Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabaraj | Hacker News Reader

Google could simply block services like Gmail and YouTube. Microsoft tried it with Windows Phone.

I'm honestly surprised that there isn't already an EU antitrust action in progress based on Google blocking YouTube access on Windows Phone and some of the Amazon Fire devices.

It seems like YouTube should have more than enough market share for EU competition law to apply.

If I remembered correctly, windows phone users can use web version of YouTube just fine. The app was not developed by Google and based on undocumented API.

I'm not speaking for Google but if I'm building a streaming app, I won't like other people make "clones" without my permission or review. Reasons are:

1. Customers who meet bugs on these clones may blame me but it's actually bugs in these clones.

2. Compability may be a pain because I have no idea how these clones use my "API". This happens a lot when Mint is scraping webpages for data and fails on webpage redesigns. "something appears to be working" is a light year away from "what guaranteed to be working".

3. One solution may be building the official app for windows phones but it just doesn't financially work out. WP never got traction to justify the cost of migrating a big app like Youtube to some totally different platform. Might be chicken and egg problems though.

What do you think can be solutions for the problems above? Standardization might help but online video site is not something you can easily carve out a "standard".

YouTube still works great on WP, but I've never tried looking for an app.

The problem that Google stated was the YouTube app for WP (written by Microsoft) did not display any ads. Microsoft countered that Google wouldn't make a YouTube app themselves. But of course no business is compelled to create apps for their platform.

Under antitrust law, once you have a large enough market share in one area, you may not use that as a weapon against competitors in other areas.

In the EU, a 40% market share is large enough to place your conduct under these restrictions, so actions that would be perfectly legal in the US can be quite illegal there.

Also, the chance of the EU competition commission buying the advertising argument is approximately zero.

>Microsoft agreed to Google’s terms and in version 3.2 of the YouTube app, released earlier this week, they had enabled Google’s advertisements, disabled video downloads and eliminated the ability for users to view reserved videos

https://m.windowscentral.com/microsoft-responds-detail-googl...

I didn't really buy the excuse either, and the demand that it be written with certain technologies seems quite ridiculous. But are you saying that they could force Google to reveal some of their internal API details for Microsoft to make a YouTube app, even if the mobile website had the service's full functionality?

That would be a very dangerous precedent.

If Microsoft could do that to Google, can we do that to other companies? Can we write custom Netflix clients for unsupported platforms too? Or for another services? That a deep rabbit hole to follow.

Antitrust law is not applied randomly.

You must have a large enough market share for it to apply, and you must be using that market share as a weapon against competitors in another market.

> Antitrust law is not applied randomly.

> You must have a large enough market share for it to apply, and you must be using that market share as a weapon against competitors in another market.

I think Netflix is big enough for it, and yet they prohibit every custom client (thanks to DRM).

I don't see what's so dangerous about that precedent. Google would basically be forced to either make an app, or enable someone else making such an app (e.g. by providing a public API).

And it would only apply to companies that are so big, they act as a monopoly in some market segment. I don't see why forcing those to use open standards and documented APIs, so that everyone else can interop with them, is a bad thing.

I mean, imagine this being applied to Facebook. I suspect that if you could do everything that you can on their website through an API, that alone would be sufficient to defeat the barrier to entry to the social network market that is practically insurmountable today, and thereby create more healthy competition. Isn't that a good thing?

I'm saying the EU can force Google to stop behaving in an illegal manner.

Your idea of a potential remedy for this behavior may not be the one they land on.

However, it is certainly a remedy which they have employed in the past, something Microsoft is very much aware of:

>The 2004 [Microsoft antitrust] ruling ordered the company to open up source code for server communications protocols to rivals, in order to allow them to build server programs that work as smoothly with Windows as Microsoft's own software.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2311190/software/ms-ant...

The mobile website didn't have the full functionality of a mobile app. It couldn't play in the background, for example.

If you want to make a legal youtube app, you shouldn't use any youtube apis. You can only access things that a browser can access. That's how newpipe does it, and it works fine. I don't know if MS took that route.

You're saying that using Newpipe to download a video doesn't break YouTube's TOS?

You do not download videos under standard license, only download videos under CC-BY-SA (which do have download button on the web).

I don't know about Youtube's TOS, but Newpipe in it's github repo says that the app violates playstore TOS.

IIRC it is because Play Store terms of service are incompatible with the GPL license.

There are plenty of GPL apps on the play store. There was some drama over vlc in the apple store due to GPL concerns, but I don't remember if there was real merit to that. In any case, newpipe's issue is different. For one, it doesn't show ads. So that would disqualify it from playstore anyway. Playstore is google's walled garden afterall. That doesn't mean that newpipe is doing something illegal.

