U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown
reuters.com
reuters.com
Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents.
How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should have been forced to divide their business long time ago. Of course they are gonna use metrics from competitors that only they have access to, in order to make their own product line get better.
Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more general results? Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even know, because no one knows how their algorithm is working, but one thing is clear, Google products consistently rank higher than anything else in the search engine.
The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here.
Depends on how you define “marketplace”. Costco/Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe’s/grocery stores all sell their own brands next to competing brands in their stores.
Is their one store the marketplace? It takes considerably more effort to go to a different store than going to a different website.
When one player now has over half the market, you need to carefully watch what they are doing in order for them not to start exploiting their position. This is why it's different between Amazon and Home Depot, they hold different amount of the market, so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't. Amazon with their marketshare, can do so much easier.
Then there is the issue of specifically Amazon ranking their own products above others in their search results, even if others have better reviews, more purchases, more page views and so on. Then we start getting into "abusing their market position" territory, and this is what is getting investigated now.
> This is why it's different between Amazon and Home Depot, they hold different amount of the market, so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't.
I would say Home Depot has far more control of their markets than Amazon does. Pick any smaller metro, and the only consumer building materials store around is Home Depot or Lowes. The two basically split up all the markets, and if there’s not enough business to sustain both, then there will be just one. But no other store will be able to compete.
If you’re a manufacturer and you can’t convince Home Depot or Lowes to stock your item in their store, then you’re not going to reach 90% of people via in store attention (for home improvement stuff).
Almost all big box store brands have whittled down to two viable options, or even one in the case of Best Buy. Although, I think that might be the natural state of things given how low profit margins are for retail (low single digit percentages).
Of course not, the final issue is companies becoming monopolies and companies abusing their market positions, that is what we want to prevent, in order to foster innovation and open markets.
> I would say Home Depot has far more control of their markets than Amazon does
Maybe you're right, I know nothing about what's going on on the ground of the US. So if Home Depot do have more control of their market than what Amazon has of the e-commerce market (more than 50%), then they should also be under watch to see what "strategies" they employ to get more profits.
Just because the House is now investigating technology companies doesn't mean that hopefully whatever legislation comes out of this, cannot be applied to other industries.
I can use plugins in a web browser to effectively visit 100 stores to shop for the best price on an item. Amazon is just another vendor.
-edit-
To add to this. If you want to compare to Amazon then you have to look at the market share and revenue of those stores too. Not simply their existence. It doesn't matter if an ACE hardware is in the area if it is 3% of the market.
Sure you could, but is that how most users use the web? According to Statista (2019 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...) [same link I put before], over 50% of the market is just Amazon, even though it's soooo easy to chose another one.
Since they now have a grip of the majority of the market, they should be having lots of eyes on them, as they can easily abuse their position, which most of us don't want to them to do.
To answer your question - it doesn’t matter. We don’t determine monopolies simply because of market share. If we did, why aren’t we filing another anti-trust investigation against Microsoft and Windows?
The point anyway is that people have no switching cost. Amazon faces stiff competition not just in America but globally. I remain unconvinced that they have a monopoly on e-commerce. Sure they may have take some monopolistic actions which could be addressed, but that’s not enough for me to demonstrate that they are a monopoly.
Frankly, I think Amazon has really been struggling. Prime sucks. 2-day shipping is slipping not just in service but as new competitors enter the market. It’s a fierce competition.
Google and Facebook on the other hand are monopolies. That’s a no-brainer.
Apple I’m not sure how they’ve even been in the discussion.
Remember that Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores, regular Apple users (like 50% of US) can't install stuff on their device without Apple parental approval and the "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is does not let you install a better browser".
50% still affects a lot of people, though Apple fanboys will attempt to say is not a big enough number (remember you could install other browsers and whatever application you wanted on Windows without a Microsoft approval or tax).
> Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores
I can't sell anything I want at Wal-Mart. Doesn't PayPal not allow porn sites to do business? I don't see how this is different.
> Windows without a Microsoft approval or tax
So is it market share or what? What exactly is the monopoly? Microsoft doesn't allow me to play PlayStation games on Xbox. Most computers are sold with Windows operating systems. I don't know what the monopoly is supposed to be with Apple.
- monopoly, duopoly is not that important, you can have 3 big actors in a market that are cooperating against the users for their own interests, so the market share is irrelevant and the abuse/damage is relevant. Is Apple not allowing say 10 million users to install some app because of political reasons or 50 million users to install a game because some other policy reason? This people were affected , for example Joe did not know when he bought his iPhone that Apple can block his favorite game , or some app , is friend Bob has Android and he side loaded it, Joe is pissed now and feels tricked because on the box it was not printed that Apple can abuse his trust like this.
