Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by absolutelyrad | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

absolutelyrad

List of companies that I'd like to be investigated for corruption and anti trust abuses:

1. Alphabet/Google

2. Apple

3. Facebook

4. Match Group

Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.

Reasons:

For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.

For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.

For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.

For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.

---

From the Chinese side:

I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.

-----------

Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.

The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.

For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.

View on HN

> 4. Match Group

> Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.

I had never heard that name and just googled them. HOOOOLLLYYY COW!!!!!!! That's what I call monopoly.

Badoo?

Dating apps are such a monoculture now, and it’s almost certain this is why

or maybe it's just that we've hit upon what works given current technology and human psychhology.

Works for who? Sure, there are success stories of online dating, but I wager a large amount that most people's experiences with them are negative.

Negative compared to what, though? A fictional imagined experience? Other kinds of dating? That's not a fair comparison.

Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Grindr, Once, Happn, and a few other apps that are probably unique to Europe come to mind as alternatives just from the top of my head.

Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.

In theory, yes, that's true. That is, if we completely ignore the Pareto principle(which I'm willing to bet is in full effect here). Looking at what they have on their portfolio(Tinder, okcupid, match, etc.), I think it's safe to assume they own 80-90% of the market share. That is pretty close to monopoly if you ask me.

> That is, if we completely ignore the Pareto principle(which I'm willing to bet is in full effect here)

That's exactly why I mentioned people using multiple apps, which lessens the effect quite a bit. Users on dating apps are also rather fickle, and will jump to the next best app once that becomes available, so even with a big market share, there isn't much lock-in and there isn't much of an outsized benefit to the position as a market leader. E.g. in the European market Bumble appeared a few years after Tinder and within 1-2 years basically everybody that I know that used Tinder before at least tried out Bumble and many continue to use both or switched outright. Of course that's very anecdotal, but current statistics for number of US users for both apps paint a similar picture[0].

> I think it's safe to assume they own 80-90% of the market share. That is pretty close to monopoly if you ask me.

In 2016, they apparently owned 25% of market share[1], which is pretty far away from a monopoly if you ask me.

It seems a bit weird to me to group them together with Alphabet/Facebook/Apple. The others span far more markets, and have much much stronger lock-in effect which they can unfairly leverage to push other products. Compared to that, Match Group is laughable.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/826778/most-popular-dati...

[1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/07/why-match-group-st...

Sure, it's not the same as Google/Facebook but you get my point. I spent 8 and a half years developing a CRM for mobile applications and it's not like I haven't poked my nose into the petabytes of data. The reality is that people(understand companies) are fighting for app time, that is how much time you spend in their app. Personally I've never used and never will use a dating app for a million and one reasons but I know plenty of people that do and have wasted money on them. Having spoken to them, they do spend most of their time on tinder/okcupid. As far as minutes in app goes, the Match group is unmatched(no pun intended). I'm sure it would raise some eyebrows, if people knew they were spending that much money on one company. I have a friend who has subscription to all of those. I wonder if he realizes that he is spending more on somewhat twisted services offered by a single company than I am on the countless gcp services I use for my personal projects.

Here’s a fun fact. If you read the Match Group annual reports, they’ll often say that their biggest US competitor is Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites.

...so duopoly??

> For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store.

I think it's much more than that.

Google makes apps and services. Google makes the platforms apps run on (Android, ChromeOS, Chrome [web + electron], Stadia). Google makes the services used to monetize apps (AdSense). Google makes the services used to distribute apps (Google Play Store, Stadia). Google makes the services used to find apps and services (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Play Store). And that's not to mention the deployment platforms, communication platforms, payment platforms, analytics platforms, development tools, content hosting services, etc.

They have so much control that you can't hope to compete with any of their established apps or services - no matter how much better your own product might be. All you can to is try to make something new and get big enough that Google can't take you on directly.

To play Devil's advocate, how many of those would exist if they had been separate. How much innovation is restricted by splitting entities.

Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.

If these products genuinely can't survive as their own viable products, we all agree that something like each individual product is necessary, and the entire suite can be reliably used to crush any competition, I'd say you're looking at a good case for state ownership.

That's not to say I agree that all these predicates are met in Google's case, but if you really do find yourself in a situation where a company can't be broken up because the constituent products are necessary to society but can't function without one another, then that company probably can't be effectively regulated by any government.

> To play Devil's advocate, how many of those would exist if they had been separate.

Who knows? How many alternatives died or resolved themselves to relative obscurity because Google managed to get a strangle hold on the market before their competitors could establish themselves?

Maybe Windows Phone would still exist. Maybe we'd be much further along with a truly open mobile Linux platform.

Maybe Firefox wouldn't be slowly fading into obscurity. Maybe Opera would be one of the top browsers. Maybe Edge would still be developing its own browser tech instead of just reskinning Chromium.

Maybe OSM would be the most popular map provider. Maybe Vimeo would be the go-to platform for video hosting. Maybe people would prefer store their files on Box. Maybe ads would have never have become such a popular monetization strategy and we might have seen some new and innovative strategies in its place.

Who knows?

what i hear you saying is "maybe we'd be stuck with half-assed shitty map software, half-assed shitty browsers, and half-assed shitty video sharing services".

Funny, since both Google Maps and YouTube were acquired, not developed by the monopoly Google.

If anything Google made Maps shittier over time (similarly to how they've managed to fuck over their own GMail offering).

As for Chrome, that was originally developed by KDE devs first and Apple second into a modern browser engine. The innovation part was theirs. Google just adopted it wholesale in the beggining, and started monopolizing its steering...

> As for Chrome, that was originally developed by KDE devs first and Apple second into a modern browser engine. The innovation part was theirs. Google just adopted it wholesale in the beggining, and started monopolizing its steering...

That’s... not how that works. You’re talking about WebKit, but the innovation of Chrome was separate processes for everything so a crash anywhere wouldn’t take down the whole browser. Sure, they’ve gone a bit “mad with power,” but to claim Google did nothing in the beginning is ignoring reality.

> the innovation of Chrome was separate processes for everything

I'd argue that's more of an evolution than an innovation.

It had only just become normal for home and office PCs to feature multi-core processors. High capacity RAM was becoming relatively cheap compared to other PC components. We were still in the early days of webapps and social media. The concept of "browser tabs" was still new.

Google had the advantage of starting from ground zero, so they could consider these new trends as part of their design. Incumbents had to re-work their existing tech to take advantage of those trends.

> To play Devil's advocate, how many of those would exist if they had been separate.

Suppose Chrome couldn't be a part of Google. They would have just contributed to Firefox, wouldn't you say?

Or if they were worried about Apple, donated startup capital to a non-profit Android Foundation to get it off the ground, where it could subsequently operate under a business model similar to Mozilla.

The difference is that the independent entities wouldn't have the same conflicts of interest as they do as part of the mothership. Firefox can care more about privacy than Chrome, so if it was the dominant browser, all the better. An Android Foundation operated by people in the spirit of Debian would probably care more about continuing to support older phone hardware, and care less about monopolizing app distribution to their operating system.

> Android was motivated to compete with Apple.

So was MeeGo, maybe we would be using that now if Google couldn't just throw its weight around.

> The Play Store and Chrome Web Store

Ah vendor locked in store fronts, nearly as innovative as the company store in mining towns. The promise by Google to completely pull the rug out under any Android manufacturer trying to get away from it only ads to its clear innovative superiority .

> Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible.

Yes, the last decade of venture capitalist funded loss companies like Uber has shown that no one could reach that size without Google to guide them.

>To play Devil's advocate, how many of those would exist if they had been separate.

Hopefully much fewer.

>How much innovation is restricted by splitting entities.

None. It's actually increased. What you listed is products, not innovations.

