If you purchase the hardware for the product, no company should be able to stop you from installing whatever you like on the product.
Apple doesn't have to develop what you want them to develop. But it could be in their interest to avoid being labeled as an abusive monopolistic power. In won't make them any less abusive or monopolistic, but it knocks out some detractors.
Why is it the government’s responsibility to stop you from buying a device that doesn’t fit your needs when you had an option.
Phones are a lot more important than consoles but, if a law doesn’t exist let’s make one that applies to both phones and consoles.
This is our country. If Apple doesn’t like it they can go do business somewhere else.
Did anything productive come out of the dog and pony shoe?
How is the Magic Mouse 2 hurting you in any way?
Basecamp also restricts who can integrate with their platform.
Is it really so outrageous to consider there might be a consolidation of power in a way we haven't dealt with before, seeing Amazon crush partners overnight, or Facebook impacting elections?
The very same HN that longs for the early internet, with web rings and personality, doesn't have a problem with Google scrapping content from pages you would have otherwise visited, further limiting smaller website's revenue opportunity?
For those of you not seeing clear anticompetitive behaviors that warrant discovery -- where is your line?
What would you propose the government do? Force people not to use FB who willingly go to their site? Have the government say what is and is not allowed on their platform.
As far as what I might want to see, since you asked: for one, I would like to see more rigor around the acquisition process to eliminate or even undo some of the consolidation. I won't pretend to understand the details of how or what needs to change, but I am more than open to taking a hard look at things like WhatsApp and Instagram being acquired by Facebook and what kinds of power centralization that enables. I hope smarter people than me will do that research and make intelligible cases so we can all hold evidence-backed positions.
Look at the valuation, never mind the societal impact, of these companies -- data is worth far more than your average consumer realizes, at least once it hits an inflection point, and our laws don't currently reflect that. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't. I welcome the discovery, and don't feel like we need to be anywhere near a solution yet.
The point that you missed, since you're being extremely uncharitable, is that rule by government works more often than it doesn't.
Nobody agrees with you here. That's why all of your comments that got any attention are disappearing.
Do I trust the politicians? Maybe not the ones you're describing but read through Elizabeth Warren's proposal around platform utilities:
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
Maybe you agree, maybe you don't - the point is that it's clearly a well-articulated position. Not all US politicians are idiots, but the loudest ones certainly make it seem that way.
The very first paragraph she used MS as an example of when the government intervened in tech. How did that work out? Microsoft is still one of the five largest companies in tech and still has the same dominance in PC operating systems and productivity apps.
- gun control
- health care
- unemployment
- “The War on Christmas”
- “those evil immigrants who are taking away your jobs”
- banning straws so we stop killing fish
- free college education
The fact is that the only reason $BigTech is $BigTech is because people voluntarily use their products - especially Apple that has a minority market share and charges a premium. Everyone knows how much money they give Apple/Amazon for their products - unlike Facebook and Google.
Most people I know are more than capable to read, learn, and form educated opinions on everything on your list as well as this topic.
We might be at a stalemate here since you won't be convincing me the discovery process into these issues isn't worth it, and I'm not sure I can convince you to not judge an entire nation by its lowest common denominator, be it extreme left or extreme right, which is what I'm drawing from your previous comment.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-health...
Where do you think the following issues rank in the list?
Facebook/Google collecting data. Especially in the case of FB where people willingly give it data.
Amazon - effects on small retailers (disclaimer I work at AWS)
Apple -
A) taking a 30% cut when most of the money comes from play to win games.
B) Or that you can’t sign up for subscription services in the app
C) you can’t sideload. People have been fine with buying through iTunes/App Store since 2003.
We know that many people on the right are single issue voters - religion, gun rights , abortion. There are probably many single issue voters on the left. The only one that I can think of is “not Trump”.
The three options you present are a completely different level of granularity, I'm not clear why you're ranking them. No one is a single issue voter down to Apple's 30% cut, that's just a piece being discussed to better understand the larger issue (or lack thereof, if that's your point of view).
The issues that you bring up don’t affect most people. Most people willingly spend their money at Apple and Amazon. People spend more to buy Apple devices despite all of the drawbacks that geeks care about.
Besides that, Apple isn’t raising the ire of conservatives about being “unfair” to them or having a negative effect on the election by liberals.
It's not about the workarounds, those are symptoms and some of the reasons this is a thing in the first place.
The face that sentiment around Facebook is generally negative but most still use it is testiment to the monopolistic powers these discussions are all about. Could people migrate to Twitter or some other social network? Sure, maybe. Are they? No. Why? Everyone thought Facebook was a blip in a string of Friendster, MySpace, etc -- but boy they've had staying power despite the low switching cost we thought we had on the early internet. How is that not worth exploring to the fullest?
We don't actually know if these issues affect most people. What would Amazon be like without their Amazon products crushing their third party partners? What would Facebook be like without WhatsApp and Instagram? What would Apple be like if you could plug your weather app of choice in vs their acquisition and likely destruction of all current iOS weather apps? Will Apple nail the DarkSky integration and make a top notch user experience? Almost certainly -- that's not in question.
All of that has a ripple effect through the economy and right now there's purely discovery happening and I still haven't heard one good reason why this discovery process isn't worthwhile, outside of its lack of effectiveness, from the very people who seem to be against any kind of change.
The weather app has no special significance on iOS. You can delete it. Choose another weather app. Put it in the Notification Center. Add a Siri shortcut for it.
Would the founders of the weather app that Apple bought be better off if Apple had just added the functionality instead of acquiring them?
Would Instagram had grown as fast without FB ad network and social graph? Would the founders be better off if the government had stopped Instagram from buying them?