That is a very visible case, but there were other smaller cases , where smaller applications were blocked because they had a link and that link was going to a page and on that page a developer would accept donations and Apple wanted a but from that.
Then you have apps blocked on totalitarian states, an entire nation is affected because they can't side load applications.
I'm currently on chrome on my iphone. Maybe you can't install arbitrary browsers, but you can certainly install different ones. And there's always jailbreaking.
I will have to let someone else to continue this since I don't own a iOS device and at work we don't target mobile.
Though I had to fix soem iOS issue sin a third party plugin, it was using some WebGl and it was broken on iOS, so the plugin was using a software(slow and ugly thing) for iOS but then Apple change things so tablets pretend they are desktops and broke the plugin(so from my limited experience iOS browsers are inferior ).
It’s not clear what the point is here.
> According to Statista (2019 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...) [same link I put before], over 50% of the market is just Amazon, even though it's soooo easy to chose another one.
Could it be that people choose Amazon because despite its faults it provides the best service?
I dislike Amazon and try to avoid them wherever possible, but in practice I probably use them 50% of the time, because in those instances there isn’t a better alternative.
How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?
Amazon is one of the most highly rated companies in the US by its customers. Its NPS score is 69 and 70 is considered "world class".
I can get almost anything online shipped to my house the SAME DAY. If Amazon sends you the wrong item they'll let you keep the wrong one and immediately ship you a new one!
How is taking action against Amazon going to help consumers? Seems to me that just ends up being a giant win for Walmart and target who offer worse service and often worse prices!
So how are consumers being hurt?
Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start using computers for the first time, yet their browser bundling was considered problematic.
Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town and across the country in real time. People love talking to their far away friends and relatives! But they were simultaneously providing this futuristic service and harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices and monopoly pricing.
It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great service to you and me and be harming consumers with priority placement of Basics products and even harming competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in deciding what Basics products to make.
I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of.
How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS?
I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS with no browser installed by default would be a reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.)
Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for preventing someone from winding up in a situation where they have no browser installed at all and can't look up how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is obviously less catastrophic.)
That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-competitive problem, but it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors).
Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking it up by division and splitting some of those divisions further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all the Windows trademarks go to some independent interoperability consortium).
I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break the existing usage.
> splitting some of those divisions further into competitors
Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies reforming into a few huge companies which usually deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers?
Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility.
(I still claim, though, that given two initially equal products and equal resources, that one will probably relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's happened almost every time a large open source project has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)
Yes, they absolutely should have been broken up into fragments, if not crushed and handed out to the rest of America for free.
So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?
The impact on consumers is often used as a justification and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement. It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their options.
Everyone does this, it is called competition.
That is why every free market monopoly that has ever existed has passed and we are not living under the thumb of a single all encompassing mega-corporation and the only pseudo-monopolies possible are the ones guaranteed by law in regulations.
No they didn’t?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
> the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.
First Trial:
> On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.
Appeal:
> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
If, by “appeal” you mean “settlement negotiated with the new, Microsoft-friendly Administration”, that is correct.
That’s not what “appeal” usually means in a legal context.
More closely: if you take a plea bargain and plead guilty to breaking and entering instead of murder, are you guilty of murder? What if you only agreed to the plea bargain because you didn’t want to spend the millions of dollars to litigate again? This latter hypothetical is the reality of corporate prosecution in America: companies will settle just to avoid tainting their reputation and spending the cash to win on the merits. That doesn’t mean that they’re guilty.
You are suppose to be tried in a public process by an impartial judge and a jury of peers, not making a deal behind closed doors with a prosecutor looking to advance his career.
As is the case when you are fighting against other humans, who are crafty, financially-motivated, and are willing to break the law, and may be operating from different jurisdictions where attempting to get the DA to prosecute them or filing a lawsuit against them is ineffective, it's a very difficult battle to fight.
As an example I'd be surprised if Amazon could get China to prosecute a business operating from their country that's selling counterfeits on Amazon. Additionally, it's hard for Amazon to know if a product sold in its marketplace is counterfeit: there's no global API or method to look up if a product is authentic. The best you can do is rely on the trust of the seller. If you want to mitigate your risk, buy products that are only sold by Amazon itself, or name-brand 3rd party sellers who have high reputation (like Belkin for electronics; Apple even lists Belkin products that integrate with theirs on Apple's online store: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/power-cables?fh=4... ).
