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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

You think an app store should be a common carrier? Should WalMart also, then? Why wouldn't a store get to pick what they carry? Everything they carry affects their reputation and appearance, after all.

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The difference is that many phones come with the the Google Play store on them, and "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" locked off. I don't know what the metaphor would be; if a good chunk of cars were somehow locked where you couldn't drive to other stores than WalMart, and WalMart were involved in the production of those cars?

This is a good point, but also suggestive of the needed remedy being something other than "force the play store open" more akin to "ensure the underlying platforms are more open."

I have much more problem with forcing someone to distribute things than I do with forcing them to allow other distribution methods.

To play Devil's Advocate, should a company be forced to bake a cake for gay people? Should they be forced to serve minorities?

I think we have decided the answer is yes.

There are interesting aspects there, but the idea of protected classes vs unprotected ones and restricting discrimination based on that isn't one I have a huge problem with. I don't believe that a cake store having to serve minorities needs to imply that they have to be willing, say, to create cakes with arbitrary recipes. Could be an issue that comes up in the future with food allergy stuff, though, but as it is today that's not protected, and I feel it would be ludicrous to force shops to be "common carriers" that have to cook whatever the customer wants—of course, there are significant level-of-market-control differences here too.

It's not just about protected classes, it's about equal service for all.

Buggered if I have a solution, I just know these sorts of things are problems.

>I think we have decided the answer is yes.

When did we decide this? To my knowledge it's still a debate.

And IMHO, we shouldn't force anyone to sell/buy anything from/to anyone.

We, as a society, decided you can't bar black people from eating at your diner - for example. We is a collective term.

> should a company be forced to bake a cake for gay people?

should a Muslim bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay couple? genuine question.

We, as a society, have decided yes.

> and "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" locked off

Which phones are these?

as far as I know, every modern android phone. To enable sideloading involves going into your security settings and toggling the option to allow unknown sources. It'd likely be a legal viability if they didn't do this, as a consumer can complain about getting a virus and that they were not proper measure taken to ensure that they were protected against this.

The GP said "locked off", not just default off, and the Walmart analogy implies they meant permanently locked off as it sounded.

You jest about WalMart but actually if they are a monopoly then yes they could be though of as common carrier. A much better solution is to break them into pieces.

"Could be" is not "should be." I would argue that neither should be thought of as a common carrier. There's no natural barrier preventing you from distributing code through other means to run on Android devices, or from setting up your own store to compete with Walmart (probably Amazon is the better parallel here). I don't think "remove any editorial discretion" is a useful answer to any of these scenarios. Decentralization and lack of control is not the panacea that the the-internet-should-be-radically-open crowd thinks, for reasons that a brief history of (mis)use and tragedy-of-the-commons type scenarios illustrate.

But maybe I should hedge this position by learning to write malware so I can have a leg up when the floodgates open. :)

EDIT: Animats makes a great point above in his comparison to railroads. Very apt-sounding comparison. Slides my thoughts around to consider that the difference today is how low the stakes are for would-be content creators - in the past you were much more likely to need a business case to justify, today things are so cheap you might just write an app to troll. If there are policy changes needed, seems like that shift is where they would come from, and that we haven't really talked about it from that side much.

The difference is that by default, Google's app store is the only option on Android devices and Apple's one is the only option on iOS devices. This means being banned from one basically means your app or service can't become popular on those platforms, especially with the mainstream user (who doesn't root their devices).

Walmart and other large retailers have alternatives available in most areas, and it's incredibly easy to choose to shop in one of these alternatives as well.

Anyone can sideload apps on Android. iOS is a different story.

"Anyone" can sideload applications on Android in the same way as "anyone" can change the drive belt on their own car. Your statement may be true in the literal sense of the word, but that that is not the standard by which antitrust is decided.

Microsoft was convicted on an antitrust charge, while "anyone" still could install Linux on their computer, or buy a Mac.

Android doesn't control 96% of the desktop market. You can thank the even-more-locked-down iOS for Android not being a monopoly.

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