Something must absolutely be done to allow competing browser engines on iOS, such an anti-competitive behaviour is astonishing. How much money did Apple make thanks to not allowing the Web to be a viable alternative to native apps on its platform?

Over the past 10 years, how many companies chose to build native apps for iOS instead of web apps running everywhere? How many people bought iOS devices instead of competing products because of that rich app ecosystem (working only on iOS devices)? How much money did they make through the App Store fee that app developers could have saved if Web Apps had been a viable option? How much money was poured in the native industry instead of the Web?

Apple has been preventing the growth of the Web as an app platform for years, it's time for a change, and it's time they pay for it.

Only if Apple can have two versions of iOS on offer: one that is locked down and possibly/putatively safe; the other that is wild-west, Android-like in quality of store offerings, with all the tracking issues that goes with that. I know which one I'd choose, and it isn't the latter; my suspicion is that the market would make the same decision.

That's a false dichotomy. Apple itself is famous for picking good defaults, I'm sure they can implement a decent compromise that simply moves the needle a bit more towards consumers. Free browsers and a simple option to allow 3rd party appstores, set to off by default and somewhat bothersome to switch (i.e. buried into iTunes account screens, behind password, possibly with a periodic reminder every few months) would be more than enough. People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.

Anything else, like two iOS versions, is simply a provocation on the level of "we cannot unbundle IE".

“People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.“

This is where this line of reasoning goes wrong.

People will be persuaded to go out of the App Store ecosystem regardless of whether it is good for them or not.

Tens of billions of dollars and the most valuable advertising real estate on Facebook, Amazon, and the front page of Google, not to mention Epic and the other TenCent owned games companies will all be used to convince users to install alternative App Store.

Facebook and Amazon will presumably bundle stores directly into their apps. Why wouldn’t many other companies do this. Presumably TikTok would.

> People will be persuaded to go out of the App Store ecosystem regardless of whether it is good for them or not.

This. We devs do a great/horrible enough job of this already being lazy with implementations and saying “Chrome is the only supported browser”

This reasoning presumes that consumers will see no advantage at all in staying in the Apple Appstore. If true, this would simply prove that the Apple Appstore is effectively uncompetitive in the market, and can only profit in a situation of monopoly.

But it doesn’t matter, because all this is effectively false in practice. The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed (by their IT or their power-user of reference). This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration, a strawman propped up to defend Apple’s utterly anticompetitive practices.

“This reasoning presumes that consumers will see no advantage at all”

You’re going to need to explain this. I don’t see anything in what I wrote that leads to the conclusions in your first paragraph.

1. Users may not understand the security/privacy benefits until after they have sacrificed them.

2. There will be very large competitors trying to persuade them that there are no benefits. E.g. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178068/facebook-apple-...

3. Alternate stores will pay for exclusives and users will be forced to use them or lose important apps.

4. Key apps such as Facebook itself will just build stores into their apps.

As to your second paragraph:

“The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed..”

This is true, which is precisely why only Facebook and Google plus Amazon and a few others, E.g. Epic, will have the resources to persuade users to establish large alternative stores. Google advertised Chrome on the front page, and on TV. This is exactly what would happen with alternative stores.

“This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration..”

A strawman is when you present a deliberately weak version of another person’s argument, and then attack it. This paragraph of yours is a strawman. Nobody alluded to anyone going tweak crazy etc. Nobody defended Apple.

My comment was a response to this:

“People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.“

Which is clearly an unrealistic depiction of how things would be.

In what universe is Apple (a private company) responsible for the growth of the Web as an app platform? (which was not a design consideration when the web was invented). And who could make a sincere argument of being damaged by Apple not caring enough? Is it Apple's responsibility to make your life easier? In that case I've got a long list of companies to sue...

Apple has deliberately not fixed rendering inconsistencies in Safari when every other browser works more or less ina standardized manner.