People occasionally experience counterfeits, but once reported the seller is typically caught and banned. (But if they're a corporation in another country, and willing to break the law and ToS, they'll reincorporate under another name and try to do it again. Stopping this is difficult.)
Reviews are also a difficult problem to tackle. Amazon decided long ago to allow people to leave reviews without purchases, though reviews from people who purchased the item get an extra "verified purchase" badge. But that doesn't stop the abusers: they "buy" the item under various accounts they've created themselves, give the product a good review, and then return it to their own inventory. Small sellers might get a bunch of friends & family to do this, which would be hard to detect as ToS-violating conspiracy; larger sellers will use sophisticated schemes to create many accounts and identities to do the same thing (or simply pay a network of actual people to do it, such as by asking on Craigslist and similar places), to boost reviews of their own products, or if they're willing to burn cash, buy and negatively-review products of competitors. When done from many names/addresses/credit cards/IP addresses, it requires sophisticated intelligence analysis to detect and stop.
Please consider the attackers that Amazon is actually up against when trying to stop these abusive behaviors before concluding that they don't care. They have multiple hundreds of people working on the problems. They are simply hard problems to solve, because Amazon is fighting against other smart, sophisticated humans who gain financially from their abuse.
Amazon could shut down its marketplace, which accounts for 50% or more of all sales on the store, and only sell products it acquires directly from manufacturers, but that would destroy many businesses who have built themselves up using Amazon as a primary venue to sell their product. Furthermore, it would disallow people who have legitimately acquired the product another way from reselling it--for example, say I buy a pallet of some authentic product from a retail store that's going out of business; shouldn't I be able to resell those products? The law says that I can. If Amazon has a marketplace, shouldn't I be able to resell there? These could be Nike shoes or any name-brand products.
(Sophisticated manufacturers who want to protect their supply chains from 3P reselling will repurchase inventory from retailers who are going out of business; or alternatively provide it to retailers on consignment --meaning Nike owns all the shoes being sold in a retailer's store up until the point where they're sold to a consumer; so upon going out of business the retailer is expected to return the inventory.)
Now you run into tricky situations. I buy a pair of Nike shoes brand new from a retail store and never use them. I decide I don't like their look after all. Should I be able to sell my shoes on Amazon as new at a lower price than Nike does? Yes, you should and you can (though you're unlikely to be selected as the default offer as a new untrusted seller with a single product; unless Nike is one of the companies with brand protection for what may be offered as "new"; though I believe you could still sell as "like new"--I am not an expert on this space).
Some brands were counterfeited so frequently that Amazon has started to offer the ability to limit who can sell trademark-protected items that are only sold by their manufacturers with its Brand Registry: https://brandservices.amazon.com/
I believe the sellers who are accused of fraud or counterfeiting will be asked by Amazon to provide proof of authenticity, such as purchase orders from the manufacturer or other proof of authentic origin, but allowing people to open accounts and sell means they start with a presumption of trust -- creating the possibility that some people will have bad experiences with counterfeiters until they're caught and shut down.
Imagine you're the Amazon engineer responsible for figuring out how to stop people willing to break the law and all of your policies to make profit; then put yourself in an attacker's shoes and imagine all the things you could do to circumvent the best ideas you can come up with for stopping fraudulent reviews and counterfeits. (Assume for the sake of argument that your company is committed to allowing third-parties to sell on the store.)
I have encountered several items with good reviews, but when you read the reviews, they're all talking about a completely different item.
What you're describing is another kind of abuse called Listing Abuse, specifically Variation Abuse. If you encounter Listing Abuse, use the link on the page "Report Incorrect Product Information" [1] and say that the product is experiencing Listing/Variation Abuse, and give a couple examples of reviews that are clearly for unrelated products. It will be investigated, taken down/unlinked from those reviews, and the seller will be punished as appropriate.
("Variations" are products that have different SKUs but are all linked together and share reviews, such as the same product that comes in different colors or patterns or sizes. For example, the Speedo Swim Cap has 20+ color and pattern variations: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B... . Each is actually a distinct product SKU, but since they're all functionally the same, just with different colors or patterns, they have one page and share reviews.)