I think I am the only person on the internet who remembers this, but ten years ago Google had some damn good WinCE apps on the old Windows Mobile. The Google Maps was especially good, and saw updates well after iPhone had stolen everybody's hearts and minds. Then MS killed Win32 on mobile in favor of the Silverlight-based SDK for WP7. I always see that as the turning point. I imagine someone at Google seeing this forced rewrite and saying, why waste our time?

Whoever signed off on WP7 sealed Microsoft‘s fate in mobile. Always easy in hindsight but I remember lots of angry articles by developers from back then - the signs were clear.

I often felt they saw Apple being successful while being demanding of app devs, and erroneously thought that it either didn't matter or even more extreme that there was a causal relationship there. They didn't realize the need to counterbalance that arrogant attitude with better execution than they delivered.

By this I mean only the app platform. WP7's built-in UI and apps got lots of praise for being buttery smooth because they weren't using .NET or Silverlight, they had a private ui framework.

I had HTC HD2 and I sadly don't remember WP7 being smooth at all.

I had one too and as I recall, the highest OS one could run on it was WM 6.5, which was a completely different beast than W7+. I remember that the best improvement I made to this HD2 was install an early version of Android on it a few years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_HD2

I thought there was a hack to put 7 on the hd2. Unofficially of course.

There was also the hd7 which was a very similar device.

Yeah you're right, I confused the versions. I had Android on it as well, good times. Bought Samsung Galaxy W after that (yeah, W!).

The people behind Windows Mobile were beyond arrogant. They even held a funeral for iPhone: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-celebrates-windows-p...

I wish people would stop repeating this BS. It was an internal ship party for WP employees. Hyperbole and trash-talking is common at such things. As it should be.

> Hyperbole and trash-talking is common at such things. As it should be.

Why?

Why should it be common ?

What good is a morale event for a team where everyone talks about how far behind they are ?

Maybe not talk about either then?

I've worked at places that are traditional soul sucking enterprises, and people generally still joke around.

> Hyperbole and trash-talking is common at such things.

Where I walk, the only trash talking is about management and how fucking far behind we're lagging re. the competition. Burying the competitor's product is narcissistic and pathetic. Maybe this had been ordered from above.

Yes, MS seems to believe having a profitable store and killing win32 everywhere are both entangled.

But Steam has proven them wrong. Win32 is still strong and Steam makes millions.

Windows 7 and Vista did not get a ported version of Windows store nor a ported version of uwp apps. While win32 can do both platforms. That was what killed the windows store.

Windows 8 1st edition was just a start menu with a uwp focus, with a desktop as a third class citizen. When win8 start menu with uwp could have been offered as a single app for Windows 7 platform. That would have been a great buzz pavong the way for Windows phone and windows rt.

The strength of windows market-share lies in the backwards compatibility with win32.

Users don't want uwp or whatever new stack MS wants to impose. They want continuous access to their existing purchases of win32 apps. That MS calls win32 'legacy' matters very little.

This.

Win32 lives because there are millenia of man-hours invested into Win32 applications. If one day Win32 would disaapear, they would be not ported to UWP or other framework of the day.

Whey would be ported to the Web. But while Win32 lives, the cheapest path is to maintain them as Win32.

That lesson was learned. Since two years ago, Microsoft Store can (and does!) have Win32 apps in it. At the most basic level, it can be just a simple download link, so the Store is only used for discovery. But you can also "package" desktop apps so that they can actually be downloaded and installed from the store, as well.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/desktop...

For example:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/itunes/9pb2mz1zmb1s

How is that ads are not in your list of reasons?

I am sure they are the top priority for Youtube.

Google blocked WP users from Maps. Lied that WP's browser couldn't handle maps. It worked perfectly if user agent was changed.

https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-phone/

No offence but the EU does have more important things to do than suing American tech companies. Unless it actively hurts the people or economy of the EU, and who gives a fig about windows phone?

> based on Google blocking YouTube access on Windows Phone and some of the Amazon Fire devices

Are there any good alternatives to YouTube at all? Isn't YouTube already filled with so much of culturally-significant content (lectures, music etc) that blocking particular people (i.e. Windows Phone users) from watching it means putting them in a huge disadvantage like if they were not allowed to read any kind of books?

Google cannot block Gmail and YouTube. These are and will be accessible through web browser. What Google can do is not spend engineering time to build a special version of mobile app to support the platform, and block other apps that access them that don't conform to Terms and Conditions.

(disclaimer: I work for Google on GCP)

YouTube without an app is just not the same.

It’s better.

I deleted the YouTube app from my iPhone and iPad because I would rather use the website and if you click on a YouTube link it will launch the app. The YouTube app doesn’t support background playback without paying for YouTube Red and it doesn’t support picture in picture mode on the iPad - I use a third party app.

