U.S. states plan to sue Facebook next week: sources
reuters.com
reuters.com
And I think that they themselves are aware of that.
The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Which they have to do because they know very well that the barrier to entry to overthrow them is less than it appears to be. And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
What's become clear to me in the decades since we first decried Microsoft's FUD, embrace-extend-extinguish, and unholy business practice methods is that every case of a monopoly I've encountered has 1) been describable as an extensive network (physical or virtual), where 2) that network structure is fundamental to its monopoly nature, with 3) a privately held central point of control.
If you can describe a firm in terms of nodes and links, and it holds key control points, you're looking at a very likely monopoly: transport (people, cargo, pipelenes, ...), energy, water, utilities, communications, information, standards & protocols, APIs, marketing relationships and contracts, logistics, retail and wholesale networks, knowledge, education and certification, finance, insurance (access, underwriting, risk), social networks, reputation and ratings systems, just for starters.
Understanding of these points are hugely distorted in large part through the direct and self-serving efforts of the Chicago School (Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, ...). It's only with recent revival in antitrust concerns, rejection of the Bork-Posner antitrust doctrine (in part by Posner himself), and work of people such as Lina Khan, Matt Stoller Tim Wu, Cry Doctorow, and Shoshana Zubboff, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic network-monopoly relationship, that this is beginning to change.
That said, the Refutation is excellent.
Facebook produced nearly $70 billion in operating income for fiscal years 2017-2019. They don't require their stock to be priced to a high multiple to buy competitors and they haven't been using that approach to competition since Instagram (2012) & WhatsApp (2014) - because they know they can't.
They didn't require their stock to buy either Instagram or WhatsApp. Instagram only cost a billion dollars. As it turns out, using stock was a large mistake as it pertains to the owners of the company; the cash equivalent is ~1/10th as valuable as the shares used to buy Instagram turned out to be and Facebook will just keep piling up cash they can't spend. Facebook has been wildly profitable since fiscal 2009, when their profit margin hit 29%. They've had a giant pile of cash throughout much of their history, courtesy of considerable venture capital backing and reaching profitability 4-5 years after their founding.
> And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
That approach would work perfectly fine in fact, as it always does, were Facebook still allowed to buy a company like TikTok. They're not allowed to buy large competitors any longer due to government competition concerns. If they were, Pinterest would not be an independent entity at this point.
They could acquire Pinterest and shut them down. Then buy Snapchat and shut them down. Then buy Twitter and shut them down. One after another, trivially. It would dramatically bolster their monopoly position. Regulators would never allow it and everyone - without exception - knows it.
MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit, although it also faces a lot more competition now and has no clear monopoly outside of perhaps business productivity software.
I'm pretty sure it changed their behavior for quite some time though. And wouldn't the relevant comparison be whether it outpaced the growth of the tech sector in the last 20 years rather than whether it's bigger than ever? Like if MS is 10x bigger now and the industry is 20x bigger then that would indicate to me that maybe they didn't choke out competition using monopoly power.
There is no reason an industry consortium couldn’t produce a new platform.
Monopoly is with respect to a market. If everyone on the East Coast uses AT&T to the exclusion of any other provider, and you could only communicate with AT&T customers by becoming an AT&T customer, that's a monopoly on the customers on the East Coast. Even if everyone on the West Coast used Verizon.
The fact that the Facebook customers aren't all concentrated in a specific geographic area doesn't really change anything. If the only way to communicate with a large population of specific individuals is to use Facebook, they have a monopoly on the market for communication with those individuals.
That wouldn't be true if they were using a federated protocol -- like the telephone network is in real life, but like Facebook is not -- because then you could sign up for some other service and still "call" the people on Facebook.
Whenever there is a network effect, anyone with a monopoly on the network has a monopoly on a market.
Monopoly is defined by market share in a specific regions, not by the unavailability of alternatives (1). So it doesn't matter if there are "many other messaging apps" what matters is what's being used.
(1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Facebook's business is ads.
Google + Facebook have a virtual duopoly on online ad revenue.
(Still does not mean this is not a problem)
Smaller ad tech companies? Literal scammers! Facebook lied about video views - everyone lies about impressions. But 0% of Google and Facebook's competitors' inventory converts, because it's shit traffic, carefully disguised and evasive of efforts to avoid it.
I don't use Facebook, I have no dog in this race.What are they even talking about though? It's a dumb as nails case.
"One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium."
An exaggerated example would be google buying firefox for $100 billion. It's a ridiculous price, but it helps google's monopoly.
You can grow a monopoly by intentionally underselling your competitor out of business. Or you can grow your monopoly by overpaying for your competitor and buying him out. Rockefeller and Standard Oil used both tactics to monopolize oil.
With Facebook you can order them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's a very feasible thing to do technically, and could be accomplished within a year. It's straight-forward compared to dealing with telecom.
So you split Comcast into a dozen baby Comcasts. You just changed absolutely nothing (and plausibly made the situation worse for a lot of people, as some of those baby Comcasts will suck even worse over time) because it's a physical location problem, it's geographically limited competition (unless you redo the entire regulatory structure re telecom). Each baby Comcast will dominate their little territory and then the re-combination will begin again, as it did with AT&T and the baby bells. Regulate that outcome away? That's the part where the competence and legal standing is a huge problem. Make it so the pipes are forced open and lots of competitors can use them? Un huh. You would have to entirely remake the telecom industry in the US, get us entirely different Congress and regulators, and overall that isn't going to happen for a few dozen reasons that would require paragraphs to explain fully. You know it's not going to happen, I know it's not going to happen, everyone knows it's not going to happen. So what would going after telecom accomplish? Not much most likely.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495068/facebook-messeng...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...
Which is mildly annoying, but I think it's a good indicator of just how much people hate all of the tech giants.
Something is clearly very very wrong with the tech industry.
Facebook has been rotten since the beginning.
Sue them all. This is stupid.
Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business.
And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices.
What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy?
It's absurd and it has to stop.
Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!
Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either!
Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company.
Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools.
Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes.
My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing.
Technology belongs to us, not the giants.
Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.
No. This is exactly what they should not be doing, because it requires detailed ongoing precision regulatory work.
The government is not a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. It can easily say that the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting. It's a clear enough line, it isn't mired in technical details, you swing the sledgehammer at the fault line between the two markets and break them apart. Then you go home.
This works.
Let's do it.
But I think that technology is going to make it easy to work around structural separation. Facebook derives its power from building dossiers on billions of people. They are intelligent motivated people. I don't think that pushing different activities into different orgs is going to do anything to limit that power.
Their surveillance business model is what needs to go. Will society collapse if we shift from behavioral to contextual advertising? I doubt it.
I like the idea of spinning off the search/recommendation/filtering from hosting (for video) and crawling (for search). We should have more diversity, filtering is not to be trusted to a monopoly.
