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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour:

1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall).

2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for).

4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

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It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere.

As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position.

Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?

If you see the original iPhone introduction by Steve Jobs, being able to play iTunes songs was a huge deal. No other phone could do it. (Well apple did try with Motorola for some phone to play iTunes, but those were heavily restricted). iTunes was the dominant music store. Did they ever offer a version for either Symbian, Blackberry, android, Windows Phone? No.

Windows phone had no Instagram too, and even that made it painful to use. If the platform doesn't have enough users, developers aren't obliged to develop for it.

You could always use a web browser for all of Google's services. They never blocked HTML5 apps.

Windows Phone came out a year after iTunes dropped the use of DRM, so any native Windows Phone music app would work.

This was not true of YouTube, where Google actively blocked Microsoft from building a native client.

If I recall Microsoft's client was blocked because it refused to serve ads.

Microsoft rewrote their native YouTube client so that it would serve Google's ads and disallow video downloads.

Google still disallowed it.

Google likewise disallowed various Amazon devices from accessing YouTube during their Amazon dispute.

I'm not really following what you're saying. I believe you're making my point - if you are in Apple's ecosystem, you're in. And it is popular. But Google provides search and email and maps and contacts for "everyone." That's why when they actively blocked Windows Phone from their services, it was anti-competitive.

Other entities like Instagram were under no obligation to build for Windows Phone, but 6tag was built and served the purpose. I don't believe Instagram blocked 6tag from working. If they did, it might not be anti-competitive, but just anti-consumer.

Beyond this, Google's behavior had ripple effects. Developers could tell that Google was putting up roadblocks to make Windows Phone an undesirable platform, and that discourages contributions.

If iTunes only exists on iPhones, but not Android, then it doesn't matter if it also doesn't exist on Windows Phone. Apple, the iPhone and iTunes are not monopolies. They are a walled garden, though. That's just a separate issue.

> iTunes was the dominant music store. Did they ever offer a version for either Symbian, Blackberry, android, Windows Phone? No.

Is it me or does that just sound like whataboutism? So people complain about Google intentionally screwing over a competitor but what about Apple? Apple is very much "we play on our own court".

I think what we're seeing on this forum at times is more emotion than rationality.

Regarding the original list, it's likely only 2 and 5 would pass muster as being issues that antitrust laws would actually be able to deal with effectively. Number 3? Might be an issue if you can frame the argument in a manner more consistent with antitrust concerns. 1 and 4 are probably just emotional frustration leading the poster to say, "These must be illegal because I don't like them."

We need to focus on real issues if we want to be taken seriously. Right now privacy and security activists just sound shrill and unconvincing. Part of that lack of credibility is the tendency to focus on things that are not true issues from a legal perspective as opposed to the slam dunk type issues that stare us in the face.

This is why these issues are so hard to build a consensus around in the larger population, because lawyers hear the complaints of some activists, and they just laugh. Then those lawyers go off and work on things that actually have a chance in Hell of working. So I applaud the move to have an antitrust investigation, but we shouldn't be under the impression that every little thing some guy doesn't like is part of it. There are very specific families of issues that are reviewed for propriety, and if action needs to be taken, it is.

Doesn't mean we should waste the time of these states looking into why some guy's youtube account was cancelled. That, and other ridiculously trivial issues like it, are not what this is about. So we shouldn't even set up those expectations. Particularly not in lieu of getting the word out to the larger society about real antitrust issues. (Of which Google and FB are the main offenders.)

> We need to focus on real issues if we want to be taken seriously. Right now privacy and security activists just sound shrill and unconvincing.

No offense, but honestly just look around. Those activists are killing it nationally in the PR game and have been consistently for the past year.

I honestly think you might want to consider the very real possibility that we, on HN, are in a bit of an echo chamber. Where I live in opioid infested fly over country, if you ask the average person the name of a single privacy concern, security concern, or even a single celebrity privacy activist, you would get a blank stare. The slightly more informed, or slightly more criminal depending on how you want to look at it, would probably say that his phone was a security concern because the cops can use it against him when he goes to see his weed man. (Or worse.) But that's about the extent of it.

