My general stance is to be more aggressive with antitrust matters than the US tends to be.
However, antitrust doesn't (and shouldn't) protect you from competition. Too often I see companies just do a really bad job and the leadership just sits there collecting a paycheck and complaining to Congress about [big bad company].
Yelp is the poster child for this. Arguably even Mozilla is guilty of this [1].
DDG ultimately is just repackaged Bing search results. Bing itself lags behind Google and has the resources of a trillion dollar company behind it. It's not just a question of how much money you have but how you spend it. Look at Blue Origin. Look at the Metaverse.
So DDG's upper bound seems to be however good Bing is and honestly Bing isn't that good. What is their path to improving? I'm not sure they have one. But I don't think Google's relationship with Apple is the core problem.
Back in the day, Microsoft got in trouble (rightly) for bundling the browser. That's because the barrier to installing a new browser was quite high. Here phone manufacturers give you a dropdown to change it (which I think they should be required to do, as they are).
"So DDG's upper bound seems to be however good Bing is and honestly Bing isn't that good. What is their path to improving? I'm not sure they have one. But I don't think Google's relationship with Apple is the core problem."
To improve it you need money, and you won't get any if the competition field isn't even. So, it's part of the core problem. It's very reductive to look at it and say you are bad because you lack research and development in this front, but you have to look at the whole picture.
"What is their path to improving? I'm not sure they have one."
Doesn't mean they don't have one.
I specifically addressed this with the examples of Microsoft's billions not stopping Bing lagging behind Google, Meta spending billions on the Metaverse and Bezos spending billions on Jeff Bezos (and still not getting to orbit after 25 years).
DDG could improve if Bing improves so the problem isn't Google, it's Bing and DDG's strategy.
I've been using Kagi [0] since a few months and I am extremely surprised how well it works. With DDG it took a few months and then I just added !g everywhere because I never found what I was looking for. With Kagi I almost never do that, every now and then I think I am not able to find what I expect and then I add !g, so far it hasn't given me more then what Kagi gives me.
So, I am wondering how much money you would really need. Because if Kagi can do it, why can't Bing do it?
Besides YouTube, Maps is one of the very remaining reasons I visit The Google's domains. For some reason I'm not entirely sure about, besides the inherent difficulties involved, there seems to be no serious competition in that space. Sure, we can get basic maps and directions from other services, but what about things like time estimates and street view?
Kagi is awesome otherwise, by the way. I'll keep saying it so more people hear about it.
DDG, on the other hand, has gone way downhill. I still sometimes use it if I am using a private browser window. It's flat out terrible. Even with safe search turned off, it's clearly been dumbed down to be PG-rated. It misses a lot of things it used to not. I don't get how they are going to stay solvent down the road without money being continuously set on fire.
> DDG ultimately is just repackaged Bing search results.
That was true at one time. I've been using DDG for many years; daily drive it and Firefox, but have been experimenting with Edge and Bing, now Copilot.
Honestly, Bing search is amazing, better than google in my head-to-heads for quick reference or learning about something your not as familiar with. Both have a lot of "data field" results, which I want to curmudgeon about being distracting but are honestly quite handy sometimes, same goes for suggested searches. DDG is very old school by comparison, but that's also what I want when I'm drilling down.
An aside, I'm surprised that nobody really talks about Edge. I run Firefox specifically because I don't want to run V8. Edge has a really good implementation Tree style Tabs, another feature I refuse to sacrifice, and overall it's featureful but still fast, the only thing it's missing is never getting implemented, containers. The LLM integration though is super cool, and makes me wonder what iPhones will be like when Apple finally gets this tech in it's products.
> My general stance is to be more aggressive with antitrust matters than the US tends to be.
i can't stress enough how right you are on this.
we literally got the IBM PC as a fairly open platform because IBM at the time had just got out of a very lengthy and serious anti-trust case and didn't want to even risk getting into another one.
we literally owe the revolution that the ibm pc has been to antitrust laws.
> But Weinberg testified that getting users to switch from Google was complicated, requiring as many as 30 to 50 steps to change defaults on all their devices, whereas the process could be shortened to just one click on each device.“The search defaults are the primary barrier,’' he said. “It’s too many steps.’'
This is hard to take seriously.
30–50 steps across all of your devices, maybe if you have 10 devices.
And a desired "one click" is similarly silly. Just opening an app takes a click. It's pretty reasonable to take another couple clicks to get to the setting, and a final click to set it.
I mean, Chrome has larger market share than Edge or Safari, and it's not default, and I'd say it takes more work to download and install a browser than change a search default.