It's okay to have a dream be infeasible in real life.
My dream government functions as a scalpel, dynamically reacting to situations faster than any one person can think and creating outcomes better than any capitalist market. However, history has shown this to be infeasible so it will always remain a dream.
You kowtow to the app store rules, or you're out. There are no other alternatives.
We need laws and regulations to protect freedoms and liberty and give power back to the people.
I think your analogy is all wrong.
Game consoles shouldn't be special. If the NES and Genesis hadn't had their locks broken then we wouldn't have been graced with some of the greatest entries in their catalogue. Consumers won because anti-consumer digital locks were broken.
IIRC, Codemasters and others discovered the magic numbers necessary to include in the header of the NES cart in order for it to boot, and went on to release unlicensed games; like Micro Machines. I'm hazy on the NES-specifics.
EA reverse engineered the Genesis development kit and released their games in their own carts in large part because they refused Sega's licensing terms; in retrospect, it's similar to Epic/Apple today. Sega eventually caved.
An old Game Informer article about EA and the Genesis:
> I'm hazy on the NES-specifics.
I'll fill you in.
The ROM on NES carts doesn't have a header (the ROM files floating around on the Internet do but those aren't part of the cartridge data) - the NES has no firmware or OS. What it is is that the NES console, along with each cart, has a chip called a CIC that was only available from Nintendo, and only if you were a paid licensee. The CIC in the console resets the console constantly unless it handshakes with the CIC on the cartridge.
There were ways to disable the chip; some things I've read say having something on the cart send a voltage spike would disable it. I think Tengen reverse engineered it and developed a compatible chip, they got sued.
As far as the Sega Genesis, I do know a later revision of the Genesis motherboard had a boot ROM and also required the cart to write ASCII 'SEGA' to some I/O ports, otherwise the video chip would not work. The idea was that copying this without authorization was a trademark infringement, but I think a later lawsuit made that tactic legally worthless.
Arcade boards of the 80's and early 90's have some interesting schemes. A number of Capcom games have decryption keys in a RAM that's powered by a 'suicide battery' and if the battery ever dies or is tampered with, the keys are gone and the board stops working.
Oh it's a much better story than that! They failed at trying to reverse engineer it so they just straight up stole the source code instead
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)
>Tengen (Atari’s NES games subsidiary) took a different tactic: the corporation obtained a description of the code in the lockout chip from the United States Copyright Office by claiming that it was required to defend against present infringement claims in a legal case.[4] Tengen then used these documents to design their Rabbit chip, which duplicated the function of the 10NES.[4]
Video Game history is just amazing at times.
And, of course, not having a licenser did little to harm PC Gaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_...
You want a government mandated software platform?
Regardless of whether any of your criticisms have merit, putting the government in charge of API design seems like a questionable suggestion to say the least.
Also, all these breakups you are suggesting are anti-consumer. Your assumption is that somehow ‘competition’ would produce better products than we currently have, but history doesn’t support that idea.
Without vertical integration you just end up with inefficient consortia attempting to solve problems by committee and political jockeying.
That’s what enabled Apple to overtake WinTel in the first place.
The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time.
It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.
Sure.
I like that cars all have government mandated turn signals and brake lights too.
Computing is an essential freedom and we can't let these companies turn it into "special sauce" that only they control. The fact that they're this close to doing it is both scary and a shame. We have a chance to get back on the right path, and we should do it.
It's not like an industry and academia consortium wouldn't step in to help build the standard. The W3C got us pretty damn far.
> The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time. It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.
How do you compete with a $2T giant that can easily clone you or lock you out? They've created a "hardware + software + services" megalopoly that does nearly everything. Email, photos, video editing, movies, music, devices, health tracking. When businesses do compete (take SONOS, for instance), Apple comes along and builds their own. Owing to deep integration and ecosystem forces, the competitors aren't able to escape the growth/funding gravity well.
Apple is Thanos, and they're snapping freedom and competition out of existence.
If standards had been the solution, Apple wouldn’t have been able to differentiate themselves.
Turn signals are a great example of why this idea is dead on arrival. They have been around for close to a century and the government mandated them 50 years ago.
If you want the US computing industry to move at that speed, the government will make that happen for you.
We just aren’t at the stage in computing where innovation is over and we can afford to force everyone to adhere to a government mandated design.
Steve Jobs crippled the web browser, wouldn't allow non-Safari browsers, and didn't open the hardware APIs the way modern web APIs and WASM seek to do.
Don't misrepresent history. It was always about control.
> Turn signals are a great example of why this idea is dead on arrival. They have been around for close to a century and the government mandated them 50 years ago.
Air bags, tire standards, headlight specifications. You're picking on the wrong part of my argument.
> If you want the US computing industry to move at that speed, the government will make that happen for you.
This sounds like a boogeyman. I hypothesize computing evolution happens slower because of how locked down everything is. Smartphones are stagnant already - no government help required.
How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?
I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.
So open that Google was able to build Chrome with it. It’s still developed completely in the open now and is free to use in your platform, as most of Apple’s competitors actually do.
That is about as far from ‘crippling the web’ as any company in history has ever been.
As for saying that evolution in computing is slower because of how locked down things are, that seems like a view that is hard to understand.
If you can’t see how fast things have moved in software over the past 5 years and then over the past 10, I think you just aren’t looking hard enough.
Smartphone hardware design may have plateaued, but that’s just superficial.
And in any case, a government standard isn’t going to make anything any less locked down.
It will be just as locked down as it is now, more expensive to develop for, and the possibility of an open alternative emerging will be harder than ever, if not impossible.
Some examples:
- Automatically erasing all script-writeable storage after 7 days, crippling local PWAs and preventing them from competing with native apps
- dragging their feet on Service Worker support for ages, another PWA issue
- delaying WebGPU standardization
- blocking the standardization of numerous web hardware APIs:
- Web Bluetooth
- Web MIDI API
- Magnetometer API
- Web NFC API
- Device Memory API
- Network Information API
- Battery Status API
- Ambient Light Sensor
- HDCP Policy Check extension for EME
- Proximity Sensor
- WebHID
- Serial API
- Web USB
- Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation)
- User Idle DetectionEdit: Sorry, I wrote this too fast and didn't finish my thought. To clarity, I meant they sound horrible from a privacy perspective, and I don't think some random website should even have to option to access those APIs. The web has enough tracking and malicious sites as it is.
They're downloaded over www.
They call device APIs
But they're written in Rust or WASM or something.
Visit Netflix.com and suddenly you have the native Netflix app instantaneously on your device. And it works just the same as the one you use today.
That's what I want to see.
The web isn't just HTML and JavaScript. It's not just documents or web apps. It can be native too.
It's a protected runtime.
And it'll be fast.
Should there be better faster options for applications to run? Absolutely. Should they run in the web browser? I don't think so.
Heck use the same permission dialogues.
If not, why not?
