Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

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> The elephant in the room is rather "why does Amazon not sell Chromecasts?"

> 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?

Then how come they sell pixel phones?

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.

How is FireTV stupid, well more stupid than any product name? Amazon have a media receiver line called Fire, FireTV fits the brand and tells you what it does, same as Chromecast -- same format.

Fire TV is garbage. The only reason to buy one is to flash something else on to it. It doesn't support casting and good luck finding something good to watch.

Well I use it and have found we watch Netflix in preference to terrestrial UK TV to the point we watch so little BBC now we might go back to streaming only and forgo the license fee.

A chacun son gout.

I got a bad impression from the product on amazon. The shape was square compared to round, the name sounded too much like fire stick and wasn't easy on the tongue. I know now that it's based on Fire (and they have another product called Kindle) but when I just saw the product image say "fire tv stick" with a square USB device in the background I was not impressed.

> it appears that amazon pulled both Apple TV and Chromecast because they didn't offer Amazon Prime.

Amazon pulled Prime Video off of Chromecast themselves to sell the Fire TV (stick). Google did not remove Amazon's apps.

Google did pull YouTube app from Amazon devices. https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/05/google-blocking-youtube-...

That was in retaliation to Amazon nonsense. Get your timelines straight.

Google first changed the Chromecast protocol a few times to prevent Amazon from using it.

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.

> Google first changed the Chromecast protocol a few times to prevent Amazon from using it.

How can they do that without also kicking out Netflix, Twitch, Hulu, etc.?

Simply by the fact that none of these attempted to build a chromecast receiver?

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.

Oh, on the receiver side. So Amazon pulled Chromecast support from their apps because they couldn't get reliable Cast protocol support on their FireTV. Thank you for clarifying.

Yes, that's basically it — they couldn't get reliable cast support to receive on the FireTV, and they couldn't reliably send from the Kindles due to Google's protocol changes.

And that was already after Google's anticompetitive actions against the Kindle Fire devices.

I'd be interested to see a citation for your claim that Google intentionally changed the Cast protocol to prevent Amazon from using it.

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.

https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/developers

How do I receive a chromecast with that SDK, please?

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)

Source? I couldn't find anything from a cursory search.

This is nonsense. You can cast with Plex from your home server of all things. I'm sure Amazon can figure out how to use an SDK.

Plex can receice chromecasts, as Amazon was planning to with the Fire Stick, and as open source projects did?

xoogler here, one of my teams implemented cast functionality in google photos. IIRC, this was definitely not the reason; the protocol was initially very limited and it was changed to make it more secure while also adding capabilities.

That's the sending protocol (and I've seen those changes, I reversed that, too), but I meant the changes to the receiving protocol.

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.

Amazon was first to pull Google products. History here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/02/amazon-still-isnt-s...

The issue started long before that, with the Fire phone vs Android.

I think, taking everything and not releasing as open source ( only after a lot of negative feedback) did hurt some toes.

But that's normal, still, amazon tried a one-up on a shitty way.

I think distinguishing consumer and producer monopolies might be valuable here. Google and Amazon can only be monopolistic and predatory towards producers on their platforms - the sites they rank in search, the ads they sell, the videos uploaded, the sellers of things. Because they have all the audience, anyone trying to get views online, buy ads, upload videos, sell things etc are throwing out a huge majority of the market by not using these two. There can definitely be a case against them there.

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.

Does Google actually sell our personal data? I know they use it to advertise more effectively but I see this claim thrown around a lot but I'm not sure I've ever seen evidence of it. I'm sure they have a treasure trove of data and use it liberally but selling it is something else entirely.

> Google is a predatory monopoly that is leveraging their existing power in search to move directly into consumer goods.

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.

Google have not even BEGUN to start selling your personal data.

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