Most frontend devs that I know making PWAs complain endlessly about the number of exceptions and workarounds for Safari, and indeed it does slow down development and ends up being a justification for contemplating dedicated mobile apps.

The problem is not that Apple doesn't care enough about the Web. If they don't want to add features to Webkit, that's fine.

The problem is that they prevent other browsers to add these features, because they prevent them from using their browser engines. That way, they prevent these browsers to really compete with theirs (Safari). Because if we could run the real Chrome on iOS, with all the APIs it supports, it's obvious everyone would ditch Safari straight away.

And more importantly, that way they prevent Web apps from competing with native apps. Because obviously, who would use a Web app which can't even send push notifications instead of a native app with all the native APIs it has access to?

So the problem is not Apple not caring enough about the Web. The problem is Apple having anti-competitive behaviour regarding Web browsers and application platforms on iOS.

It's true that Apple outright bans apps that themselves could be vectors for platforms such as Flash back in its day. Today's "browsers" with their ever-increasing scope surely fit that criterion. I'm not defending Apple, but the idea that the web is an "open" platform (when it's overwhelmingly just Chrome) should not be used as an argument here, when Google employs just other anti-competitive tactics.

It's not just not caring about the web - they have a very strong financial incentive to kill the web as a viable platform for applications, games etc.

> Because if we could run the real Chrome on iOS

You'd be running features that both Mozilla and Safari consider harmful and will not implement.

Well, that would be my problem, as it is when I'm running (the real) Chrome on macOS, Android, Windows or Linux.

And if I'm not happy with that, maybe I'll switch to Firefox, which doesn't support them while not holding the Web back on many other features and with many unfixed bugs for years, like Apple does with Safari.

That's the advantage of competition, if you're not happy with a product, you can use another one instead.

I'm going to assume you are non-technical, because you are utterly missing the point of the GP.

Apple doesn't have to do anything, they just have to stop blocking others from doing anything.

I'd still put Facebook as the #1 issue, since WhatsApp and Instagram clearly should exist separately.

Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).

Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.

Mozilla is still around, though?

For now...

> Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).

Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.

And Google pays far more to Apple because they have more users. This would probably be dwarfed by what they'd pay to a hypothetical independent Chromium Inc. that develops the browser.

Hard to say -- In Apple's case, there are so many potential users it's worth Google's money to get their search engine as the default.

However, Mozilla doesn't have a massive userbase like that, which leads me to suspect that Google only pays Mozilla to stave off pressure form regulators who would otherwise accuse them of having a monopoly on browsers.

If chrome didn't exist, I'd say that it's more likely than not that Firefox would have the majority of windows uses...

You can't draw any conclusions about Chrome based on Moz and Opera, because it was the reason the other two could not survive.

Interesting thought -- but IIRC, before Chrome, Firefox was already facing an uphill battle, since most people just tended to use the browser bundled with their OS. I mostly remember only tech savvy people tending to download Firefox back in those days.

Yeah, I used internet explorer until chrome. People said firefox was so much better than internet explorer, but they always felt comparable to me and I'm not a person who just switches because others tells me to. Chrome however really felt different, I switched to it when it was just a beta and had less site compatibility simply because I liked it so much more.

Firefox usage was slowly but steadily increasing pre-chrome though.

Depends on your location. In 2010 Firefox had 60% market share in Germany.

Mozilla and Opera aren't viable because of Chrome. Chrome is arguably more polished because Google pours more money into its development, more readily available because Google can lobby/buy/enforce its inclusion as the default browser, and free because Google makes money from the information it collects through it.

You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.

>Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.

I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.

Love this idea.

“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”

I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)

I'm not sure splitting off the crawler would have the effect you want it to. Crawling is hard, but actually one of the easier parts of building a search engine. There are less complete, but still pretty impressive public crawls available already, like Common Crawl.

The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.

I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.

If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.

> Common Crawl

Not even close. I've used Common Crawl, it has nowhere near the breadth that Google has in their index.