So it's pretty clear that when users perceive something as better, they switch. None of my non-tech friends have ever even heard of DDG, so that's going to be the start of the problem right there. Not Google's payments.
> DuckDuckGo’s internal surveys, he said, show privacy is the biggest concern among users, beating their desire for the best search results.
Interesting, our own (anecdotal) data is the opposite. Better search results trump everything and this is the main selling point of a paid search engine. Privacy is important, but less people would be ready to pay for a privacy respecting search product without also better search.
People who would have rather not ventured within a mile of an ‘as closed as it gets’ iPhone are kind of forced to, because Google on the other hand makes it between a rock and a hard place.
Yeah. Google wiped out all the freedom we used to enjoy with hardware remote attestation. Now there's no reason to put up with Android's inferiority anymore. I'm just waiting for them to finally break Termux. I'll buy an iPhone the very next day.
Maybe postmarketOS will gain support for more devices but without WhatsApp support it's hopeless.
This must be personal preference. For me the #1 thing I do on my phone is browse the internet, and having choice of browser is a vital priority in this. Android allows you to choose browser, the other big maker only supports a single browser engine.
But I just can't wrap my head around Google tracking every single thing I do on my phone, even the things I don't do explicitly and there is no fathomable way to stop that unless I start everything from scratch. From the bricks, to sand, to water, and cement to setup a phone using some ROM that might or might not support the Android phone model I bought and if it did then even a patch might upend everything I had setup (including but not limited to bricking my phone for good) and then do that all over again. Not to mention that if I used that ROM a lot of essential apps might just don't even work to begin with or I might not even be able to install them, forget working.
A browser is important but a kinda small, part of overall phone usage. At least for me.
I highly doubt it, Firefox on mobile is a rounding error at best and I can't imagine the legal antitrust implications of doing that. It serves more as "there's competition you see" for google than anything else.
I wouldn't put that past them either. All they need to do to kill sideloading is make devices with sideloaded apps fail attestation. People's bank apps will suddenly stop working and they'll be forced to bring the device back into an "untampered" state.
So, what does that actually mean? You think there's a 50% probability that Google waves a magic wand and "gets rid of Firefox" in let's say the next two years? 10%? 1%? 0.01%?
Not defending goolag, but you can still install non authorized apps on your Android, root your device, and install a custom ROM. Hard to do with an iPhone'
The number of Android phone models where one can unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM is fairly small. And among those models, there are plenty where no up-to-date custom ROM is available any more, so security vulnerabilities are piling up.
> you can still install non authorized apps on your Android, root your device, and install a custom ROM
No, you can't. Your device will fail hardware attestation because you "tampered" with it. Then everyone starts refusing you service based on that alone. Your bank app stops working. Your streaming app stops working. Your games stop working. No doubt one day WhatsApp will stop working as well and at that point my phone might as well be a paperweight.
I'm currently running lineageos with microg on a recent model phone, and google wallet is the only thing I've encountered that has given me any grief. Games, streaming apps, banking apps all work just fine. No hoops to jump through or anything.
The problem isn't that they are making partnerships. The problem is that they are using the success of Android and Google Play Services to force their search engine which should be seen as an unrelated service.
It's misleading/wrong as an "and" from the article headline was replaced with a comma and it now states that "Google's phone thwart competition", which is certainly not what was said
Can you elaborate? I was personally so happy with Pixel4 that I've decided to buy a new version when my phone lost support. I didn't have any specific problems, I didn't feel like I was forced by Google to do things I don't like, and when I started caring about privacy even more, I changed my OS to Graphene (something you can't easily do on Apple owned device, I believe). They're not perfect, but I'm genuinely interested what was the show stopper for you.
I wouldn't hold up GrapheneOS as a good example of more freedom compared to Apple or Google tbh.
Their device depreciation policy is literally just Google, they refuse to support anything that isn't a Pixel (because of the security chip, although as I understand it, there's other manufacturers who could probably work as well - Pixel is simply chosen because Google promised to open up the microcode on the security chip, which hasn't happened yet) and their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom - they literally offer their own SafetyNet implementation and are aggressively against rooting whilst refusing to understand why people root to begin with (the most common reasons is by far hosts based adblocking and their recommendation, VPN based adblocking, gets in the way of a normal day-to-day VPN or something like Tailscale).
(Relatedly - the toxicity problems of their community against criticism of GOS or even being interested in non-GrapheneOS privacy projects are well known at this point and with a smaller community, you're bound to run into something that isn't answered on the general internet at some point. This makes that component somewhat unavoidable. I've never seen a non-corporate, non-FSF run community be such extreme NIH types.)