The fundamental problem that makes Listing Abuse hard to stop is that, if you allow people to sell on your store, that means you allow them to enter their own product information -- which you don't have any way to verify. There's no World Authority for Product Information that you can check against. And not all sellers use Fulfillment-by-Amazon where Amazon holds the inventory; plenty of sellers ship the product themselves, meaning that Amazon never has an opportunity to see or inspect the product. Even if Amazon had a policy requiring new sellers to ship a product to Amazon to inspect, that wouldn't stop malicious sellers from shipping something different to customers.
Sellers have a lot of power to describe the products they're selling that they legitimately need. Unfortunately this means they have the power to list their products as variations of other highly-rated products to falsely make them look like they have a lot of good reviews. This is another one of those problems that is difficult to solve, because you need to give sellers access to describe their products to support legitimate usage patterns, like adding a new variation. (Like Speedo deciding to offer yet another color or pattern beyond their existing 20+).
All that being said, I agree that this should really be one of the easier types of fraud to stop, and don't understand why it's taking so long for the company to shut it down effectively. I think they need to build some machine learning systems that compares product information to review content when new variations are created, to flag likely variation abuse for human review. I also don't understand why variations are not required to all be shown on a single page (which would stop the abuse); there are probably legitimate use-cases that require it.
[1] Here's a link highlighting where it is on the page for the Speedo Swim Cap: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B.... - or just find it by text searching for "Report incorrect".
And yet Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose the correct reason for returns when they receive counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose "This item is a counterfeit" or "I believe this item is a counterfeit", the customer must choose between reasons for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or doesn't work".
You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on their platform would at least try to collect data on the counterfeits their customers receive.
Allowing anyone to sign up and do business on your platform with minimal friction is great for growing your platform, but it's terrible for growing a trustworthy platform.
The things you bring up are the result of an allow-all policy with a denylist. Deny-all with an allowlist would fix the problem. But of course that costs a lot more to implement, and as long as people still buy stuff on Amazon despite the hassle of dealing with counterfeits, Amazon will continue to fail to fix the problem.
Right.
Amazon Reportedly Pressures Small Businesses with Retaliation if They Don't Hand Over User Data
Meanwhile, Amazon Warehouse was slinging hot garbage and getting constant negative feedbacks (80% positive range) and they never got suspended. Amazon Warehouse even cancelled a massive number of their own negative feedbacks by blaming Amazon Prime for things that had nothing to do with shipping.
We were undercutting Amazon on price for a long time, but in the end we threw in the towel because it was just an impossible marketplace to participate in. Interestingly there was another textbook seller that had a similar experience that got their testimony read to Bezos by Congress.
https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-third-p...
It's weird asking "how does killing off the competition hurt consumers?" when literally all economic growth depends upon it.
This was invented from whole cloth by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and Aaron Director, at the University of Chicago, as part of a decades-long project and organisation to redraft US antitrust policy. It was devastatingly effective.
It also has little if any basis in the legislative rationale of original antitrust legislation in the US.
I’d rather see legislation that focused on both improving worker wage and making it easier for new companies to enter the marketplace and compete with Amazon rather than punishing Amazon for having a store brand or whatever (store brands very often seem to be a good thing for consumers, even if companies don’t like being undercut).
Now they say it is a monopoly is a problem after Walmart managed to become the biggest employer in several states and literally becoming the only option in many areas? Now they cite vague unspecified harms while long ignoring concrete ones and claim the ones with no ability to exclude from the market are too far? That just screams "pretext".
but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller product competitors away, reducing their sales and their ability to grow and innovate.
Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other brand sold, and made them cheaper. Great for consumers if the only thing you care about it price.
Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with Amazon on these products.
You end up with less competition and less choice. Amazon can just undercut you, push you down in their listings and get the lion's share of any product type they find lucrative.
Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon?
Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial party so they have a chance to sell their ware.
And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store, the rise of...
And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands. Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear mongering, today there is not a single product category where only one brand exists, there is not a single product category where only the Walmart brand exists.
Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge today because Walmart was so huge before it; people actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of spite.
Competition cannot be stopped, except by regulations. Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making sure they'll never let anyone else in.
Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
And?
>And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store
So... Walmart was outcompeted by the Apple Store?
The vast majority of companies are incapable of self regulating because it is contrary to their primary mission of 'maximizing shareholder value'. This generally just means eliminate your competition and then maximizing profit. In the absence of competitive markets, the government often needs to step in at some point.