If they do, why hasn’t it enabled Android to leapfrog iOS?
Web standards require voluntary cooperation and isn't something that can be resolved by allowing "better" standards variants to win in a marketplace over others (otherwise they wouldn't really be standards).
Apple has pre-emptively blocked the standardization of these APIs because they effectively have veto power, and they have veto power because web standards aren't really a free market. Browser vendors choose not to ship standards that major browsers don't all agree on, which means that Apple's singular objection scuttles the process by design.
Of course this is one of the risks you have with standards, one bad actor can screw everything up. It's why standards often suck and it's a happy miracle that the web is as good as it is. When Apple themselves can screw up a standard that they directly compete with (web vs native iOS) from the inside, well, that's just too convenient for them.
It simply isn’t true that vendors always wait for agreement. Apple’s participation is important, but not mandatory.
I'm sure there exist instances of vendors not waiting for agreement, those are rare exceptions because it essentially breaks the standard. Web fragmentation was a big problem for a long time and the major browsers have largely willingly agreed to avoid that. Apple's participation is de facto mandatory, they control a major browser and other major browser vendors won't ship something that Apple has openly declared they will never support.
> I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.
While I agree with your points that Apple in general contributed a lot when it comes to how humans perceive technology (for better or worse), I cannot let this argument stand untouched.
- WebKit is NOT developed in the open.
- It has a private bug tracker nobody outside Apple can see. Try to report a bug, even as a bug reporter you can't see shit what's happening with it. And this wasn't the case before ~2009, from personal experience.
- Over 80% of contributions were actually from Mozilla or Google.
- WebKit source code is still released 6 months after it was developed, leaving nobody outside Apple's internal team with the capability to even discuss features or APIs.
- Apple's "Open Source" philosophy is the minimum legal requirement, aka dumping a fucking zip file with random shit to a server and forget about it afterwards. Lots of people from Chromium have been in contact with Apple's legal team until they "really complied" and actually dumped the full source code (again, as a shitty zip file). Apple didn't do this on their own, and they never have.
- The Blink incident. Don't forget this. A shitload of contributors left WebKit because of the previous points, and now Chromium is getting dominant due to Blink. Do you think this is a coincidence?
All these policies how Apple "loves Open Source" speak against the fact. Also, don't forget bash, tcsh, zsh and pretty much all related to the brew ecosystem. These people, while they still love Apple's ecosystem, never benefited a single dollar and neither a single contribution from Apple.
If you don't believe me, pick a random zip file on Apple's "open source server" [1], contact the maintainer of said project and ask them about how they think Apple helps them. The answer is: not at all.
I won't dig into the other facts which made the Web crippled, where we've been before with IE6 and ActiveX. Humanity hasn't learned shit from that lesson. And /u/themacguffinman did that already in his own comment to elaborate this fact [2]
Nobody is disputing that other people contributed to WebKit, however what is true is that WebKit was brought to the level of maturity require to create a competitive desktop browser before those contributions.
The fact that competitors are able to use WebKit, and that Blink exists is validation that WebKit is really open.
I do agree that Apple controls development of the mainline engine though, but that changes nothing about the meaning.
Apple's behavior is definitely a problem, but government mandated standards are almost certainly not the answer.
They're breaking standards so that they can abuse IP laws to force you to pay more for an equivalent or worse product than the standard
Only a competitor that consumers like as much as Apple but also has standard screws can prove Apple wrong. Or, alternatively, maybe a day will come where consumers care about standard screws/repairability as much as you do. Until then, consumers will continue wanting Apple's non-standard stuff over the rest of the industry's standards, and what consumers want is pretty much the only thing that matters (with few exceptions, of course).
You must realize this doesn’t follow at all right? Almost no one is even aware if their laptop has proprietary screws or not when they’re purchasing one. It’s not listed as a feature on laptop comparison sites or in reviews. People choose Apple for many reasons but it’s not because they prefer non standard screws.
You’re confusing people choosing to buy a product with them endorsing a specific feature of that product that clearly goes against their own interest for no benefit.
That seems implausible, but it also seems like they’d have just been outcompeted if that were true.
Security is a little easier to specify, it's a more clearly defined space but you still have to be careful or you end up with outdated standards actually holding back industry security.
I have nothing against a public option, as long as it is an option. Government regulation of the tech industry doesn't sound to me like it's providing more options.
I never thought basic income was a good idea in the first place, I'm not sure what to say about this.
Basic healthcare is a more complicated case, but the healthcare industry doesn't look anything like the software industry. Regulating healthcare won't and shouldn't be like regulating software.
Clearly they would meet any such baseline.
Consumer protections of this kind would simply increase the cost of entry, and concentrate more power in the hands of those with capital, I.e. the incumbents and VCs.
>I like that cars all have government mandated turn signals and brake lights too.
Actually, you have an even better example to use here, which is the government mandated diagnostic computer in cars, which gives a uniform interface, across all brands, for querying what's going wrong with your car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics#OBD-II_si...
Take a look at WWDC (or any of Google or Amazon’s platform announcements) and see how many new APIs or API chances were announced this year alone.
20 years ago, Macs didn’t even run OSX.
Luckily we don’t have to imagine the industry being fossilized like this: any country that hobbles itself in this way will simply be ignored by the rest of the world as a technology backwater.
And backward-incompatible changes to an API should be considered a downside, not a benefit -- though which may (of course) be justified in the circumstance -- but which should never be trotted out, in and of itself, as evidence of superior engineering or progress, as you seem to be implying here.
Edit: One more thing: Requiring that certain information be provided through a specific interface/standard does not mean they can't also use other standards as an option or support other other features, so I don't know why all the new APIs are a point in your favor either.
What good is a mandatory API if you have to use proprietary extensions a year after it is introduced, because new capabilities have been added to operating systems and hardware?
Do you think gasoline engines have changed as much as computers in the last 20 years? Perhaps people like OBD-II because engines are a mature technology.
I’d be surprised if you can make the case that operating systems and computers can be considered mature.
You're probably being downvoted because you posted an off-topic rant. The topic is Facebook. Going all, "But what about Apple!" is deflection at best.
It's a comically bad idea to talk against Apple around here, but the guidelines are clear: don't talk about downvotes. If you have good points corrective votes will happen.
That being said, while Apple is strongly anti-consumer (in everything except for privacy), Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in more regards than merely celebrating choice. Definitely a great second contender, but the world would be genyinely better place without Facebook.
I've seen corrective votes happen, but I wouldn't be so categorical in saying all votes are well reasoned and reward cogent argument.
Any random reward system produces community.
If the community has no shared goal or purpose, the random outcomes the reward system produces will be tolerated.
There is a very easy solution to the problem, don't like the computer/phone? Buy a different one!
I totally agree its really stupid to go to such great lengths to lock down devices like they do, but at the same time it really doesn't hurt anyone because anyone who doesn't like it can just buy one of the million (vastly less expensive) alternatives.