> Google cannot block Gmail and YouTube. These are and will be accessible through web browser.

Well, through web browsers that Google chooses to support, given at least Gmail uses UA whitelisting (and, at various times, various non-Chrome Chromium based browsers have been excluded). If Google chooses not to support any browser that runs on the given system and blocks access to any other browser, then Google absolutely can block access to them.

Email is an open protocol. Anyone can write a client. All major ones work with Gmail. For YouTube, see newpipe. The main missing piece is Google maps (at least the navigation bit) which you can't legally get without explicit cooperation from Google.

Until Google deprecates IMAP for @gmail accounts. It's already disabled by default for new accounts.

It's been disabled by default for years, as far as I know. Not sure why they'd deprecated it now.

EDIT: A quick search shows it was always disabled by default, since 2007, when it launched.

Doesn't that support GP's argument? Seems like they really don't want anyone to use it, since the beginning.

The Gmail concepts do not really map very well to IMAP and traditional mail clients. They do provide a custom API that does mirror their semantic for that.

Not today, I agree. It was just an ordinary email up until a few years ago though.

Gmail's labels have always been an arse to map on to normal IMAP-based email.

The replacement API that GMail offers (which reflects their different approach) is open and free to use, so it's not really an issue, as third-party apps can support it. And many, in fact, do.

That's not the case for YouTube, though, which is exactly why it's a problem when GMail isn't.

They also have a regular alert which nags you to "improve your security settings" if you use 'insecure' IMAP. I'm glad I don't use gmail any more.

I don't know people here noticed but they are already doing so by bringing "confidential email", etc to all users which explicitly require WEB VERSION or Gmail app.

@bubblethink

Maps is a tricky beast. Given Google Maps has been around for so long, there may be a lot of licensing going on with the images. You also have to comply with various government requests to be able to host images of specific areas.

They backed down almost immediately, but after Google removed the YouTube app for Amazon's Fire TV, Google also blacklisted the Fire TV web browsers from accessing the YouTube webpage that had been optimized for televisions.

>As discovered by The Verge, the TV-optimized web version of YouTube is no longer accessible on the Fire TV. Instead, visitors using both Amazon’s Silk browser and Firefox for Fire TV are being redirected to the full desktop client.

https://9to5google.com/2018/01/22/google-blocks-youtube-tv-o...

Google services being refused on the windows mobile platform contributed greatly to its death.

Who would ever make an app for something that doesn't even have youtube--when trashy tv boxes do?

Who would get and keep a phone that doesn't have the apps they and their friends use?

Maybe I’m weird, but I probably use YouTube even less than twice a month.

You are. 18-34 year olds in the US spend an average of 19 hours per month watching videos on YouTube. https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-still-watch-tv-d...

YouTube not being on Windows Phone is really Microsoft's fault. They wrote their own "YouTube" app that removed ads and allowed downloading videos. Google rightfully was like "No way" and Microsoft continued to be belligerant.

Google didn't want to let Microsoft develop their own YouTube client because Google frequently changes how the YouTube client works. Microsoft could have wrapped the web client, but after they acted stupidly Google didn't want to further cooperate.

Ah, YouTube API's do not supply ad's. Google refused to make an app for Windows Phone. MS created an app with the available API. Google didn't want to work with MS to address any issues Google had with it.

Didn't google block various Amazon devices (like Echo Show) from accessing Youtube?

If the terms and conditions were onerous enough that Microsoft could not conform to them then I feel like this rounds to "Google can effectively block the native consumption of YouTube and Gmail."

It's probably tied to the play store. If they want to have it in their version of Android, they should be able to install Youtube on those phones. If they want to roll their own, they'd probably end up in a similar situation as WP.

YouTube website is not a replacement for a web app, and anyone who used the app on, say, Android would know. The most basic thing I expect from any YouTube mobile app is being able to play things in the background. Mobile browsers don't allow websites to do that, and for very good reasons.

As for "don't conform to Terms and Conditions" ... well, if you guys don't offer an API to build a conforming app, then such a complaint is misleading, because there's no way to build one. So what you're really saying is that you will block all apps except your own, or made with your blessing. And then we're back to square one - your refusal to grant such a blessing to an app on a competing platform is abuse of your monopoly position wrt YouTube.

>Mobile browsers don't allow websites to do that

Mobile browsers do allow that, YouTube just breaks that functionality for reasons unknown. They do it on mobile only as well, videos do play in the background when I use the desktop site.

> They do it on mobile only as well, videos do play in the background when I use the desktop site.

Or if you use a browser that supports add-ons and install something like https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-pl... to block Youtube from accessing the APIs it uses to detect when a tab has been backgrounded.

And the reasons aren't that unknown - if I'm not mistaken background playback is one of the selling points of a Youtube Premium (formerly Red) subscription.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com