wasn't suggesting calling a congressman as an alternative to posting on a forum, but as an alternative to a civil suit.
AIUI their point is that the purpose of civil suits is to settle disputes between two parties and (unlike calling your congressman) not about establishing laws defining good and bad.
You neglect that civil trials often result in relevant case law, which benefits society when similar actionable events occur. This is a clear benefit to society which settling cases destroys. Legislation is the start of the law, judicial interpretation is the implementation and will of it. This too applies to civil cases to which the state is a party - if you want to avoid any possibility of creating case law, binding arbitration is what you desire. If you want the power and will of the people to solve and enforce the solution to your civil problem, you owe the people something also.
Settled out of court does not mean not involving the court or using those resources - of course the use of the court and those resources is a strong means of coercing parties and, as such, yes they very much have used the courts' resources to secure a settlement instead of a judgement. Be it settlement or judgement, they will again use those resources if the party who settled or was judged violates that contract and or judgement. It's not nearly as simple as you suggest.
Settlements apply to anyone who could be a potential victim and strip them of their rights to sue, unless they opt out (this is insane to me!). So in this case the lawsuit filers settling actually does enforce bad behavior for society at large.
> Settlements apply to anyone who could be a potential victim and strip them of their rights to sue, unless they opt out (this is insane to me!).
How would you solve the problem that class action suits are trying to solve while fixing the problem that someone else might end up speaking for you without you wanting them to? Note that this feature isn't specific to settlements; it also happens with judgments.
Direct government intervention seems like a better solution to most class action lawsuits.
Company causes significant harm to millions of people, gets shut down or massive fines seems like a better solution than having them send out a token payment vastly smaller than the harm caused. The first is an existential threat, the second just becomes the cost of doing business.
Class action lawsuits sit in a strange middle ground where reputation damage isn’t enough but the government doesn’t care or the penalties are too small.
This is the issue though with these large companies. They have such immense wealth and power in the courts that they're basically untouchable. They do what they want and then pay people off without ever admitting guilt to make the flies go away.
Consider a similar case where you probably favor the defendants. Random patent troll company registered in Texas files 1000's of lawsuits against companies that it alleges infringes on a trivial patent, i.e. one click checkout. All companies settle because the cost of going to court is greater than the requested settlement amount of $500k. Should we also see these companies admit that they infringed on (likely frivolous) patents?
I get your point, but in that case, I'd rather see it go to court and the patent get invalidated. While settling might be good for the settling parties, it doesn't stop patent troll from making more frivolous suites, and I don't think it is better for society as a whole.
Just to be clear I don't think settlements are always bad. But there are definitely cases (in both directions), where settlements result in a worse outcome for society.
I distinctly recall cheering on old Newegg when a patent troll accidentally sued them. Newegg said they would be taking the issue to court, and actually prevented the patent troll from backing out of the suit, IIRC.
If I had to guess, in the general sense: when you run your mouth to the point of making legal threats, the person or firm you're threatening will start actual legal proceedings themselves because they think (or know) you're full of shit.
It's worth noting that that's not at all what Newegg claims happened.[0] So "accidentally" in this case is probably more accurately states as biting off more than one can chew.
I'd add on, maybe the first patent troll to sue (the old) Newegg didn't know Newegg would fight hard, but all future patent trolls to sue were put on notice, and should have been careful which bridges they moved under.
But, maybe somebody messed up and didn't check who was on the other end of the suit.
I think the poster meant "accidentally targeted someone who would not only fight back, but also hurt the patent troll", not "accidentally filed a suit".
That's always bothered me too. I think someone should be forced to admit to wrongdoing, or else keep battling in court to prove their side.
That said, how does Google monopolize Android app distribution? You're free to install APKs yourself. So why isn't Apple being prosecuted? There's no such ability on that platform. Why does it always feel like Google is constantly being hounded about stuff that Apple gets off scot-free for? Not that Google should go scot-free, but Apple should be dealt with first as it's the bigger offender and has far more marketshare.
