It is an interesting salvo in what I've started thinking of as the "data war." All three companies have a huge asset in data collection capability, and preventing the others from exploiting it is only the first skirmish among them.
It will be interesting to see if Google offers to pay additional monies to Apple in order to "restore" this pipeline, and whether or not Apple will agree. In one sense, Apple already gives up a data feed by sending search queries to Google.
Do this. Create a fake company and say you wrote a spider to index Facebook public profile data and that you have like say 100GB ....
Watch how fast you get sued by Facebook.
Mind you this is public data that EVERYONE can see...
The entire concept of law is based on the premise that not everything that is physically possible should be permitted.
Yeah nah, that's where the concept of agreements comes in. You walk up to Fes Boock and say:
― I want to have business with Fes Boock.
― Fes Boock will have business with you if you promise to not stab Fes Boock in the back.
― I give my word to not stab Fes Boock in the back.
Turns out, this thing is so valuable, it's supported by law everywhere that I know of, in multiple forms, including rather implicit ones such as “ToS.” Which is what allows Fes to sue the stabbing bastard.
A better real world analogy is a bulletin board on campus or a wooden power pole.
Lets suppose that it is super common that people staple flyers to power poles, with the expectation that people will read them as they pass by. Your analogy would claim that if I staple a letter to the power pole, expecting that only my friend that I told about the letter should read it, that passers-by are doing something unseemly by reading it, while being surrounded by want ads and for sale flyers that people do want read.
Websites are nothing like mailboxes. The vast majority of websites would prefer that as many people as possible read their contents as much as possible. Email would be a better analogy.
This is not the case for HTTP. A network protocol is an agreement about the meaning of certain clusters of bytes sent over a network. When someone operates an HTTP server, a reasonable person could conclude that they take HTTP messages to mean what HTTP says they mean. A lot of cases get more interesting because there is also something generally understood to mean, "Please don't access the following resources by automated scraping, independently of whether my server decides to grant those requests."
Since a web server, by its primary mode of operation, does indeed more or less indiscriminately send replies to whomever makes a request, it follows that the duty of choice lies with the client. The person operating the client has to apply their reason and follow the inter-party conduct.
Sorry, why isn't it the duty of choice the server owner, who chooses to put the server online in the first place? What exactly are these rules you think exist? This is the first time I've ever heard of them.
> Since a web server, by its primary mode of operation, does indeed more or less indiscriminately send replies to whomever makes a request,
This is completely false. The server owner can authenticate GET requests and return an unauthorized response if the client is not permitted to access the document. We are not talking about a situation where a hacker attempts to brute force a password or gain unauthorized access to a server. If the server is on the internet serving anonymous GET requests with no authentication the reasonable assumption is that anyone is permitted to access the data.
It appears that the rest of the web gets by pretty well using the legal framework I've described. Because, you know, they tend to choose things to be pragmatical instead of those that “can be done.”
"It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for him"
Apple does this under protest. Their top search queries are served through siri lately, and the hope is siri will replace all search so they won't need to utilize google anymore.
There was a time when the Siri folks approached Blekko (which was an actual search engine with its own index, crawler, and ranking Etc. to discuss partnering with Apple (personally I think they should have bought us :-)) But, according to people who should know, there was a cultural mental block at Apple about providing web services at the time. The biggest thing like that they had done was Apple Maps and it was a 'mixed' success. Apple didn't see itself as being a search company.
I used to point out that Microsoft had a phone (Nokia), an operating system (Windows Phone), and a search engine. Google had a phone (Nexus), an operating system (Android), and a search engine. Apple had a phone (iPhone) and an operating system (iOS).
Since that time Microsoft dropped the OS and phone, and Apple never did build a real search engine.
[1] More precisely it is a front end to a simple knowledge base, a local index of things on your device, and when those things are exhausted an internet search engine.
I've noticed several times now where Google assistant has been able to answer questions about things in almost real time all thanks to Google's crawlers.
My friend asked it earlier whether USPS delivers mail during a polar vortex and Google assistant told them they didn't yesterday, at least in Chicago.
I mean, when I think about Apple, I think of a company that designs the look, the internals, the case, the glass, the board layout, and even some of the chips. (Sure, they contract the manufacture out, but Apple is deeply involved with designing components on a low level -- not merely farming it all out to some device maker in Taiwan or China.)
But for Nexus/Pixel: how much is Google and how much is LG or Samsung or HTC (yes, I know they bought HTC). I mean, how deep do Google personnel in Mountain View really go? How much do they just hand off to outsiders? Is it comparable to what Apple does? Maybe so. I just can't quite see into it.
Google's biggest challenge was customer support, they just didn't do the whole "someone to pick up the phone and talk to you" thing.
So I'd say, they have a core capability to do handset design (perhaps some of it residual) and they likely strongly influence the hardware they sell. Is their bench as deep as Apples? No.
What are you basing that on, exactly? Apple doesn't exist in a market simply to "be" in that market. That's why they jettisoned things like their Airport routers
Bing, I thought?
But I think that DuckDuckGo uses multiple sources. Although it's easy to restrict that to Google.