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
As to your point, don't confuse the market of phone devices with the market for apps. If I, as a developer, want to sell my apps what is my choice? The only real choice is Android or iOS.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/
According to this iOS had two thirds of total sales. I'm probably going to want to develop for that, but oops, I only have one app store choice.
Most android phones are either in the good area or in the gray zone of the line that shouldn't be crossed. It's difficult to instruct a user on how to add a third party store, and that has much to do with both this almost always being a bad idea as well as customizations on the devices that might make the instructions not the same for all of them.
I also wonder if android applications have need to install as root, or if the system might have a stub that handles this but then isolates the privilege level by classifying applications as individual users / cgroups.
Nextcloud, Matrix, Discord, Signal, Telegram, Skype, Zoom, hell even Pidgin. These are all competitors to Apple's Facetime -- they all have voice and/or video chat on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS.
Here, let me help you start the conversation that way:
> You: Hey mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss, I'm going to use a different program to talk to people who don't have an iPhone. Can you install it and talk to me on it for a bit and test it?
> Mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss: Yeah sure what's the app?
> Another mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss: What? No.
I wonder which way the conversation will go?
Perhaps they should be allowed to buy an appliance where most of their basic computing needs have great, widely used, secure solutions out of the box.
On phones, in the US, they have a dominant position. US Anti-trust doesn't require a absolute monopoly; merely having a dominant position is enough to prohibit anti-competitve behaviors.
I'm honestly surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to defend apple's app store policies.
I'm happy to have my house in Apple's gated community because I know every day I'll drive out to Linuxville at the edge of town and work in my shop filled with sharp tools.
Like in real life, you could absolutely choose to always go to the one expensive shop you trust rather than a cheap one in a dodgy street.
Wishing for the shop you like to have and use the power to remove the other ones from existence has nothing to do with your own security.
there is no reason you couldn't have this while also having competing app stores. All you would need to do is not install the competing app stores.
Same way people blamed Microsoft when Bonzi Buddy made their computer barf.
Right now the perception of iPhones is that they work. Soon as people are tricked (and given the $$$ at stake that will happen) into installing malware infested garbage, the platform's rep will take a hit.
Android used to allow apps a lot more freedom, but then android phones turned into ad filled monstrosities with a battery life measured in fractions of a day, and Google had to clamp down.
> Probably the one that's full of fake apps and malware.
If all other marketplaces are shady then why is that? Is it because Apple has locked out any way for a competing marketplace to afford to protect users? If you know of specific instances of fake apps and malware being distributed on other legitimate marketplaces why don't you name such a marketplace and get it improved?
> Or you can write desktop apps and sell them however you'd like.
Desktop apps target a completely different user-base with different wants and needs. That's like asking people wanting to make and sell cars to consider making toys instead.
How much longer do you think this will be possible?
Or maybe it will still be possible, somehow.
But not without going through some hard to navigate loops and dire threats to life and limb when you proceed with installing software from somebody who couldn't or wouldn't pay up for the necessary certificates.
Sorry, but I can’t get behind such a draconian government takeover of private corporations. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.
Support free products with your wallet instead of demanding that a the government coerce a private entity to make your arbitrary wishes and desires real.
A world controlled by a few giant conglomerates that own all of your data while providing the illusion of choice of "just don't buy it" is not a good outcome.
Consumers have always come first, and they've already spoken.
For example:
iOS: Better for privacy than Android but less open to sideloaded apps
Android: Sends tons of data to Google about all kinds of things. Furthermore Google bricked one of my old Android phones by disabling the DNS for the authentication server so I could no longer sign into the phone. (It was too old to support Cyanogen).
Samsung: The last Samsung S-series smartphone in my house had apps pre-loaded on it including Blockbuster (it wasn't that many years ago) that could not be removed without loading new firmware or something. I guess Tizen is open source so theres that? But then again Samsung is one of the most cruel companies on Earth with a long track record of polluting, worker abuse, and blatantly copying others products and inside deals with the government to look the other way.
Microsoft: Abandoned the entire space. Was basically a copycat product with a UI based on squares anyway.
Essential Phone: Dead on arrival
Palm: Got left behind. Missed the whole app store wave
Blackberry: Wasn't really designed for non-business users with all kinds of upcharges for Blackberry data services. Missed the whole app store wave. Pivoted into automotive software after they couldn't keep up
So sure its easy to critique Apple for this or Google for that but ultimately what are the other options that can realistically compete with the above megacorps?
Not that I don't know how you feel, there are areas where I hate all the options too. I don't always get what I want, that's life. It would be perverse for me to force legions of others to dedicate their efforts towards what I would like instead.
Well yeah. But yeah they control the market. So you buy the least evil product you can that is fairly priced and works with all your other stuff.
Or just blame the consumer cause they didn't choose the mythical Linux phone with great battery life and no spyware.
I'm not here to tell you that you should have just not bought X phone, I'm here to tell you that you have a choice as a consumer to buy what you want, and if you don't want anything available, that's not anyone's problem.
For millions of consumers, an Android phone or iPhone or Samsung phone is a great option and is largely what they really want. The phones that people buy today are phones that most people have repeatedly chosen over others, including some phones you may have liked. Sorry you don't like the current choices, society has never owed anyone a mythical Linux phone. If you want something that doesn't exist, make it yourself or convince other consumers to buy it as well so companies find it worth their while. Go buy Purism. Don't whine to the government that it's not fair you can't get a mythical Linux phone.
My point was that your claim to "just not buy it" doesn't work when its an essential item in modern society like food, water, housing, or a computer.
Its easy to sit here from your armchair and say "well if dumb consumers hadn't bought smartphones like this then we wouldn't have them so they shouldn't complain." But you, of course, have a smartphone from one of these manufacturers because like everyone else you realized you basically need one these days if you work or travel. We created rules that favor tech mega corps and now they dominate the industry.
So your "solution" isn't really a solution. You say people should have made some amazingly insightful decision to boycott all smartphones fifteen years ago but since they didn't we are stuck with the brands we have and its the consumers' fault...
Let me be clear: it's your problem to deal with as a minority consumer who apparently doesn't like anything most other consumers like. The tech world we live in today is the world that most consumers want and are happy with. You are stuck with the brands we have, the rest of the consumer market have bought the smartphones that they've happily, willingly and repeatedly chosen.
Whatever you may think of the tech industry, it very closely reflects what most consumers want. If you want something no one else wants, make it or evangelize, asking the government to forcibly change outcomes is awful.
Why is it so hard to understand?
I like my iPhone. I worked at Apple. I still recognize its limitations. I'm not going to go without a phone to make a point to a $2 trillion company.
There is no choice and the markets for highly sophisticated technologies are not free or efficient. It's farcical.