"That's always bothered me too. I think someone should be forced to admit to wrongdoing, or else keep battling in court to prove their side.
"
God no.
For starters, civil litigation does not have a goal of proving right or wrong, but settling disputes between two parties.
This is actually a good thing.
But what you are suggesting goes against the very basis of civil litigation systems :).
You see the same thing in say, divorces. People fight in court because they want a judge to tell them they are right and their ex is wrong, and mostly the judges tell them to grow up and act like adults.
One reason it's a good thing is that it enables you to use lower evidence standards to resolve disputes.
Most civil lawsuits (at least in the US) are preponderance of the evidence as a result - whose evidence is slightly better.
This isn't always true, mind, you, but the point is that the goal of the system overall is to resolve disputes, hopefully efficiently and reasonably.
If you are looking for a system to decide who is right, that would be a very different system, and a very scary one at that, IMHO. It would also, among other things, take ~forever to resolve anything, and be even higher cost.
You would be raising the stakes dramatically - everyone would be much less willing to settle, and much more willing to fight about every little thing.
I'm not sure who or what such a system would serve.
In reality, you want as few people in civil court as possible, for as short a time as possible. It is an amazingly high over head way to resolve a dispute, and the vast majority of disputes simply don't need it.
IE if you broke a simply contract with someone, it should not take 10 years, a judge, and a jury, to come to an agreement on how much to pay for it.
Serving some greater end would be a bad mismatch for how it was built, because in most cases, the main type of relief is monetary.
I am hedging in various places because there are specific laws and statutes that grant courts specific powers/remedies
for certain types of cases.
Absent that, it is expect that monetary relief is the primary form of relief, and forcing people to do things only happens in the rare case money doesn't work.
The system actually sucks (relatively) for those other types of cases too because it wasn't really built for it.
We've built special courts here and there to try to make up for it.
> You see the same thing in say, divorces. People fight in court because they want a judge to tell them they are right and their ex is wrong, and mostly the judges tell them to grow up and act like adults.
From what I heard juges say nothing. Meanwhile lawers of both sides drain money from them until one of the sides concludes that it's not worth to continue.
Without breaking confidentiality, this is not my experience. That isn't to say it doesn't happen - states are very different, but at least in the states and areas i've seen it (CA, NY, MD, DC, VA), judges were pretty aggressive at telling people to stop wasting their time and mediate it out instead.
Again, I can even buy that you may see differences between say NYC and Albany, but at least what i saw was pretty consistent.
The family law judges did not have a lot of tolerance for adults pissing on each other, and made it clear they wanted parties to resolve most things without them.
Justice is not a well shared concept, so that's basically impossible anyway.
Beyond that, this is actually right. For civil disputes, the main historical goal has always been compensation for injuries/damages. That's it.
Speed is actually a goal because you want people to be put back into a good place as fast as possible.
Otherwise, the goal of a number is reasonable. Not perfect. Just reasonable.
Again, it's a dispute resolving system. One that was mainly meant to be used when all other forms of negotiation/mediation fail.
So it was not meant as a system of first resort, it's a system of last resort.
Trying to use it for social change/et al is a relatively new concept.
The ability for a corporation or whatever to cause widespread injury to a large class of people is a relatively new thing.
As a result, mass torts were historically uncommon, etc.
Like maybe a building fell down or something, but even if someone sued someone else because all their cattle died after their neighbor seemed to put something in the water didn't affect (and couldn't be detected to affect) anywhere near as many people as happens now.
Thanks for articulating this. I hadn't thought about how using the courts for social change is a relatively new thing (maybe since the civil rights act in the ~60s).
Read Plato's Republic. Justice is an extremely fraught concept that has been debated for millennia. The ultimate purpose of courts is to keep society running smoothly, not uphold justice. Justice can never really be upheld because people disagree on its definition. That would be like trying to get everyone to agree on the best ice cream flavour.
I would much prefer if more people settled their disputes without going to court. If they go to court and settle later, that's less great but still more productive than years of litigation.
>So why isn't Apple being prosecuted?