For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.
> I wouldn't hold up GrapheneOS as a good example of more freedom compared to Apple or Google tbh.
I don't see why we can't have both, but this doesn't really a fair criticism of GP's comment. The specific word GP used was 'privacy', not 'freedom', and you are attacking GrapheneOS's stance on the latter, not the former.
GrapheneOS is more focused on privacy over freedom, as you said ("their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom"). They have chosen to prioritize one over the other.
> For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.
This might be true, but LineageOS doesn't have access to microcode either, and certainly GrapheneOS is more 'private' than Lineage, assuming that GrapheneOS hasn't been compromised either internally or at some point in the AOSS supply chain. Except for niche mfgs like PinePhone et al, Google is probably the most free of the major manufacturers (ironically, less private but more free).
I agree that we should aim for both freedom (as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer although it'd be nice!) and privacy.
Both are critically important, and the efficacy of the latter depends in large part on the former.
Android security model does not allow root users. If you allow root users, you destroy the security model. GrapheneOS has people working on it that are real security researchers. You can't patch your way up into security out of shit foundations, the foundation being an user existing that breaks the OS' security model.
If you hadn't noticed, we get a zero click RCE on phones basically couple every years. That's the type of stuff GrapheneOS worries about, not whether its users can block ads, however nice that is.
That is almost the exact argument from the toxic Graphene community GP complained about.
Only the anti-user part of the security model is really destroyed, and rightly so. The part that considers the user to be the attacker and wants to protect the app and their developer's evil intentions from the user.
An RCE that only affects a non-root component or a component that ran with system privileges anyway will not be enabled or facilitated by this.
Of course current root implementation may be not be as secure or convenient as they could be. For example after each update they must be re-applied, from a downloaded app, leading to people updating later and opening another problematic supply chain. But that could be remedied if they were better integrated into ROMs.
To be more exact - the comment you're replying to is exactly the type of GOS dogma that makes it hard to recommend.
The problem is that GOS is taking a privacy approach that's so niche that it borders on being useless[0]. If you're the type who is at threat of say, state actors (or has convinced themselves they are), then it makes complete and total sense to use GOS with all the anti-user crap it entails. You get a completely secured fortress of a phone out of it.
What makes the GOS community toxic is the subsequent attitude taken by developers to other privacy models. Most people aren't "state actor" degrees of paranoid, they just don't want Google enabling hidden settings and pass the users photos onto their servers; they might want to reign in Play Services (without abandoning it entirely) or take advantage of GOS' anti-background GPS capabilities. These are all legitimate features that aren't undermined by having root. Google isn't generally a malicious actor with these things (you're not worth enough to them to do these tactics) and if someone is capable enough to install GOS they are also likely capable of maintaining decent app installation hygiene which limits that too.
The response from the GOS community when these things are brought up amount to 1. Fork Off (not happening because user != developer), 2. "You're holding it wrong" or 3. Ban the user for being a Calyx/Divest shill or whatever else (not endorsing either project).
There's also the projects noted history of using license trickery to prevent non-Vanadium browsers from implementing a System WebView that are why I'm considering them toxic to Android privacy as a whole. (And general trademark nonsense to prevent people from achieving the fork off bit) The GOS community is extremely "GOS or nothing" and it sucks because GOS itself is genuinely a technical achievement.
[0]: Which to be clear - multiple online privacy communities have this specific issue, that's not just on the GOS community.
Graphene isn't a 'privacy' project. It's a security project. It just manages to be the most privacy friendly there can be; but it's not a design goal.
You cannot have 'privacy' without 'security', because your privacy measures can easily be circumvented and defeated otherwise. That's why calyx os or other grift projects are useless on both.
The design goal IS security. And each decision is motivated by such design goal. An unconstrained system user that circumvents the security model just to allow some users to intercept network requests to do adblocking is irreconcilable with the design goal of having a secure OS. What's stopping the adversary from terminating TLS requests and snooping on your plaintext traffic when such privileged API access is possible?
If you really want some adblocking, you can set-up to use a DNS server that does that. Such measure is not the best there can be, obviously.
Finally, if an user can bypass the security model, so can the attacker. The security boundary between "adversary user" and "not hostile user" is hard to define and enforce.
GrapheneOS is a security and privacy project, and puts significant effort into advancing both. Security is a prerequisite for privacy, and getting that right is extremely important, but all of that is exactly so that you can then safeguard privacy.