There is plenty of choice, many of which I'm happy with and many of which I'm not. I think it's farcical to say that there is no choice, millions of consumers have chosen freely without coercion from many options. The choices we have today are options that consumers have chosen willingly and repeatedly over other options that no longer exist.
I was responding to the other person's argument that you can simply not buy products like Apple's to show you don't like their lack of openness. My point was that all of the available products have different drawbacks so its not so simple as "don't buy Apple" when there are only a few options left from monopolies and they all have similar issues.
I often wonder if we would have gotten rid of things like lead and asbestos faster if consumers had to decide for themselves rather than depending upon regulators to determine what is safe.
The government's job here is to do that tedious research and ban/regulate anything that's hazardous to health and safety. The alternative would be a grassroots campaign by citizen experts who decide to go against the advice of what should be trusted sources, which is how you end up with stuff like the anti-vax movement.
If they're unaware of the negative effects of lead or a business is being dishonest about what's in the fuel, that definitely falls under unfair/dishonest practices and the government should prosecute that.
But how on earth is that relevant to Facebook or Apple antitrust? Facebook operates a bunch of websites that millions of people voluntarily sign up for and can leave at any time. The government isn't suing Facebook for safety issues or anything, they're suing them for antitrust which means they believe Facebook has somehow unfairly coerced consumers into using their product over their competitors.
Consumers really didn't like having lead in their gas or asbestos in their walls, the problem was that the dangerous effects of leaded gas and asbestos weren't well-known at the time.
Maybe you should elaborate on what you believe isn't well-known about Facebook that warrants an antitrust lawsuit.
Extremes are never good or useful. We need moderation. Capitalism with guardrails. We already have regulation to ensure certain corporate behaviors don't harm consumers, and even protect them from themselves, which has massively improved quality, safety and reliability of the things we buy.
Sure some regulations are overreaching or outdated, but the rise of giant software/internet companies has upended all of the old considerations of antitrust. There are a few trillion-dollar companies that impact a vast amount of our lives and there's no effective way to disengage from them while living in modern civilization. That's a major problem because pretty soon they will be the "government" that controls your life - but without any of the accountability or transparency.
My points apply to Apple as well, consumers wanted this and continued buying devices like this. I don't doubt that some people complain about various flaws in the products they buy but it's largely meaningless because they clearly don't care enough about these flaws to put their money where their mouth is. No one forced them to buy hard-to-repair, locked down Apple products when there were more open alternatives, they simply decided that repairability is so unimportant they'd still buy Apple products over a product that is more repairable.
It's one thing if Apple were dishonest or consumers were somehow forced to buy Apple, but they're not. There's nothing actually stopping consumers from buying the phone they want. Consumers aren't being harmed, they're getting what they really want.
This is the choice I lose with this: the ability to buy a product that is locked down and tightly integrated/controlled by Apple. It's a choice millions of consumers have already willingly made. I'm personally living happily without buying Apple's locked down products for myself, I and every other non-Apple consumer didn't need the government to make this choice for me. I don't want the government to remove a choice that millions of consumers have made on their own.
Instead of buying oil from jobbers, they made the jobbers’ profit by sending their own purchasing men into the oil region. In addition, they made their own sulfuric acid, their own barrels, their own lumber, their own wagons, and their own glue. They kept minute and accurate records of every item from rivets to barrel bungs. They built elaborate storage facilities near their refineries. Rockefeller bargained as shrewdly for crude as anyone before or since. And Sam Andrews coaxed more kerosene from a barrel of crude than could the competition. In addition, the Rockefeller firm put out the cleanest-burning kerosene, and managed to dispose of most of the residues like lubricating oil, paraffin, and vaseline at a profit.
Between 1870 and 1885 the price of refined kerosene dropped from 26 cents to 8 cents per gallon. In the same period, the Standard Oil Company reduced the [refining] costs per gallon from almost 3 cents in 1870 to 0.452 cents in 1885. Clearly, the firm was relatively efficient, and its efficiency was being translated to the consumer in the form of lower prices for a much improved product, and to the firm in the form of additional profits.
https://fee.org/articles/41-rockefellers-standard-oil-compan...
It is difficult to overstate how much Standard Oil revolutionized the oil refinement process, resulting in oil that was significantly cleaner and cheaper than its competitors’.
Sounds like the government should and did step in at the "until they couldn't" part, which is not where we're at. Hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.
> Railroads
Considering the US returned control of the railways to their original owners in 1920 and most rail today is privatized, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
But even though it takes time to determine wrongdoing, we still prosecute crimes after they happen instead of before for obvious reasons. You wait until there is evidence of harm to consumers. Maybe the government has evidence, this is just an early article after all, but again, it's hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.
No one can come first. If the terms aren’t mutually agreeable, the other will not participate in a transaction. They don’t have to make things to sell you just like you don’t have to buy from them. It can’t work any other way.
Free markets and capitalism are great, the best system we have, but there are still guardrails to ensure proper behavior and mitigate harm. This is the problem being discussed. The balance in recent times is completely off with these massive software/internet companies that control so much of our lives with little oversight or accountability. This is what people are arguing against, and I believe you would agree with that.
And yet corporations don’t exist to do your particular bidding and make your desires real. Unless a corporation is doing something illegal, you have no right to tell them what to do and what to make.
Apple could, for all intents and purposes, sell useless slabs of aluminum. Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.
Finally, giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best. Has the Trump administration not shown you the extremes the government can go to? The TikTok debacle after Trump’s Tulsa rally was ruined by it, calls to repeal Section 230, etc.
The government is not your friend and it never will be. There will always come a time when it will abuse its powers to the greatest extent possible. Unless corporations are actively and illegally harming consumers, I don’t see why your proposal is necessary.
Consider supporting companies that further your ideals with your own wallet rather than telling other companies what to do.
Exactly, legislation and legality is how we tell them what to do.
> Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.
I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that? However right-to-repair and other freedoms and ownership over the hardware you purchase, especially when it's so critical to your life and centrally controlled, is worthwhile to pursue.
> "giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best"
Either the corporation or the government has the power. The challenge is finding the right balance, because neither should have complete authority.
What legislation do you propose?
> I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that?
OP’s comment, which you seem to be arguing in favor of. Apologies if I misinterpreted.
> Either the corporation or the government has the power.
Obviously. So long as there are anti-monopolistic practices in place, you can choose the corporation you want to interface with easily. Nothing is stopping OP from buying an Android phone, PinePhone, or Purism Librem 5.
Governments are not something you can choose, not really, and giving them wholesale control of how corporations can create tech products is granting them an absurd level of power, especially when viable alternatives already exist on the free market.
Like what the hell am I supposed to do on a purism libre that has 100x less apps of 1/10th the quality as iOS? It currently does not support signal, banking apps, maps, Spotify, slack, Feedly, pocket and millions more. Yes, a dev could potentially spend 100s of hours making shitty homegrown alternatives for every little app - this is a VERY long stretch. And even then 99% of people are not devs and will never ever ever do that. It’s like saying a horse is a viable alternative to a car. It’s not even in the same damn universe yet.