They had a nearly identical settlement in 2021 [1], main difference is that the Google settlement applies to developers with revenues up to $2 million in a year while the Apple one is up to $1 million.
Hmm, I was notified today about Google settlement. We sold our app on Apple for the same period (2017-) in the same <1M range, and this is the first I've heard about the Apple settlement. The website said everything is over and by doing nothing and being part of the class I've waived my rights to everything, but seems odd given I wasn't notified. Is there anything I can do?
Because Apple builds more expensive hardware which is tiny bit less popular than Google's opensource OS. And governments of 2020s hate, HATE solving these problems systematically and ensuring equal markets - the only approach right now is just to randomly slap the biggest company to get some money and let everyone else continue with problematic behaviours.
Also, richer people (which includes polititians) are using iPhones, why would they hurt the corporation they love?
It is risk aversion by both parties. You never know how a jury trial will go, so if both parties can negotiate a settlement they are willing to live with, it makes both parties happy without having to deal with the extreme consequence on either side.
I would relate it somewhat to what insurance gives you. There, you are paying a fee to help stave off extreme expense.
I don't think so. I've seen a lot of FCC cases end with the entity being sued/investigated making "a voluntary contribution to the United States Treasury". You can make one yourself right here: https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.h...
No, it’s simply an admission that the courts could conceivable rule against you, and that percentage chance * the cost of the judgment if they do is estimated to be greater than the settlement fee. Since judgment fines are massive and often open the door for other cases to pile on, the percentage chance you feel you would lose can be pretty small and still make a settlement rational.
It's not a fine, it's more like hush money one pays to an extramarital affair, a disgruntled employee or in some cases a rape victim to keep their mouth shut or else.
Android maintained its position as the leading mobile operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2022, controlling the mobile OS market with a close to 71.8 percent share, while iOS accounted for around 27.6 percent of the mobile operating system market.Jan 17, 2023
Indeed though you'll notice the case includes Google's international arms. Bear in mind this is US developers gaining access to the entire global market Google controls access to, which comes through Google's US business.
So for the purposes of this case, the global figure is quite relevant.
Funny that Apple may need to help Google and Samsung gain marketshare in order to keep the most profitable segment of the market while staying out of the monopoly category.
> how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away"
Have you never paid a fine or penalty that you totally did not deserve and that you could probably have gotten out of if you made a mountain out of a mole hill?
> Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD.
Now reverse it and imagine that someone accuses you of stealing something from them that they value at 100 USD. They say they have witnesses and video surveillance camera recordings to prove they're right! You would never do something like that, but considering the costs of litigations in tens of thousands, would you agree to say
> "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it"
That's because they might not be at fault. Companies settle when they did nothing wrong - they settle because the cost of going to court and paying those fees to prove they did nothing wrong is expected to be higher than settling.
This is like someone stole $100 from you, and you _think_ it's Henry, and Henry says "it wasn't me, but I'll give you $10 to stop bothering me." Maybe Henry did it, maybe he didn't.
No. It not necessarily. Maybe it is cheaper for them to just pay up. Even if they aren't guilty, there might be a chance a court would find them guilty and the punishment would be far worse.
What alternative is there? For the court to say to both parties, “no, you’re not allowed to come to this mutually agreeable resolution. Keep paying lawyers to litigate this and keep using up the court’s time.” ?
I mean… maybe there’d an idea in there, but I’m not sure it’s practical.
No need to find an alternative. Same outcome but remove the "Ok, sure I'm guilty, but I don't admit to actually doing it". If you agree to lose the case, agree that you're in the wrong.
What's good for an individual set of plaintiffs (mostly their lawyers) is actively unhealthy and unhelpful for society as a whole, and indeed should be avoided.
Who decides what counts as a win or a lose when parties agree to a settlement? Are there cases where it’s not obvious who is really doing all the winning?
Mind you I don’t have any answers and I’m not intending on being adversarial. I just don’t immediately see how this can work.
Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD. Then when you try to convince them to give it back because they took it from you, they say "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it", wouldn't you take it as that person actually admitting they took it, although they don't want to confess to it?