GrapheneOS has many features which are heavily towards the "privacy" side of the scale, rather than the security one. Features such as Storage and Contact scopes are features which allow you to preserve privacy by granting apps just the information you need, instead of giving them bulk access to your data. The network permission is as much as a privacy feature as it is a security feature. Being able to deny sensors access from apps so that they can't access them is a privacy feature etc.
I'm mentioning the above because it seems like people tend to split security and privacy into completely different camps in a way that doesn't make sense. Those two things play off each other, and one needs the other to be effective. GrapheneOS focuses on both.
It defeats the purpose of using it. There's plenty of unlocked bootloader OS that make root easier. Calyx or lineage work better for root. If it works well for you though, great!
Not entirely, there would be a bit more security during bootup.
However, the risks and problems are probably not worth it.
Other benefits Graphene advertizes: they are much better and quicker applying updates (that's easy because they only support pixels), they allegedly support much more and better exploitation mitigation mechanisms, and have a Google Services sandbox that looks quite interesting.
Though, after the conversations I had with them I really do not want to trust those people :(
The usual: Voice some opinion that doesn't exactly match theirs, Ina friendly way, get insulted, get accused to be part of another group that allegedly is conspiring to harm them...
Later found this is apparently a pattern and happened to others in a very similar way, e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0
Hey there. GrapheneOS community moderator here. In case you haven't taken a look, I would recommend reading through https://grapheneos.org/features to get a better sense of what GrapheneOS provides beyond what you mention above.
I also wanted to address a few things:
Applying updates quickly is extremely important. You seem to consider GrapheneOS supporting devices that get timely updates and make developing for them easier to be "cheating", for some reason. Regardless, every GrapheneOS change has to be ported to each monthly, quarterly and yearly release of Android, which isn't a trivial task, as I'm sure you can imagine, but it's done correctly and quickly, because it's important.
Now, I also wanted to address the last part of your comment here, because judging from your other comments in these thread, you seem to have a bone to pick with the project and its team. It's unfortunate that a lot of the time, project members and community members taking the time to properly answer questions and explaining how things work is seen as a bad thing because it is not the thing that you (or anyone else, I'm just using you as an example here) wanted to hear. The team considers it very important to help people understand how things work, as there is unfortunately a lot of misinformation about these topics. The fact that we're passionate about explaining how these things work, and the fact that it clashes with people's preconceived notions about things often means they're hostile in return, which is unfortunate, but still, it is important.
> They're not perfect, but I'm genuinely interested what was the show stopper for you.
Not OP, but: Google. I don't believe Google can be trusted with Android. I'm stuck with the iPhone, or getting a phone that can run CalyxOS, because I basically only need apps that a solely available in the Play Store. The thing is, I don't care for messing around and trying to make my phone work and flashing alternative operating system. So I'm stuck on the iPhone, because I trust Apple slightly more than Google.
Can you elaborate? I was personally so happy with Pixel4 that I've decided to buy a new version when my phone lost support.
I still use Android, but the lifespan of every Android device I've ever owned is two years or less. They just don't survive that long. Whether it was the old Nexus 7 tablet that hit a boot loop issue, or charging issues that I've run into on most Pixel phones. My previous pixel even had to be repaired (thankfully under warranty) because of the charge port failing. But again it died 6 months later right around the 2 year mark.
The only saving grace is that I'm usually spending around $300 for the Pixel phones, so it's still likely cheaper than if a bought a higher end Samsung that lasted longer.
Funnily enough, the longest lasting "Google" device I've owned is a ChromeOS Lenovo Duet that I purchased back in 2020. The tablet is decidely sluggish these days, so I don't really use it anymore, but at least it still functions.
I don't think that the OP was talking about the cell network changes when they said that the phone had lost support. GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone) will never loose software support, since they run mainline Linux. Also, Librem 5 has a replaceable modem.
Oh, Purism. The guys who included a separate chip to deny the user the ability to upgrade the firmware, so that they could meet FSF's completely arbitrary requirements for a honorary badge of freedom (see the hypocrisy?), but neglected an IOMMU, so the baseband (or any other device on the bus) can wreak unlimited havoc (see the irony?). Great alternative indeed.
> neglected an IOMMU, so the baseband (or any other device on the bus) can wreak unlimited havoc
The Librem 5 doesn't need an IOMMU, because it uses separated components, and it uses serial buses (USB 2.0/3.0, SDIO, I2C and I2S) that don't allow direct memory access, so there is absolute no chance of the WiFi/BT, cellular modem, GNSS and USB controller being able to access the RAM or the SoC's cache
The USB URB structure have a field named 'dma_addr_t transfer_dma',
used for DMA access. I've abused that to chain vulnerabilities. To boot, it is possible to develop an I2C-B2C or SPI bus master which is capable of DMA toward the host memory. Linux 2.5 kernels and later, USB device drivers have additional control over how DMA may be used to perform I/O operations.