It depends on what you call the marketplace. Look at the broader "retail" sector
> The eCommerce giant [Amazon] accounted for 3.2 percent of total consumer spending in Q2 (spanning all categories, including retail) and 9 percent of total retail spending... When it comes to consumer spending, Walmart accounts for 3.4 percent overall and 10.2 percent for retail. That’s up from 9.6 percent in Q1 2020.
Walmart has a considerable share.
> so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't
Do you really think Amazon has more pricing power than Walmart? I'm much more likely to switch online retailers than my brick and mortar store. It's a lot easier to compare prices and switch.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2020/amazon-and-walmarts-...
The analogy I would use is that e-commerce retail is smart phones in 2008 (maybe a bit later) and the broader retail market includes landlines and feature phones. Even today landlines exist and feature phones are sold. The growth trajectory for e-commerce won’t change and big box retail won’t encounter a meaningful resurgence. Amazon is the second biggest retailer alone as compared with Walmart which primarily makes money on big box store and has a retail presence in name only (if you take just their online sales it’s not meaningful competition). The concern is that the reason Amazon holds such dominance in e-commerce is because it’s really leveraging cross-market dominance. AWS subsidizes their marketplace to be extra competitive, their data on retail has them introducing first-party products that compete with suppliers selling through their platform by focusing on high-margin items.
The better question is whether or not this kind of behavior needs regulation, or needs regulation yet. I’d argue yes having read the story from the diaper.com founder and Bezos’ laughable diversion.
As for ease of switching, I think e-commerce can’t be directly compared as the driving user behaviors are different. I could argue it’s easier with a big box store because I could just drive to a different one, use my CC and move on whereas in e-commerce I have yet another account to manage, I have to make sure I’m not getting scammed, etc.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I like the convenience of online shopping, but I also like convenience of immediately taking possession and curation. I'm price sensitive of course. I buy most of my electronics from Best Buy. Their prices are almost always the same as Amazon and if they're not its trivial to ask for a price match, which they always do.
Obviously Best Buy or other retailers can't stock everything, but they can stock a lot of the things I want to buy in Electronics. And they leverage Amazon search, ratings and price. They're just more convenient. They have been doing very well over the last decade.
I think people extrapolate too much of the current trends. Physical retail has been around longer than Amazon and will likely be around when Amazon is gone.
There's basically nothing on Amazon that can't be purchased elsewhere online, so to say that the answers to the above questions can change because lots of people choose to buy from Amazon doesn't ring of "protecting the consumer". If anything, the fact that so many people choose to shop there makes me think the consumers have spoken and they like the deal they're getting.
Not if the different website becomes hard to find because first pages of Google's search results are sold to better bidders.
if somebody paid for rank, the FTC requires them to disclose the sponsorship.
That seems like it must be true - Going to Lowe's instead of Home Depot takes getting to know a different store layout, and likely at least an extra half hour if you still have to go to HD.
But evidently, by the way people talk about ordering everything from Amazon (despite its numerous problems) and look at you like you have three heads if you talk about going to even say just Target.com, there seems to be some counterintuitive hurdle for switching websites that's actually worse than for physical stores. Perhaps because web widgets are so un-affordanced that figuring out a new one can actually be hard, or that the majority of orders are reorders, or the smaller stakes dopamine feedback from getting what you need while sitting down, or the dark forest feeling makes people extremely conservative. Whatever it is, it exists.
Of course there are also plenty of people who have no problem switching between online stores at the drop of a hat. I'd posit that these people have a model of buying based on manufacturers, viewing the web stores as mere means to some ends, and understand credit card chargeback policies. For example I buy a decent amount of stuff from Zoro (whose descriptions can be lacking), and so I often end up referencing manufacturers' catalogs directly. Which are fantastically informative and easy to read (single PDF, well-specified comparison tables, no middle clicking dozens of search results, no page load lag, no flipping between tabs to spot a minute difference hidden by web chaff, no surveillance, etc), but I'm certainly paying a fixed effort overhead to get to that point.
Whatever the case for such stickiness is, I think one of the best tech reforms possible would be to mandate open APIs. As Amazon (et al) are stores, then their business is selling specific products for specific prices. This data should be openly available such that it can be retrievable by every user agent (no CAPTCHA harassment), and ideally, orders placed through the same system. This would enable price competition as well as UI competition, rather than the two being bundled as they are now.
I think there is truth to this since I personally for a long time would go to Amazon for everything. Over time I have shifted to using them less and less.
However I think it’s just a matter of consumer maturity. Apple Pay has done a lot to make it easier for me to buy from 3rd party websites. There is a lot of money to be made in services to help the rest of the web be more competitive to Amazon. We are just at a certain stage in the cycle.