Imagine that defending yourself in court was going to cost you $250,000 regardless of whether you won or lost. Wouldn't you just give them $100 with the caveat that it's not an admission of guilt?
I'm too lazy to dive into the proceedings proper. How did the suit handle the presence of sideloading from arbitrary sources, and the fact that F-Droid is alive and somehow popular?
Or was it mostly about in-app purchases?
It was just about Google Play policies from 2016-2021. App Developers get a pro rata share of the settlement fund based on the commissions they paid Google during that period. It's basically a partial return of commissions over 15%. I for one plan to live a life of excess with mine: a hamburger with cheese and all the toppings. (assuming I even get that much)
It's a settlement, what proceedings? The only proceedings would be the court approving the class action status. What does sideloading or F-Droid have to do with anything?
> That last part has always irked me in settlements like this. Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away"
If it'll cost you Y to settle, and Y is substantially less than the cost across defending yourself, PR Hit, and time spent not on core business. You might want to settle.
Sure you could fight, win, sue for damages, etc. BUT that's really unlikely to win when the plaintiff isn't another multi-national court and the lawsuit wasn't totally frivolous.
I think for the purposes of law, the statement exists for the purposes of not being admissible in further cases, but in non-legal discussion of if a company did something wrong, we should all be comfortable agreeing they did something wrong.
Google would far rather defend their position in a lawsuit like this if they had a case for a multitude of reasons outside of plain cost, except for the fact that they are aware they are liable and can avoid the heaviest penalties by settling.
so I recently say an image of a paper check that was issued for an equifax data breach class action lawsuit settlement and it was for something like $5.71.
If the expected value of (the cost of defending vs the accusation + the cost of losing the defense) is sufficiently greater than $100, it makes sense to pay the $100.
IANAL. In this context, possibly not. However, in US courts, culpability is a major consideration in many types of civil litigation. Lawsuits concerning malpractice, contract violations, torturous interference, defamation, wrongful death, etc. go beyond merely mediating a dispute.
No, actually, they don't.
Really.
In all of the things you list, the main damages are viewed as monetary, and the expected relief is monetary.
This is actually what gets so many people upset - people see it as, like, "they killed my son" and the civil court's #1 job is literally to figure out "how much should someone pay for killing your son".
That is a mismatch for how people often feel about it (they really want the court to help prevent it from happening, etc), but for the most part, civil courts can't do that effectively It's a little more nuanced than that, since there are "punitive damages" and such, but as far as mechanisms to improve society go, it's not necessarily the right hammer for all the nails.
So like I said, there is a small amount of injunctive relief/etc, but the vast majority of civil litigation has a monetary outcome.
If you are interested, it may be worth reading some of the history of how these systems came about - the transformation from two people walking in front of the king and asking him to settle their issue, to what we have now.
What if you were rich and hated talking to people? If someone falsely accused you if stealing a hundred dollars wouldn't it be rational to just pay them to go away? (ignoring second order effects like reputation)
That's not to say Google aren't 104% at fault here though. It's even possible that they're at fault but don't realise it (or can't admit it) and so think they're paying to make a false accusation go away, despite the legal reality.
We developed a free social media application back in 2016 that cost us about $500,000 to build. We provided multiple safety filters including world filters, neural net pornography detection for profile avatars, etc. The application had a user profile search function. We had about 100,000 downloads in less than a year. I'm sure that 99.9% of user profiles did not contain any sexual material. Certainly less than Twitter has, where you can search for explicit porn. Google found a rare edge case that our ML model missed and removed the app from the Play store. With a single automated email half a million dollars was gone from my bootstrapped company. Is there anything I can do?
Be quick at contacting a lawyer, because you may have a limited time frame to act on it. It could even be that the terms already expired, but given the entity of the damage it is well worth paying a good lawyer for a consultancy.
I was banned around that time, myself. I ported to objective-c and applied to iTunes. the exact same app. made it through their manual review process. Still banned in the dev console even after this settlement. If there’s any way to get back in, someone please let us know. Unfortunately, I believe the only answer is to create a LLC.
