> it's an illegitimate business practice when you are in the business of selling pretty much everything else.
Google is a predatory monopoly that is leveraging their existing power in search to move directly into consumer goods.
Amazon is also a predatory monopoly that is leveraging their existing power in shopping logistics to move directly into consumer goods.
This is tit for tat.
https://www.recode.net/2017/10/12/16464132/google-target-ret...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2975731/software-games/youtu...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...
These companies are moving into the same market, and if they don't fight as hard as possible, they're letting their shareholders down.
I don't know if it's illegal and the DOJ is asleep at the wheel, but Google isn't going to stop: They're not content with selling people's personal data and even that they're losing to ad blockers. They're getting desperate.
Amazon isn't going to stop either, fuelling consumerism is their bread and butter, so they need to be in the middle of every shopping transaction. No market is out of bounds, but they're really struggling with media and product. These were big investments and Amazon is simply not very good at either, so they too are desperate.
We consumers are surely the collateral damage in the meantime, but besides "voting with our wallet", what else could we do? Regulation would be likely required to even allow Google and Amazon to cooperate without violating their obligations their shareholders, but what shape would that take?
Edit: I did some googling and it appears that amazon pulled both Apple TV and Chromecast because they didn't offer Amazon Prime. Which is clearly abuse of their position in the market to me but I'm just a layperson.
Then int 2017 they were slated to come back but now in 2018 I can't find chromecasts anymore. Only peripherals for it and clones.
Edit: Lol I just noticed they're selling the "fire tv stick" instead. What a stupid name.
A chacun son gout.
Amazon pulled Prime Video off of Chromecast themselves to sell the Fire TV (stick). Google did not remove Amazon's apps.
There’s a lot of fuckery there, and those of us that tried to build open source chromecast clones got fucked by Google as well.
If you wish to argue against this, please offer me a way to implement the Chromecast protocol on a raspberry pi, reliably, without it constantly being broken by Google’s updates.
How can they do that without also kicking out Netflix, Twitch, Hulu, etc.?
There were three groups working on such a receiver, Google with their Chromecast, Amazon wanted to support receiving chromecasts with the fire TV, and open source projects trying to receive chromecasts on the raspberry pi.
Google changed that protocol a few times, only Google's products can receive chromecast streams today.
And that was already after Google's anticompetitive actions against the Kindle Fire devices.
Your argument that Cast is hard on unsupported platforms is irrelevant. They are, by definition, unsupported, and Google is under no obligation to support them.
Google provides an SDK that people are free to use on the platforms Google chooses to support.
The point is not about sending, but about receiving, as was possible with miracast, and which would have made the fire stick a killer product (by having immediate compatibility with all Google apps' casting feature)
There's a separate protocol app → Google and Google → Chromecast. Or at least, there was, after countless changes, I gave up attempting to build a raspberry pi with chromecast support.
And of course, Chromecast replaced the dlna protocols and Miracast support in Android. I lost the ability to stream the screen on my nexus devices to open source receivers back then, because Google had to go proprietary.
But that's normal, still, amazon tried a one-up on a shitty way.
But those are just because they made products consumers want to use. There is no opportunity cost to switching search engine or store website. It takes a line of text to move to duckduckgo, bing, startpage, etc from Google. It takes a moment to move over to walmart, target, ebay, overstock, newegg, etc from Amazon. Neither can be overtly predatory towards the consumers of their platforms because they have no way to lock them in without taking over the whole Internet (and yeah, Google is trying that with AMP, but I doubt they will ever have enough of the Internet under their control to start restricting / banning non-AMP sites in Chrome - if they ever did that its the most blatant monopoly abuse case since Comcast).
Speaking of Comcast, they are the other side of the coin. Comcast has sheer market dominance, uses their size to buy out and kill competition and bribe politicians, and leaves their "customers" with no alternatives while they abuse them. For about 95% of Comcasts market base your options are Comcast or move somewhere without Comcast. That is a blatant, consumer harming monopoly.
Online, Facebook is damn close to that. You cannot easily switch to Facebook competitors because social networking is defined by network effects - Facebook is infrastructure as much as search is, but one requires the people you want to be on it while the other just needs to index the sites you want to find. Anyone can index websites, only Facebook can have everyone in your extended family on it. And Facebook surely uses its monopoly position to exploit and abuse its consumers.
I just like making the distinction between the two. Both are dangerous, but for most of us the threat of Google and Amazon isn't direct, its to the businesses and services we want to use that we access through them. But it remains our choice to give Google and Amazon that power, choices you don't have with Comcast or even Facebook. As long as I can have a voice in the efficacy of their monopolies I simply feel less threatened by them.
How is their search dominance coming into play here? I see leverage of youtube, and leverage of android. Plus plain-old mass media advertising campaigns. Not search.
Yep. This is how you get the attention of regulators. They should ask Microsoft how fun it was to be hounded by them for a decade.
No vendor should be forced to sell the products of its direct competitor.
Amazon Fire Stick is a direct competitor to Google Chromecast.
Because Google operated an online shopping portal, which is also Walmart-like (perhaps moreso than Amazon, since you can actually buy from Walmart on it.)
"Store X has come up with their own Macaroni and Cheese that market tests show to be extremely successful, so they stop carrying Kraft"
In that scenario, should Store X be forced to carry Kraft? Of course not, people who want craft will go to any other myriad of different stores. Amazon doesn't even close to resemble a monopoly on online shopping.