Compare that with other issues. How many people around here know all about the #MeToo issue? How many people around here know the ins and outs of all the immigration stuff? You may have disagreements with them as to what should be done about these issues, but they definitely know them. Even more esoteric issues, something like prison reform or the trade war. They definitely know what it means for them and are all about making sure things go their way on those issues. They know Trump is about the trade war. They know Kim K and Trump are about prison reform. They largely support both. (Again, I'm not making an argument about whether or not they are on the right side, just pointing out the difference in familiarity with the issues.)

The only people around here who know about security and privacy issues are the meth dealers, the few techies, and the usual bedfellows of child porn lovers/racist ideologues. We have to get the average teacher in, say, Markesan or wherever, talking about privacy and security in the classroom the same way they talk about Kim K's prison reform push, or the trade war.

I'm respectfully suggesting that this is something that is just not happening right now. Definitely not around here.

I don't think that is the case because I see this outside of HN in my day to day life. Your mistake is assuming that opinion in opioid infested fly over country is what determines Facebook regulation, rather than a targeted PR campaign towards elites that impact policy.

On the coasts (which is half the country at least), people are certainly talking about FB and privacy.

#MeToo requires a cultural shift, not a legislative shift.

Part of the purpose of activism is to exploit current laws for immediate change, but the other part is to create support for changing the laws to provide better protections.

The idea that you could disappear completely from anyone using modern technology (which is what getting accounts banned from communication services will amount to) with no legal recourse or transparency is horrifying, even if it's technically legal, because the laws were written at a time when the tools of communication were widely distributed and could only be feasibly disrupted by governments.

In the short term, the lawyers matter. In the long term, we need to create laws and conventions which ensure that the lawyers of the future are focusing on the right issues.

The Apple ecosystem is huge though. You can't claim Google is dominant "outside the Apple ecosystem". That's the same as saying Google has a monopoly if you ignore its competitors.

I used to work at Google. Apps written by hobbyists were only exceptionally rarely blocked deliberately. But those apps often [ab]use internal APIs and protocols of the services, so they'd break during updates (which were frequent). Sometimes they have to be blocked due to external contracts (e.g. Maps). Sometimes they tripped anti-botting/anti-spam detection and got users blocked that way.

In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software. Moxie Marlinspike has written about the difficulties introduced by formally supporting this:

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

> In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software

Yes there are. They are called anti trust laws, and anti competition laws. These laws apply to companies that have significant market power, regardless if they are on the internet or not.

If a company has significant market power, then it is illegal for them to engage in anti competitive practices.

In Google's industries, such as search, it can be described as being close to a monopoly, which is enough for anti trust laws to kick in.

Yes, if you have significant market power, then you are required by law to not engage in anti competitive practices.

You're connecting two very different things. Disallowing a third party client to connect and use your infrastructure for it's own purposes is not anti competitive.

It could be anti competitive if you are a monopoly and it effects competition.

This is a common thing that happens in anticompetitive case law.

Just ignore the internet part of this, for a second. Instead, imagine if a train company, that owned all of the train tracks in the US, decided to retaliate against it competitors by banning some people from using their trains. This is anti competitive.

Being on the internet does not absolve you from anti competitive claims.

This is similar to internet clients. There isn't much difference, logically, from banning people from using your trains, vs banning them from using their stuff on the internet.

If something effects competition, and you are a monopoly, it could be considered anti competitive. It being on the internet doesn't change this.

>imagine if a train company, that owned all of the train tracks in the US, decided to retaliate against it competitors by banning some people from using their trains. This is anti competitive.

No it isn't. As long as the train company is not banning people based on a protected category (a local or federal civil right), a private corporation can choose who it does business with. A company has the right to refuse service. How does that even apply to competition? If anything, refusing some customers from using their trains means that it opens up competition for other companies to serve those banned customers.

To take your analogy in another direction - if a private train company buys land across the US, lays down track with their labor and their material, they are not forced to let other companies use their tracks. That is what you're asking for here.

Of course, if this were a public company or utility that was paid for with public funds, it is a different matter - because it belongs to the public. But a private company doing what it wishes with the private resources it acquired and manages is a right.

> a private corporation can choose who it does business with. A company has the right to refuse service

This is not true.

I would strongly encourage you to read up on the history of anti trust law.

