vs. Google
And the crux of the complaint seems to be:
"As internal Google documents reveal, Google sought to kill competition and has done so through an array of exclusionary tactics, including an unlawful agreement with Facebook, its largest potential competitive threat, to manipulate advertising auctions."
Most of the accusations leveled against the FAANGs come down to somewhat of a matter of opinion if they harm consumers. The two dominant players in a market colluding to drive up prices isn't. It's clearly anti-competitive and I doubt there's many that would disagree.
Free to consumers is generally a net good, since it gives them access to things they wouldn't otherwise have.
Unless "access to things they wouldn't otherwise have" is free and fair market competition.
There's a very good reason that anti-dumping laws exist in almost every nation in the context of international trade, and the one and only reason reason a company dumps a product (selling it below 'normal' price) is to kill any local competition that might arise.
YouTube, as far as I'm aware, is offered at a price that doesn't meet its full cost of production, and as such should constitute illegal dumping in any country that has or wants to have a tech industry of its own.
The laws of trade just haven't caught up to this yet; of course, there's nothing stopping countries from updating their laws and banning YouTube and similar sites- unfortunately for them, banning services "sold" in this way would end up causing massive civil unrest, since its citizens now have a bunch of time to deal with the government who took their primary source of entertainment away and aren't as concerned about what the local tech industry might look like in 10 years without unfair competitive practices. Also, the US would take a very dim view of countries that modernize their trade law in a way that restricts how its most valuable companies make their money.
This an big misconception that I've seen before of HN. I don't know why that is.
Youtube standalone revenue is $15B/year[1]. Netflix is around $20B/year, but Netflix spends about $15B/year producing professional content and yet still produces around $1B/quarter in profit[2].
There's nothing at all to indicate that Youtube isn't actually highly profitable.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/heres-why-netflix-shares-a...
But that's entirely different from what is at issue in the advertising market.
Courts interpreting § 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act have generally used the term "consumer welfare," which sidesteps this issue. (The original text makes no reference to this concept.)
"In the end, Facebook curtailed its involvement with header bidding in return for Google giving Facebook information, speed, and other advantages in the auctions that Google runs for publishers’ mobile app advertising inventory each month in the United States. In these auctions, Facebook and Google compete head-to-head as bidders. Google’s internal codename for this agreement, signed at the highest-level, was REDACTED a twist on the character name from Star Wars. The parties agree on for how often Facebook would publishers’ auctions—literally manipulating the auction with for how often Facebook would bid and win."
If I were a betting man, I'd think it was something like "Fando Calrissian" or something akin to that; FAN from Facebook Ad Network and Lando because of the famous "I'm altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further" dialogue between him and Vader.
The argument in the complaint is this (paragraph 16):
The monopoly tax Google imposes on American businesses—advertisers like clothing brands, restaurants, and realtors—is a tax that is ultimately borne by American consumers through higher prices and lower quality on the goods, services, and information those businesses provide. Every American suffers when Google imposes its monopoly pricing on the sale of targeted advertising.
Here’s an example: Dollar Shave Club launched with a only digital marketing strategy and pressured Gillette to significantly cut prices to the net benefit of consumers. Without digital marketing, DSC wouldn’t have got off the ground.
But there is also truth to the argument that more competition would (probably) have driven prices down, and that Google and FB colluding to fix prices in auctions caused this
Edit: May be confusing Hamilton and Jefferson with Hobbes and Locke again.
[1] https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
Google in particular has also abandoned support for open specs in favor of deepening the Chromecast ecosystem -- having both removed DIAL support from later versions of the Cast protocol and Miracast support from Android itself.
And that's before you get into the interop for purchases within these ecosystems, because under the DMCA you can't legally do anything about the incompatible DRM schemes, even for media that other devices are more than technically capable of playing.
Another, related issue is that the additional set of proprietary APIs on top of AOSP amounts to an Android ecosystem that's "open," but renders any implementation that they haven't blessed as a second-class citizen. This has tangibly impacted compatibility efforts by other vendors, ranging from Amazon (Fire devices) to Huawei (loss of Play Services via the ban) to Microsoft (Project Astoria) -- for reasons that, in part, involved maintaining a walled garden of complementary hardware.
To be completely fair about this one, it's not strictly that cut and dry, as the ability to leverage vendors with Play licensing has also forced widespread adoption of solutions like Treble. But over time, large sections of the OS have been abandoned in favor of proprietary Google apps, and the API incompatibility hampers the growth of alternative ecosystems, even if you're another FAANG that can bring your own cloud and develop your own hardware.
To that point - while I personally think Oracle's SCOTUS case amounts to brazen trolling, it's, uh, not great optics for that whole argument that API compatibility is fair use when Android apps across several different categories will break just because updating your EOL'd device or getting rid of manufacturer bloatware will trip SafetyNet -- or because your vendor is a competitor and your device just isn't allowlisted by SafetyNet in the first place.
Apple TV is available on other devices. Today was announced Apple TV will be avilable on Chromecast https://blog.google/products/google-tv/apple-tv/
Last week was announced that Apple Music is available from Google Nest speakers https://blog.google/products/google-nest/never-miss-beat-app...
AppleTV has been in Sony, LG, and other devices for several years.