Problem no. 1 is that website owners block non Google crawlers because of limited bandwidth. So you can't reliably even get started on creating your own search engine. Once we have the data available, we can figure out the other bits and what they require. But to get to that door, you need access to the crawl.

You don't need to have everything in the Google index to beat Google.

You need to be better than Google in the search niche that you'll serve.

And for that, at the bare minimum, you need access to all the crawl data that Google has to get started, then throw away the bits that you don't need.

So if we make internet bandwidth a regulated utility like electricity and water, would that create an environment where other crawlers could compete?

Bandwidth costs have been continually declining for decades since competition started. The utility model of Ma Bell kept bandwidth costs up.

Well, I wasn't taking the OP's idea to mean only splitting off the crawler. Why not an API where you send it the search query and then it returns the results? It could have a variety of return options including using a ranking of the API publisher's choosing or you could ask for something raw, and innovate with an even better or more suitable ranking based on your specific needs.

In the end, the point would be to make Google closer to what it was at the beginning -- just input and output. No ads on top of it, no bundling with other offerings etc. And if the publisher's ranking remains as good as it should, then surely some will be willing to pay not only for the raw data, but the ranking as well.

This is exactly how I envisioned it. A crawl+index company that gives equal access to all competitors.

The search front companies would use the index to retrieve pages, then they would rank these pages with their own criteria and filter with their own white/black lists, then present the result in their own UI. Each one would have their own ads and tracking (or lack thereof). The index would not be able to know the identities of the users.

In the end they all boil down to an "attention economy", it's about us and our eyeballs, we should have more say on what we are consuming.

The part about ranking, filtering, tracking and UI is true for FaceBook and Twitter as well, even though they are a different kind of service. We could have alternative views on these systems, where we have more control on the way the system manipulates the information for us.

Google's crawler gets preferential treatment on many sites. Not necessarily because of private deals, but because it drives traffic from search results.

Quote via [2]

--- start quote ---

When Mr. Maril started researching how sites treated Google’s crawler, he downloaded 17 million so-called robots.txt files — essentially rules of the road posted by nearly every website laying out where crawlers can go — and found many examples where Google had greater access than competitors.

ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers, permits only Google’s crawler to have access to links containing PDF documents. Only Google’s computers get access to listings on PBS Kids. On Alibaba.com, the U.S. site of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, only Google’s crawler is given access to pages that list products.

--- end quote ---

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...

[2] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/12/14/wakabayashi-goo...

So it sounds like the regulators should focus on forcing every web property to give equal access to all crawlers. Why steal Google's investment and hard work and innovation?

There is so much irony in the fact that the web loves Google crawler, optimizes for it, makes sure that Google robots have special, first class treatment.

And at the same time, on the same website I need to enter Google-provided captcha. To fight robots.

>I'm not sure splitting off the crawler would have the effect you want it to. Crawling is hard, but actually one of the easier parts of building a search engine. There are less complete, but still pretty impressive public crawls available already, like Common Crawl.

When they saw crawler they don't mean Googlebot or something.

They mean the whole thing you've described, the search engine as a backend.

What the law proposes is that other companies should be able to just buy the search engine service from a new company split from Google, of which Google which will just be just another client.

>I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking.

The idea is to split the whole search part from Google. Let them have the ad business, Android and so on, and just rent the search from the spin-off company...

Sounds like a similar idea to the way the UK broke BTs hold on the internet market. They were forced to split the infrastructure into BT OpenReach and then BT joins all the other ISPs in paying for the lines from OpenReach.

One possible issue is that the users of the data may place different prominence on a particular URL, and may decide that it warrants more frequent crawling.

For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.

A real API would be nice! One can imagine what innovation it could spark in AI / feeding / learning neural nets with a nice API.

To expand on this idea: Place the crawler under a non-profit such as the Internet Archive, so the results can serve the public & the commercial agreements can fund their broader archival efforts too.