Do any of these guys actually read the hardware specs or do any real hardware hacking?
I don't know, Google integrated the mainline Linux kernel a while ago. Probably most of the modern ones.
PostmarketOS fills the plaything niche like the Librium 5 and pinephone do but much cheaper with much better old hardware. Aside from a checkmark of running the latest kernel and hardware switches what can the librem 5 do an Android phone can't do much better? They aren't good phones.
Lifetime updates, no proprietary drivers, support of tens of different operating systems, schematics, openPGP card, desktop apps and convergence, verifiable security.
Those are features but not descriptions of good uses. Running a small laptop or steam deck fulfills all of that and much more and I've yet to see an instance where it's a good use. Again it sounds like a plaything to tinker with, with no real world use as a phone or computer.
> Running a small laptop or steam deck fulfills all of that
Why on earth do you need two separate devices (phone and laptop), when you can use one for both use cases (phone with convergence)? No synchronization or double-backups and maintenance required. Also, decreasing the amount of e-waste is a good thing as well as fighting with the user-restricting duopoly.
It looks like for you Linux itself is also just for tinkering, since you can already do everything with Windows and MacOS, isn't it?
Coming home, connecting my phone to keyboard and screen and continuing using it as a desktop. Using it as a thin client for any Linux server with the full access to desktop tools while on the go. Open your email/ssh session with authorization by the smart card, so that even if the phone is stolen or hacked, nobody else will have access to it. 100% defense against the corporate surveillance included in Android and iOS.
Of the three Pixel6a phones I bought for family members less than a year ago two have had their eSIM support mysteriously and permanently stop working, and one has had its physical SIM stop working. Unfortunately, those failures were not evenly spread and now one phone is completely without cell service. Google's tech support response is basically "Wow, sucks to be you". Was quite the 180 compared to taking an iPhone into the Apple store.
"In the US, iOS has no search engine choice at all, in europe DDG quietly pays Apple a fee to be one of the choices. Android is the only reason anyone outside of europe can use DDG on the phone at all."
Wait, what? Where does this information comes from? When I was in the USA I bought an iPhone and could choose DDG. Isn't it like that for all phones bought in the US? Did they somehow "knew" I was from Europe and showed me an extra option? It is the same for my relatives who live in South America and friends in Asia.
Also, is it confirmed anyehere that DDG pays Apple, or is this just conjecture? The only thing I can find about this is DDG's CEO criticizing Google/Apple for exchanging money so Google is the default.
> Also, is it confirmed anyehere that DDG pays Apple, or is this just conjecture?
It came out during the trial, in Weinberg's testimony. They pay Apple a revenue share for all searches done via the Safari search integration if the search engine is set to DDG.
As far as I know, none of this was even conjectured before that testimony. That he is so happy paying a revshare to Apple is pretty surprising given how vehement DDG was about the original Android search engine choice screen in the EU.
> Android is the only reason anyone outside of europe can use DDG on the phone at all
Huh?
First, as dwighttk noted already, DDG is one of the search engines available in the search engine setting for iOS.
Second, even if it wasn't one of the options in the search engine settings you could simply manually visit duckduckgo.com in Safari, and then save that as a bookmark or favorite or to your home screen.
I really love this idea of Apple as an innocent company that has been corrupted by Google. Maybe we can raise some money so that Apple doesn't have to prostitute itself to survive?
However, antitrust doesn't (and shouldn't) protect you from competition. Too often I see companies just do a really bad job and the leadership just sits there collecting a paycheck and complaining to Congress about [big bad company].
Yelp is the poster child for this. Arguably even Mozilla is guilty of this [1].
DDG ultimately is just repackaged Bing search results. Bing itself lags behind Google and has the resources of a trillion dollar company behind it. It's not just a question of how much money you have but how you spend it. Look at Blue Origin. Look at the Metaverse.
So DDG's upper bound seems to be however good Bing is and honestly Bing isn't that good. What is their path to improving? I'm not sure they have one. But I don't think Google's relationship with Apple is the core problem.
Back in the day, Microsoft got in trouble (rightly) for bundling the browser. That's because the barrier to installing a new browser was quite high. Here phone manufacturers give you a dropdown to change it (which I think they should be required to do, as they are).
Antitrust won't solve poor execution.
[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html