I chose the example of train lines for a reason. The reason being that this literal thing happened. It is the literal most famous example of antitrust law, of all time.

The sherman anti trust act was created, for the literal purpose of prosecuting people, related to railroads, in the example that I just gave.

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

> if a private train company buys land across the US, lays down track with their labor and their material, they are not forced to let other companies use their tracks.

Yes they are. This happened. Literally this exact situation happened. It was called the Standard Oil Company. And they used the railroad system in the exact way that I described, and it was was broken up, in the most famous example in history of anti-trust law.

Check it out here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jersey...

So once again, this is not an argument about what could happen. This is instead an argument of literally what happened, in the most famous example of anti-trust law, in history.

You cannot disagree with what happened, related to the most famous example of anti-trust law, in history.

I am honestly not sure if you know what anti-trust law even is, if you don't understand anything about the most famous example of anti-trust law in history.

You're connecting several tangential points at the margins and trying to make a larger argument, but you are missing several key components of the early history of the Sherman act.

Maybe I missed it, but I'd love to understand how your specific example relates to Antitrust and the Sherman act (other than being tangentially related to railroad ownership).

Alright, how about I post some official government resources on this general topic:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

The TLDR is that if the refusal to deal with a competitor helps maintain the monopoly, then it might violated anti-trust law.

Here are the main points:

"In general, any business — even a monopolist — may choose its business partners. However, under certain circumstances, there may be limits on this freedom for a firm with market power. As courts attempt to define those limited situations when a firm with market power may violate antitrust law by refusing to do business with other firms, the focus is on how the refusal to deal helps the monopolist maintain its monopoly, or allows the monopolist to use its monopoly in one market to attempt to monopolize another market."

"For instance, if the monopolist refuses to sell a product or service to a competitor that it makes available to others, or if the monopolist has done business with the competitor and then stops, the monopolist needs a legitimate business reason for its policies."

There are absolutely cases where refusing to do business with competitors, can violate anti-trust laws. It says so right there, on an official government page related to this.

This, and similar things were happening, related to railroad services and prices, related to standard oil, which is why I brought up that example.

But that government page is a more general explanation of the problem.

Thank you for taking the time to reply and explain, I appreciate it. I was incorrect.

> Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage?

EDIT -> They did NOT, see below comment by nvrspyx.

Apparently they did, and removed it around Mojave-era or so...? I'm not familiar with Apple products, this statement is based on https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_th...

> Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

> When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either?

I agree that incompatibility in general is not on its face evidence of anti-competitive behavior.

> Facebook offered XMPP messenger?

They did, then once they imported users to their platform, turned that feature off. That might have precipitated Google to turn off XMPP federation on GTalk to stop the bleeding.

> Shall Google ... not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall)?

Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list.

> Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too?

Those developers could refrain from developing themselves, but they were not in a position to stop competitors from developing their own apps. Google is in a different position.

> Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for

Google said not to develop the app that way, but this way. MS complied. Google still refused to allow the app for no explained/good/political/anti-competitive? reasons. Google was focused on killing Windows Phone, not the iPhone, even as far back as 2006. Eric S in the Verge article in my above comment "... at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft's mobile strategy would be successful."

Jabber was an option in macOS's messages app, which allowed you to connect to Facebook for example. It was an app to consolidate multiple messaging protocols. iChat (replaced with Messages) was sort of like Pidgin, Empathy, or Adium. However, iMessage, Apple's own chat protocol, never used XMPP. It has always been proprietary. Messages replaced iChat, which only uses iMessage. However, iChat used to technically still be hidden underneath Messages, but was really a separate app. That reddit post is when they removed iChat completely.

Thanks for correcting me on that. I learned something today!

Messages used to support Jabber and custom IMService plugins. Both of those were removed and Messages now only does iMessage and SMS.

It did, but that was really just iChat packaged with Messages. They were actually two separate apps, but iChat was hidden within the Messages app. Messages just called iChat whenever you wanted to use Jabber or anything other than iMessage or SMS. They even had different UI with iChat using the older, pre-Mountain Lion (I think) design.

> Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list.