I would like an investigation in to data sharing in the travel industry. Airlines and cartels thereof, credit card companies, airports, hotels, oldschool booking networks (Amadeus, Galileo, etc.), newschool booking websites and governments.

While we're at it, how about making shady practices about "last seat available" and "secure your seat" and "sit with your family!" and so forth illegal. "Upgrade to clue!"

> The app store needs to be eliminated.

Oh fuck NO. Apple has saved me from scummy apps more times than I can remember. They always refund without question, including when I fell for Match.com's "Pay up to see how many bots like you" scam.

Right now I'm fighting to get my money back from Couchsurfing.com (they started throwing a "COVID contribution" prompt on the app and the website that blocks you from doing anything, can't even delete your account until you pay) and they're flat out ignoring me. They use a custom payments system. If it was a regular In-App Purchase, Apple would have refunded me within hours by now.

Anyone clamoring for the protections of the App Store to be abolished is very likely someone salivating to prey upon users.

How about Microsoft?

They own Windows + Internet Explorer/Edge + Bing and a lot of internet services.

I think it's problematic that Skype gets auto-installed eery time Windows updates.

I don't think it's a problem. Developers that develop for Windows collectively make far more money than Microsoft does. Windows is a platform and Microsoft does a good job of being a platform.

While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.

The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.

In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.

The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.

if microsoft is abusing their OS market share to push edge and bing, they are doing an awfully bad job of it.

Based on the frequency with which Windows 10 decides to reset my default browser to Edge "because reasons" I disagree.

that does sound very annoying (although as a Win10 user myself, I can't say I've ever experienced this), but it's not exactly an antitrust issue when edge and IE combined have captured only ~10% of the browser market.

Google accepted the anti-consumer challenge: on Android, links from Google Assistant and Google News feed ignore phone's default browser setting, and open in Chrome instead.

Not only has Chrome near monopoly, cemented by being the default preinstalled browser - they feel the urge to nip even the tiny insignificant competition in the bud.

The expectation that the EU can have this much influence over American firms, to the point that they can break them up and change their business models is a pretty shocking development.

We're beginning to see the limitations of globalization. For all the anti-trust rhetoric from the US, it's unlikely it'll accept this level of over-reach without pushing back. Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?

We're definitely in the beginning stages of a new world order that's far less cohesive, with distributed levels of influence.

It’s already happened. GE-Honeywell was rejected. The answer depends on how important the EU or China market is to that business.

> Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?

Both of these are already the status quo even before this law

Are they really "American" firms in anything but name? Once they go multinational, they lose their allegiance to their "native" countries. I don't see any evidence of loyalty to their home countries, per se. Not even in the most basic sense of paying their fair due of taxes.

I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.

I love how these tech companies are under scrutiny, yet the telecoms with US duopolies are being conveniently ignored. imo this is a lesson for those companies to massively increase their investment in lobbying.

This story is about the EU. What is the point of making it about US-specific problems?

I was responding to a specific comment. I wasn't making a general one regarding the article. Is my comment not a relevant response?

Let's not forget that this is a US based website. It's only natural that US based issues and US based viewpoints will always surface.

They don’t own:

- Bumble

- Badoo

- Eharmony

- Zoosk

- ChrstianMingle

- JDate

- tons of international and niche sites and apps

- many, many others

The idea that there is monopoly power being leveraged here to prevent other dating sites from being started and grown and be successful has very little evidence behind it.

Apple owns far less of the phone and mobile app market than Match Group owns of the dating market. Should Apple be on the list?

If you agree that Apple should be on the list, then Match Group should without question be on the list.

The reasons why monopolies are bad isn't automatically due to the size of the market that a company controls.

Instead, the reason why they are bad, is due to things like barriers to entry, and the anti competitive practices that they enact.

For dating apps, I don't see how match group is putting up anything that could be described as a barrier to entry, for other dating apps.

Whereas Apple is absolutely doing things that effect competition in the market, by, for example, preventing competing app stores on the Iphone.