For the record, the Librem 5 does indeed support many of those apps via Anbox.
We also need to stop talking about individual purchasing decisions as if they represent the broader market. The point is not that there are zero competitors in a monopolised market. It’s that those competitors suffer at the will of the monopoly and cannot bring viable competing products to market. Hence all the competitors outside of the big two in the mobile space having effectively zero market share combined.
Far from forcing people to develop something anti-trust is design to increase competition by opening up the market. Offering more people the opportunity to build the innovative things they want and consumers the ability to choose. As we saw with the results in this happening to MS it works reasonably well.
Here's a question: Should the wireless networks that your phone requires to function follow net neutrality? Why or why not?
The idea that the government is going to create an open software utopia is hard to understand.
OK so we make it illegal. Governments are good at that.
I'm just a bit sick of the argument "It's OK if it is legal" when laws exist to serve us and can be changed. Discussion is the first step. My comment was a response to that.
Mandating right to repair and open platforms and formats (such as the circuit diagrams we used to get within our instruction manuals) would be one possibility.
This is not a realistic option.
This doesn’t make sense to me.
In your example, a company with trade secrets may want to (and be allowed to) keep circuit diagrams or charger designs secret in country A, but have to open them up to be allowed to sell in country B. It becomes a choice that carries a cost without a global mandate.
This isn't a draconian government takeover. It's to prevent a company, of all things, becoming more powerful than many governments in the world. Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.
> Support free products with your wallet instead
That's not how society works. Humans can be abused and manipulated and deceived. I have seen scenarios in which Apple was a customer of another company. Apple was incredibly abusive in many ways, and this was toward a billion dollar plus company. How do you think Apple treats or cares about others, including its own customers?
I don't, but the government does if they are doing so in a harmful way that violates laws and agreements.
> Why do you think you can dictate who can buy and sell from who, especially on the basis that they are somehow too good at it?
Again, I don't think anything of the sort. I didn't say that. And they aren't being punished for being "too good" at what they do. They are, or will hopefully be, punished because they are good but then they abused that to be even better. It's the abuse that's the problem.
The same right that literally every other private entity has to use their existing wealth and power to gain more?
> This isn't a draconian government takeover.
Oh, for all intents and purposes it absolutely is - you are giving the government enough power to corral and coerce corporations into doing their bidding. See the ridiculously unethical actions the Trump administration is taking against TikTok after they ruined his Tulsa rally, for example.
> Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.
And governments do? Governments abuse their power to the maximum extent legally possible all the time. Often, they go further. A cursory reading of United States history will show you that the government is not your friend, it never was, and at every moment possible it is also vying for more power, more control, more surveillance.
As long as Apple has not turned into a monopoly there isn’t really a concern here. There is an available market for the products you want. Just because they are not as capable as the ones Apple makes, does not mean you get to coerce Apple into doing your bidding.
> > Support free products with your wallet instead
> That's not how society works.
But it is. There is a flourishing community around libre products. The PinePhone has been a hit. There are large communities around reasonably open Android phones.
Further, pushing responsibility onto individual consumers to (somehow) shape the market "with their wallet" is absurd. The highest purpose of a public government is that it can serve to protect the common folk from the abuses of concentrated wealth. Asking regulators to do their job isn't coercive, it's corrective.
Government has been intervening (in some industries) in these ways for decades. It works. It's not arbitrary.
It's not perfect of course, but it's far better than allowing large companies to get a complete stranglehold.
It seems to me that if you want to claim some version of "leave the marketplace alone and it will self correct" then you have to make a pretty strong case. It's not a self evident truth, history tells a different story.
Sometimes the marketplace takes care of itself, sure, but there have been lots of examples where it hasn't. In those cases, when government has stepped in, the outcome has generally been positive (if sometimes short lived).
Think for example about regulations regarding cellphone number portability. They supported porting a phone number to switch providers fostered competition and lowered cellphone rates. (not perfect, but much better than before)
Without that regulation new or smaller companies - even those providing better service or lower rates - could not get customers because of simple shenanigans.
(Is Purism really even shipping? I ordered in 2017 and haven't gotten mine)
Because I don't want to spend twice the price of an iphone for something less useful than a flip phone. Freedom preserving devices will always struggle to reach the level of usability of the first iphone.
That’s just life. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. I want my phone to be a toaster - I have as much right as you do to make Apple implement what I want - that is to say, no right at all.
The government is a powerful tool for improving the world when applied correctly.
It's not a takeover, it's a break up of business units.
When these units operate together, they enable a kind of power otherwise unachievable.
Carriers and Mobile device makers play incredibly anti-competitive games all the time in the fight for market share.
It's almost surreal. The carriers were pretty bad before smartphones, now it's Android+iOS.
Large entities can play all sorts of games like forcing their buyers into exclusivity, requiring them to not carry competitive devices all sorts of things.
Microsoft is a classic example with Office: they can integrate their software into their OS in a manner they don't afford to competitors, thereby leveraging their OS monopoly, into other monopolies, which in the long run is bad for business.
Platforms have an inherent aspect to them which makes us want to have fewer players, but there still should be more diversity.
Remember feature phones? There were plenty of choices. And buying one, did not lock you into the next one. They were not 'platforms' there were 1000 varieties even if there were some 'big players' (ie Nokia).
There are actually some consumer benefits when vertical integration is done well, and there is pricing competition - which is why I think that the desktop market is fair.
Apple is being a 'good capitalist' on the Mac side - great innovation - and choice.
The issue with Facebook is an entirely different issue, I don't even think it's one of 'anti competitive' behaviour - the real issue is a little bit political and it's about the control of information, liability, content filtering, 'truth' etc.. That's where that discussion is focused.
If I were 'Capitalist God' I wouldn't break up Apple but I would force them to allow open distribution of apps, while allowing certain measures for security, and of course, transportability of personal data from all apps, all vendors, including Apple. Similarly to Google with their services and Android.
With Facebook and content, requiring them to have a completely independant panel for content filtering, with some kind of objective oversight (like a board, but not corporate), where FB gets to set pretty much any policy they want, but that Board/Panel ensures that there's fair and consistent application of those policies to the content.
Much like Banks are regulated: they have to have 'firewalls' between their buy and sell side operations to avoid conflict of interest.
Finally, some rules about channel ownership and exclusivity - so that Apple/Android can't join in with AT&T/Verizon to basically cut every little other vendor in the world out.
Honestly, what I just described just as an example is not deeply interventional, and it would allow those businesses to thrive mostly the same while giving users more choice, privacy, allow business to set their own content guidelines and wash their hands of politicians thinking 'their party is treated unfairly' because it's literally and independent body doing the filtering equitably, and it would let smaller players with actually decent products into the playing field.