Genuine question: how was Apple rarely sued in similar fashion?
Not just compared to Android/Google, but also the way they bundle programs in their operating systems, compared to Microsoft browser case in the US/EU.
To my untrained eyes, they're worse in almost every aspect.
Is it just the boring answer "they have better lawyers", or are there things fundamentally different?
They vertically integrated beyond the scope of the law.
Microsoft got in trouble for forcing their hardware suppliers to only ship windows machines. By taking the hardware in house, Apple does the same but it's legal.
Google loses an antitrust case for monopolizing app stores on Android. By making alternative app stores technically impossible, Apple doesn't have the same issue.
It really feels like the went mega-monopoly so hard that the law doesn't apply to them.
> Microsoft got in trouble for forcing their hardware suppliers to only ship windows machines.
Not accurate. They required their licensees to pay a license fee for every machine they sold, whether it was sold with Windows or another OS. This meant that any machine that didn't ship with Windows was burdened with two licensing fees, one to Microsoft and one to whatever other OS provider.
Interesting, it should be easy enough to track the number of Windows OS being shipped so this is really just Microsoft strong arming the suppliers with monopolistic intent.
> Funny that when apple announced the changes, they made it sound like they were being altruistic.
Apple (and several other big tech companies) do that every time they have to give up a modicum of control or are forced to admit wrongdoing.
They will deny critical design glass in their hardware but "altruisticly" open up free repairs for a few months so their customers don't realise they're effectively just making use of their warranty when these flaws come to light. I'm pretty sure they still haven't admitted that the butterfly keyboard was a mistake.
Every time a big company pretends to care about their customers, look for lawsuits or product flaws, especially if they're in a duopoly position like Google vs Apple or Microsoft vs Apple.
In my opinion, its based on the perception of the companies combined with the impact they have on the general consumer market. Eg 70% of phones run Android, only 27% run iOS which makes Google a much better target to go after.
Same situation with personal computing, Windows was like 80% of the consumer/business market when the whole browser thing took place. MacOS was something like 5%. Also I've never really heard of someone complain about Safari compared to IE/Edge so maybe there wasn't any traction for something like that
Maybe someone has a better/more accurate answer than that but thats just how I've been perceiving it.
> Also I've never really heard of someone complain about Safari compared to IE/Edge so maybe there wasn't any traction for something like that.
Well, when Apple was letting other people ship hardware with their OS, I don't think they bundled a browser or restricted their hardware partners from bundling one. Also, in those days, Safari didn't exist. I think Apple may have bundled IE 5.5 for a while, but I'm not totally sure.
People do complain about Safari being the only browser engine on Mac. But on desktop, might as well have Safari so you can download something else without using the command line; which is also what IE/Edge is good for (especially since windows's ftp command line wasn't very good and ftp is mostly dead)
Windows Explorer has had native FTP support forever now. All you need to do is point it at the Mozilla servers and you could get another browser without even opening up IE. Sure, it wasn't as fast as FileZilla, but it got the job done.
Because they have cornered the market for top 5% incomes while leaving the rest 95% to their competitors. Since their market share is always less, they always get less scrutiny. Outside of developed world, no one uses apple products unless paid by their workplace (for example mac books) or if they are in the top 1% of their country.
> but also the way they bundle programs in their operating systems, compared to Microsoft browser case in EU.
Microsoft was blocking competitors by requiring a fee for every processor sold by a manufacturer that offered Windows, whether that machine was sold with Windows or not, causing any other operating system sold on licensee machines to be more expensive for consumers. It wasn't bundling that was the issue in Microsoft Corp v Commission, it was tying applications together, such that if you purchase one application, you are forced to purchase another.