Therefore, Apple's actions are much worse than Match Groups, even though they have a smaller percentage of the market.

> For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.

In your opinion, what is the real reason for no allowing alternative browsers?

> The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google

I like this idea, but more precisely I'd put the index with the crawler as well and only keep the ranking/filtering and display part separate. I'd like to see many "heads" on top of the crawler/indexer.

Travel apps never managed a "The winner takes it all" approach.

Regarding "match". You would be surprised how much fraud exits in the dating industry. How many people get payed to keep paying customers engaged with the app. Also, just wait until your Tinder gold expries. You will get tons of (hidden) likes.

Add whoever owns all those hotel booking sites. Pretty much the same kind of monopoly as Match Group, but with 10x the dark patterns.

It’s split between Expedia and Priceline.

Funniest thing, Alibaba was just recently denied its merger attempt in the grocery delivery market.

Alibaba and Tencent would be great candidates. There is no chance China will do anything though, as these companies are their best chance to compete on a global stage. The EU could make a case against them that actually has legs, rather than the U.S. flip flopping on TikToking

Do Alibaba and Tencent have a significant number of users in the EU?

Your list not seeing the forest for the trees:

Microsoft

ebay and paypal

I'd wait and watch. Cryptocurrencies are rising, and PornHub is going all in on crypto now that they've been cut off from VISA and MasterCard.

They might be the ones who finally push it for mainstream adoption, then PayPal can go kick rocks.

If it fails, then maaaybe we could think about it. Still not as bad as these 4 major offenders.

Paypal existed because they allow disputes. Until a cryptocurrency or some broker on it can handle fraud other than "haha you're screwed" its a non starter.

Regarding Apple, just break it into a hardware + software company. All issues will automatically resolve. And it will be better for the environment as a bonus, because devices can be used for a longer time and with multiple purposes.

As an Apple device user that's precisely the last thing I want. The whole reason I buy their product is because how tightly the hardware and software is integrated and for all the benefits that this gets me, as opposed to Android.

Can you give an example? What features does it bring specifically?

The M1 chip, which seems designed to run reference counted software written in Swift or Objective-C. But there are plenty of other examples (ever wonder why no one seems to be able to replicate Apple's great trackpads?).

> The M1 chip, which seems designed to run reference counted software written in Swift or Objective-C.

You'll have to explain why a dedicated hardware company wouldn't be able to come up with such a chip given sufficient competition. If many people use language X, then it makes sense for an IC design company to optimize for that language (unless there is a near-monopoly situation and they don't care about what the market wants).

> But there are plenty of other examples (ever wonder why no one seems to be able to replicate Apple's great trackpads?).

I'm afraid you'll have to provide some more context, because the connection between your argument and both hardware and software seems missing.

> You'll have to explain why a dedicated hardware company wouldn't be able to come up with such a chip given sufficient competition. If many people use language X, then it makes sense for an IC design company to optimise for that language (unless there is a near-monopoly situation and they don't care about what the market wants).

They gave you an example. Apple (software part) don't need to run around and ask hardware companies to implement optimisations in their hardware, and hope that implementation will be as promised (see: Microsoft and Qualcomm, and debacle called "custom ARM chip for Windows"). Apple (software part) can plan their releases many years in advance, knowing that Apple (hardware part) will fulfil their promise (see: Intel's roadmap recently, NVidia and Apple in the past). Apple (software part) can choose programming language that suits them and be sure that the hardware will follow. Apple (hardware part) can plan many years in advance and make obviously superior product knowing that there will be enough software support (Rosetta 2) to overcome initial platform switching pain. The whole M1 Mac story is all about the company that is so integrated that they can pull something that nobody else can.

You choose to ignore the example.

There is no reason that that tight integration needs to go if apple was broken into hardware and software parts.

There's no point in splitting them if there's still the tight integration. All you'll end up with more legal bureaucracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com