So you're saying that Google (or any other company for that matter) is better off NEVER EVER releasing services that use potentially open protocols because later on if they would ever consider changing those to a closed protocol it can be seen as anti-competitive. Better to just always use closed protocols.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is a pretty clearly anti-competitive strategy.

The best way to counteract that strategy is a more complicated topic.

You are correct that creating bad rules around the removal of open protocols could end up dis-incentivizing usage of open protocols, but that doesn't mean there aren't some good rules that won't (I don't claim to know what they would be).

I think it makes sense that we create anti-trust or consumer protection laws that cover the circumstances under which services with high market-shares can remove support for open protocols.

I even see a potential argument to require services with sufficiently high market-share to implement open protocols.

Google just happens to be the biggest among them, so it's understandable they come first, but this is going to happen for every entity that grows to a certain point because it's how our system works: small players crying mommy about big corporations killing competition until they grow to a point they can kill competition themselves, which they will happily do, becoming themselves the bad guys. Then some external entity comes and restores some balance by splitting them etc. Rinse, repeat.

Maximizing profits, which is the goal that moves every company everywhere, from small shops to multinational corporations, leads ultimately to this if no, sloppy, or deliberately inefficient control is performed.

Biggest among what companies. Both market cap and net income of google are less than both MSFT and AAPL.

MSFT has had a phenomenal year. Amazing that big bad monopoly MSFT, survived an attempt to break it up, and then collapsed to irrelevancy, attacking Google with AstroTurf political advertising campaigns, yet is now higher market cap then AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, currently the only one worth (barely) over $1T.

All of these companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, actually. This isn't proof that Google isn't guilty.

If some behaviour is too common across all companies, Governments need to focus on laws to address the underlying problems across the industry, not to cherry pick a company and make example of.

I mean, that's why the government isn't just one institution. You have Congress/Senate and the state-level governments to pass laws, and the FTC and the DoJ (and state-level equivalents) to enforce them. You can do both. Except the behaviour of Google et al. has largely gone ignored since their rise for whatever reason. I don't even remember the last time we saw a proper anti-trust case in the US, much less one that went anywhere. Was it Microsoft? Who knows. And there are plenty of financial interests to ensure that anti-trust isn't enforced and isn't adapted to the modern state of markets. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed, but that doesn't make suing Google for their abhorrent behaviour any less valid.

It seems to me like a decent first step.

The irony is that anticompetive behavior usually means competitive behavior but being the one that wins, as OP's examples show. OP even went wonder as blaming Google for Talk, which is mostly famous for being the last major service to disable XMPP after losing marketshare to competitors who already did or never supported it. Before Google, Apple and MS went head to head with the same anti/competitive techniques as each other but since MA one Apple got to play the victim.

In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.

Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")

Those sound anti-competitive as well

> Facebook offered XMPP messenger?

They did actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 The actual link itself is now gone, so there are comments. I remember using it with Thunderbird at the time.

I would imagine it's pretty self-evident that other companies' examples of anti-competitive behavior don't absolve Google of their own wrongdoings.

Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.

No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.

There is a big difference between removing support for something you once supported versus never supporting it at all. If Google never supported XMPP, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But removing XMPP support in favor of closed protocols raises eyebrows. It makes people wonder if the change was for the better, or just as a way to close out competitors. Similar to Google Reader. If they never had the product, no one would be complaining. But they did offer the product, it was so much better than the competition that it put the competition out of business, and then Google shut it down. That raises eyebrows. That makes people wonder if there's something malicious behind it.

That's not to say they can never change their product lineup or discontinue products. But if they do, they have to answer questions like this. If there was no malicious intent behind removing XMPP support from their chat product, then everything is fine and the questions stop. We don't know, which is why regulators are investigating.

On the Windows Phone part, you are blatantly misrepresenting what happened. It's not that Google refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, it's that they refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, then blocked Microsoft from developing their own apps for Google products, then blocked Windows Phones from accessing Google products through a web browser that was more than capable of displaying Google web apps. You could not access Google web apps on Windows Phones in any way, a limitation that was not applied to any other phone maker or any other phone.

There is absolutely no defending that situation, Google played Microsoft hard and they played them dirty. Yes, Microsoft has done the exact same thing in the past and yes they deserved it, but remember: Microsoft was punished as an abusive monopolist.

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