Hacker News Reader

Comment by JaceLightning | Hacker News Reader

Why Google and not Apple? Apple is worth more, and is extremely anticompetitive. You have to buy and sell apps in their app store. Apple charges a base 30%. All apps must be approved by Apple. And Apple has a history of removing apps from their app store only to release their own clone of the same app!

View on HN

Because most people don't have an iPhone? Only 40% of smartphone users use iOS. Its fine to be anti-competitive, you just can't do so if you hold monopoly powers. MS only got in trouble when they leveraged their monopoly (OS) in one area to gain marketshare in another (browser).

Google has a effective monopoly on search traffic, (find me a Bing exclusive SEO firm), if they leverage that to gain Android marketshare or others, they could run into issues.

You must mean 40% in the United States, right?

Yes, which is the relevant number for this post where the topic of discussion is US anti-trust law.

> Why Google and not Apple?

It took the various levels of government about 15 years to catch on that all was not well with Google.

Apple will not skate by forever, but at the moment there are more egregious fish to fry.

The simple answer is all the things you list are things you are allowed to do when you don’t have a monopoly, and while Google has a monopoly on Search, Apple does not have a monopoly on Smartphone.

How does Google have a monopoly on search? Does Bing or DuckDuckGo not exist? Or the dozens of other sizable search engines? Monopoly does not mean majority shareholder.

I vaguely remember a strachery article on Google's strategy of saying that they weren't a search company so they could claim that they weren't a monopoly because, hey look we aren't winning at self driving cars and reader and google plus etc.

> Why Google and not Apple? Because Apple controls just their ecosystem (iOS, macos, etc.), and Google controls the web and Android. It is just like Microsoft, but much bigger and more dangerous.

Google gets more press for things like the Damore memo, political advocacy/bias, and walk-outs. They lost a lot of good will with typical defenders of laissez faire business practices.

Laissez faire for me but not for thee, apparently.

or maybe both?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com