I’m all for putting pressure on them with antitrust lawsuits but ultimately consumers are who will drive meaningful change
Andrew Yang had a better idea. Put a VAT on big tech and use that to fund UBI.
Look, I don't like it either, but common people have statistically insignificant impact on whether or not legislation is passed.
Well, maybe, only the studios listed in the original consent decree were strictly prohibited, but nobody else did it, because they would risk being added, and lose their investment in theaters.
The DOJ recently convinced a federal judge to terminate the consent decrees that prevented studios from owning theaters: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-court-terminates-para...
Arguably things went seriously downhill with Windows 8 and culminated in the horror that is W10: ads everywhere, invasive tracking that can't be made to shut up for good, extremely ugly redesign.
I’ll never get how people can argue that older versions of Windows are more aesthetically pleasing than windows 10. I don’t use Windows (and haven’t since XP) but even I think 10 looks better than, say, Windows 7s fat task bar.
Although I can actually say with a straight face I think most default Linux DEs look better than Windows for the first time in my life.
There's a reason that the Win95 look is so iconic and "timeless": it's clear, consistent and simple. Windows 10 is a fucking hot mess, made worse by the fact that Microsoft for whatever dumb reason wanted the same UI on mobile and desktop, and the result was the worst possible outcome.
And I really don't know what this 'ads everywhere' crap people keep talking about.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ximg_57...
From https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...
Or premium photo service.
Oh and my phone randomly shows me ads, from Google, for their photo printing service.
Maps now has ads.
I'll remove the link to candy crush and not let it bother me, but I can't stop the YT premium ads.
Looks that way. No leadership to stop it.
Compare Apple to PCs. Windows is, has been, and always will be a security sh*tshow. Linux isn't interesting enough to scammers to be a security target yet, but it sure is ugly and chaotic. Apple just works for me.
By forcing Apple to be open, you're trying to both turn it into Linux by taking away the quality and usability of the apps available, and into Windows by .. making it a security shitshow.
Nobody has ever given me a real argument as to how Apple harms consumers in the iPhone. The only argument seems to be that app developers want a free ride. They want full access to do whatever they want, consumers be damned, without paying into the infrastructure which made their market available. (techno-libertarianism strikes again?)
Really?
Facebook has contributed to ethnic cleansing in places where Facebook has such a dominant position that it is practically synonymous with the Internet. Facebook’s responses to this have been slow and lack oversight, with Facebook themselves saying they failed.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/07/facebook-...
How on earth can you arrive at the conclusion that Apple are the “worst of the lot” because they won’t let you run the software you want and they are getting involved in movie/tv production? Those are quite literally first world problems compared with the harm Facebook does.
Don’t make me barf. This is stupid. I hate to be so, well, blunt, but you can’t be hurt by an App Store, maybe if you don’t like it you can create your own?
Apple (and they aren’t unique in this - Wal-Mart, Amazon, Steam, Epic, Nintendo, you name it) created a place for people to sell products. Without that creation, that market doesn’t exist. I’d you want to “punish” Apple then sure they can pay the developers and then all the developers can pay back all the profits they made on top of iOS.
But that's the point. You can't.
Imagine Wal-Mart sold fridges and forced you to buy every item you put into that fridge at Wal-Mart.
And maybe that Xbox you bought at Wal-Mart required you to buy (and pay for) your Xbox live pass through Wal-Mart.
Why do I have to pay Microsoft to play via Xbox Live? Why can’t I set up my own online service to play games on their hardware?
Better yet, why do I need Wal-Mart’s approval to sell anything?
And Steam doesn't, and in fact cannot, prevent you from installing GOG Galaxy or downloading games from itch.io. (And devices like the Steam Link will happily play games sourced from GOG Galaxy or itch.io through them!)
This is tiresome. I will not reply to you further.
Exactly! If you bought your Xbox through Apple, you'd be paying Apple a chunk for the privilege of using a Microsoft service. See the issue?
If you purchase a Netflix subscription from the Netflix app that you got from the Apple store (replace Netflix with Xbox here to see the comparability), Apple takes 30% every single month. Never mind the fact that you might be using the Netflix account on your non-Apple TV or laptop.
Apple also ensures that you can't buy it through Netflix directly, you have to buy it through them. You would have to purchase the subscription outside of the Netflix app.
Why shouldn’t Apple get what amounts to a referral fee here?
Why should they? I feel like you are not getting the point that everyone is trying to make to you. Maybe if I throw a few more examples at you. Otherwise I give up...
If I buy a smart TV at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the TV but not for the Netflix subscription I use on that TV.
If I buy an Xbox at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the Xbox but not for the Xbox live subscription I run on that console.
If I buy a physical copy of Adobe Photoshop at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the purchase but does not get a cut when I sign up to Adobe's CS subscription each year (because at that point there is no more 'referral' going on!).
If I buy a fridge at Wall-Mart I am allowed to purchase my groceries I put in it from stores other than Wall-Mart. Imagine if Wall-Mart set up a system to block any non-Wall-Mart purchased groceries from going into the fridge? Then you'd be forced to pay a 'referral' fee to Wall-Mart every time you want to use your device. No one could set up a competing store to sell you groceries for your Wall-Mart fridge.
I don't even think Apple's doing anything I don't like, and I gotta throw a flag on this pseudoargument.
Compelling.
There are plenty of phone manufacturers with different operating systems. If you don’t like using Apple’s App Store you are perfectly free to use other hardware and software combinations as you see fit to purchase that are available on the market.
There are plenty of hardware manufacturers that are free to spend as much money as they want to build phones, spend money to build operating systems, and then do whatever they want with those systems. So yes, create your own hardware stack on which to put applications and then put an App Store on that. Apple had the foresight to do so and create market value, nothing is stopping Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Google, or others from doing so. Nothing.
And the fun part is this: I made my first post in this thread having in the past said that I really didn't mind the status quo but you've successfully convinced me that that hammer should be swung at them as hard as it possibly can be.
I don’t get it. If you hate the iPhone and apple App Store philosophy why can’t you just buy a different phone? Put your money where your mouth is. Apple and the App Store suck? Prove it with your purchases. Don’t sit here and complain about a “monopoly” that makes developers a shit load of money.
Ok how about this. If developers want a different store, they can all pay a fee to Apple to continue to develop new hardware and provide updates for iOS. Sounds fair to me.
Google does not allow you to have an alternative store preinstalled.
You'll see a hell of a fight if you try to take "No Name" from Canadians.
Should car manufacturers be forced to use interoperable wheels, lights and other proprietary components? Maybe so.
Take a basic 36V drill, companies such as Black and Decker and Dewalt use different methods to lock the battery onto the accessory. Should the government also mandate these are interoperable?
The list goes on - construction tools, consumer electronics, appliances, etc.