I don't see how it relates. Apple bundles software but does not sell what it bundles, nor even the OS, which is also free, nor is the consumer unable to remove that software or required to pay a licensing fee to Apple whether they run their OS or not, unlike with Microsoft Windows and Explorer. You can delete Safari and every application Apple bundles, including the OS, and you can not purchase it because it's free with the hardware. Apple is not tying applications, and there's nothing anti-competitive with their bundling.
mobile Safari is embedded in iOS. It can be deleted by jailbreaking and gaining root access, but removing it would cause iOS to malfunction. You can't delete it entirely from iPhone, but you can effectively delete it by removing it from the Springboard, entirely disable it in Settings (using Content & Privacy Restrictions, toggle the switch next to it in Allowed apps), and make it undiscoverable.
And although all web browsers on iOS use WebKit, there are effectively only two browser rendering engines still used today, WebKit and Gecko. And only FireFox uses Gecko. Every other browser uses WebKit or an engine derived from WebKit. So while Apple considers allowing the other rendering engine,[1] Gecko, I guess you're stuck using any other browser other than the official Gecko version of FireFox. There's a WebKit version of FireFox for iOS, if you can stand to use it.
You are incorrect. Blink might be a fork of WebKit (which in turn is a fork of KHTML), but they are definitely not the same; WebKit is generally inferior.
Thankfully, the EU is forcing Apple's hands, and soon we'll see better browser engines running on iOS.
Wait, you can delete apple music? I never use it, but if I ever touch the soft button on.my right earbud it launches and plays nothing because it has no library or account.
Absolutely. Applications on macOS are just bundles in the sense they are just a special kind of directory that contains the executable and supporting files. Any application in the Applications directory will require Administrator privileges to delete, but the entire folder can be deleted if you want, including the Utilities folder and all utilities. With SIP disabled and root access, you can delete everything in macOS piece by piece or all at once.
True. What you mentioned was always false.[1] macOS is BSD. Everything is a file in BSD. Anything that is a file can be deleted. Next time, try not to assume that something can't be done just because you don't know how to do it. Just assume you don't know how to do something when you don't know how to do it, not that it can't be done.
Ok, first of all, even if you are right, you need to not reply to people like that. It was bad enough already when you tried to teach me about BSD and how files work, but then for whatever reason you decided to go back and add to it and make it even more condescending and personal. That's definitely unacceptable here, and I doubt it is celebrated elsewhere on the Internet, either.
Second, and perhaps more awkward, is you're actually still wrong. I didn't assume that what you claimed couldn't be done because I didn't know how to do it, but because of, for example, the fact that I was actually at Apple when this change was rolled out, or that I've gone through the processes in the article you linked enough times to know how they work.
Anyways, turning off SIP does let you just go rm everything you want. That used to be the case, until Catalina, but it isn't anymore. In macOS Catalina those files were on a separate mount that was read-only, but with SIP disabled you could remount it as read/write and then work with it as usual. In Big Sur the entire volume has been turned into a signed APFS snapshot that you cannot modify, period. Even if you pull off hacks to patch it the system will panic on the next boot (as several iOS jailbreaks have found out the hard way). What you can do on macOS is shut down the computer, boot into recovery, disable signature verification, and from there create an entirely new snapshot with the modifications you like. With just SIP disabled and root permissions you can't do this, and even if you go through the process I described it's irrelevant whether macOS is a BSD or apps are in bundles because you're literally constructing a new copy of a APFS volume with the contents you want.
I didn't consider the lets them have their own cookies part, but I kinda like it, however I don't really know why other than I like separations of concerns. Why do you prefer that, and what scenarios have necessitated that in the past if you don't mind me asking?
Actual reason: because there are different firms administering these settlements. You want to separate these by subdomain so that there isn't a chance that an administrator from one site hijacking into another. Unless you're proposing the government to directly call/mail affected persons (might be desirable in cases like the JnJ Talc powder case where it is clearly a retail case).
That last part has always irked me in settlements like this. Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away". You might say that you're not admitting you're at fault but the conclusion of you paying "victims" what they are "owed", you are admitting you're at fault.
Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD. Then when you try to convince them to give it back because they took it from you, they say "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it", wouldn't you take it as that person actually admitting they took it, although they don't want to confess to it?