To what extent should the government force industries to do things?
By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes, but I wonder how successful the government would be in pursing these things.
I was about to say... :)
Remember when cell phones all used proprietary adapters and you had to buy expensive chargers if you lost yours? This is one of the great things governments can do to protect us. (I think we owe Europe for that one.)
If your solution to creating margin is being anti-competitive / anti-consumer, there's something fundamentally wrong.
Big tobacco.
And that's a great analogy. And just like tobacco might be something the consumer wants, it's bad for the broader system.
Apple is creating negative externalities that ripple across our industry, all the while bringing smiles to consumers that don't know about the cost.
Apple creates fewer negative externalities than any of their competitors. This is well documented.
I don’t see how this analogy works.
Yes!
The people building the future that don't happen to work at Apple have to work that much harder. They are less productive because of the toll Apple extracts.
App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone. There are higher order, dynamical impacts that tough even non-Apple users. (Kind of like secondhand smoke!)
Apple users are serving their device by surrendering freedoms to it. It should be the other way around. Apple users pay more, they get less, and the software delivered to them is 15% less good than it could be.
Competition can't get started or survive. The ocean is being over-fished, and natural evolution has been artificially controlled by one entity.
Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.
“Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.”
What you are saying here is that your argument is based on conjecture. There is no factual basis to it at all. This is literally a fantasy.
“App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone.”
Only in a world where these things are not part of why Apple is successful.
These are not problems, they are solutions to the complex problem of creating a market in which consumers are willing to spend money on software.
This is not conjecture. It is a fact borne out by the huge amounts of money people do in fact spend on Apps.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion of Apple hadn’t created a marketplace people trust.
Believe it or not, I actually want a parallel universe where Apple isn’t the only trusted platform, and I want the alternative to be open, not just another giant corporation.
However, the only way to make that happen is is if we build the technologies to enable it.
We won’t be able to do that if the government regulates software distribution.
If we create regulation it will end up reproducing all of the restrictions that Apple imposes, plus whatever else the government wants.
The biggest difference is that nobody will be able to compete with it, and even open source will be forced to comply.
On the other hand, it would lead to the proliferation of distributed, decentralized systems where there's not a good way to demonstrate culpability for a suit, so maybe burning down Facebook is a nice side effect of a kind of decentralization that would be more healthy in the long run anyways.
But would the responsibility fall down to the one who owns the machine running the software? Is digital ocean responsible for the post I host on a vps in their datacenter?
But if you want evidence, I would cite the lawsuit climate in the US. If it smells like money, there will be a lawyer willing to come up with a case, no matter how far-fetched or unrealistic. I've seen too many examples of that over the years. (If you want specifics, the one I'm most familiar with is SCO v IBM.)
So if you make this change, I say there is enough evidence to believe that some lawyer will decide there's money to be made finding "hate speech" or "discriminator speech" or something on HN, and suing YCombinator for it. (Because even if HN per se doesn't have a lot of money, YCombinator does.) And if that happens, that's probably the end of HN.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history
Where's your argument that returning the law to its previous state wouldn't result in exactly the same thing happening again?
Facebook played it way too liberal here and now they're gonna get screwed.
Not sure where you get the idea that Facebook is somehow hostile to conservatives. Hell, they hired Joel Kaplan, a GOP operative, and made him their VP of public policy[1]. They made fringe tabloid Breitbart a 'trusted source.' Elderly conservatives are kinda Facebook's lifeblood at the moment.
They're not just letting conservative circles exist, they're fueling and radicalizing them.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/facebook-twitter-don-t...
This is a matter of civil law -- the burden of proof is the balance of probabilities (more likely than not that the allegations are true) rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal law.
These major companies have just gone too far. They shot themselves in the foot when they didn't bother to self regulate in a way that could appease both sides fairly. They tried running it like a typical corporate business when it's not that. They've been in the media too much and their name is constantly plastered with a negative connotation. They did this to themselves and they deserve ever ounce of dissolution they get.
They can do like MPAA and refuse to rate certain content, but that's only if the number of producer is small versus the general population, and everyone is forced to go through the same pipeline to reach wide distribution.
However with Facebook, the number of producers is more than 2 billion people; and mires them in laws and customs of every country in the world. They can't self-regulate because they are trying to control a number of people many orders of magnitude greater than their own internal manpower. Governments can only control so many people at once because:
(a) they are unbound by privacy requirements, and know your real name, history, and physical location
(b) they can dictate punishments at will until you comply; ranging from fines to jail time to gag orders to physical penalties like whipping
So now the ball is right back where it should be: in the hands of government.
Are the Proud Boys a white-nationalist terrorist group or merely an ethnocentric all-boys political action club? That's something the U.S. government should decide on its own, the U.K. government should decide on its own, and so on.
Facebook is in no position to figure out if people opining about election fraud are conspiracy theorists, foreign agents, or dangerously close to sedition. That kind of deep investigative work is the role of government.
It's darkly funny to me at this point how the "CENSORSHIP!!" crowd has completely ignored the routine purges of leftist voices on Facebook. Sure, the centrist liberal and the slightly left of center voices have survived. But get even a little further to the left and it's a crap shoot in terms of their long term survival on the platform.
Meanwhile, conservative circles are thriving on Facebook. Conservative sources are among the most popular on the site. I honestly don't know how much more you want from Facebook when they go out of their way to make conservative groups feel at home. Even to the point of adjusting their engine to point users to conservative pages, as has been widely reported.
- Calling Trump "White Trash" - Suggesting my tax dollars should not be used to fund Israel's genocide in Palestine - Suggesting that leftist protestors arm themselves for protection against the Proud Boys - Suggesting that my tax dollars should not be used to subsidize churches
I've probably reported 500 blatantly racist and threatening posts since Traitor Trump took over. Unbelievably racist things including swastikas, threats to kill people, Europa-Identity posts, etc.
One was a ycombinator-associated lawyer calling all muslims "Animals who fornicate with their sisters and with donkeys".
None of those people have been banned, none of those posts have been removed.
The left-wing bias on Facebook seems to be a helluva lot like the "war on Christmas". Doesn't seem to exist, but I really really wish it did.
The more reasonable (and widely accepted) reason as to why conservative content thrives on Facebook, is because conservative users are active in greater numbers on Facebook.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/1/21544501/facebook-rules-p...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-thr...
In terms of groups and pages, The Intercept reported on this. And I've seen this directed at groups that were not explicitly antifa but were more socialist in nature. Some of the groups were targeted with a large number of user reports. I live in a red state. Some of the local groups & pages I followed were hit with many complaints from local conservatives. Which led to some of those groups disappearing.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascis...
In terms of conservative popularity on Facebook, it looks to be partially organic. A mix of an older userbase and many conservative groups heavily targeting the platform. But the skew in the algorithms and the laxity regarding the rules also has a role to play.