That’s what concerns me about getting the government involved. These ‘monopolies’ have arisen very quickly - on the order of a decade. Things can change in the marketplace just as fast.
For example, by bundling product sales and web UI, what Amazon (et al) are doing is making it so that customers have to use Amazon's software to shop Amazon (and conversely they're prevented from using software of their own choice). Of course Amazon's software hasn't been designed to benefit the user, but has been designed to benefit Amazon - eg "dark patterns". Hence my call to unbundle the two by mandating API access. A public API is straightforwardly in Amazon's capabilities (it's literally just making a version of their website in a predictable format without all the extra crap), and would tie right into your "services to help the rest of the web be more competitive to Amazon".
Facebook et al are doing the same thing with regards to Metcalfe's law, and a similar remedy would be appropriate.
Not that I think any specific legislation will be anything resembling sensible reforms. Hell, we'll be lucky if it doesn't end up being a boon for big tech.
This is true of almost all online stores and nobody is proposing legislation against it, so it’s not at all clear what you are saying.
Government mandating APIs seems like a fatally destructive move against software freedom forever.
I actually like house brands of stuff, when compared to the thousands of gensym brands. The problem isn't marketplace companies privileging their own brands - it's with singular companies owning the marketplace to begin with.
Humans are creatures of habit, and the way to make it so we aren't in the habit of just buying everything from $Amazon is to replace that with the habit of buying things through non-affiliated aggregators. I'd rather have one familiar UI showing me (Amazon Basics, Zoro Select, HDX, etc), than multiple UIs each showing me the same "competing" gensym brands.
All this focus on fixing particular companies or government mandating software architecture seems like it just gets the government more and more invovled while not doing anything to prevent the actual abuses.
And so any attempt to do that will necessarily "get the government more and more involved". Either through some administrative body that decides whether a certain thing is a "dark pattern", or through judicial remedies ("Here is your 57 cent media credit because Amazon lied about shipping cutoff times. They admit no wrongdoing but promise to never do it again").
Meanwhile mandating APIs isn't mandating "software architecture". It's merely just a different form of the website that has a predictable structure. Amazon could even choose whatever structure they want, as long as it is documented and versioned.
Both approaches aren't mutually exclusive, so I'm not arguing against the former. I just don't hold out hope for it to create meaningful reform - centralized bodies are just as likely to bless abusive practices.
That is software architecture.
Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a central website, just as an example, would be illegal.
This is just one example of how the future would be encumbered forever based on a 90’s software architecture becoming enshrined in law.
The web as it is today is not some endpoint in software evolution.
A Government mandated API is literally the government regulating software architecture.
That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that. There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.
There would have to be a lot more than that. Who would govern API quality, what about service levels, how about authentication and sign up? Data formats, etc. Would these all be up to the vendor? What happens when there is a bug in the API?
> That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that.
No, see above. It just isn’t that simple.
> There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
Well this isn’t what you said before.
> Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.
Not at all. There is no reason at all for distributed store network would need to have an open API. It could operate in terms of user facing pages for people to interact with - or be like a network of chat bots.
You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.
It seems to me that you are the one who is pulling in details from today, asserting that they must be incorporated into any law, and then pointing out how that's a bad idea.
My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.
>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
> Well this isn’t what you said before.
This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.
Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access. For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI. You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.
Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to. After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.
Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.
In general, you seem to be succumbing to the programmers-don't-understand-the-law trap whereby you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.
You say this but then go on to pull in far more detail from today than I have...
> My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.
False. Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.
>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility. > Well this isn’t what you said before. >This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.
As already stated, the front end is not the same thing as an api suitable for clients. Maintaining a stable API is quite different from building a front-end site.
> Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access.
Is it? Front ends often require sign up for read access. Why wouldn’t an API?
> For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI.
Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?
> You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.
Ahh, so this is just about how things are built today with minor tweaks.
> Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to.
Ok, so your law requires people to dictate formats?
> After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.
Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?
> Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.
Seems like you have just introduced an architectural requirement to be able to run old versions in parallel with new ones. Who determines the person of time?
> you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.
You are the only one talking about bad faith. I’m simply pointing out that supporting API clients requires architecture that is different from only supporting UI visitors.
If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API unless you engineer one separately. No bad faith needed.
I'm referencing details that today's businesses are already operating with. I'm not proposing them to be part of the law, but analyzing how a generally abstract law would be applied to today's implementations.
> Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.
You're right. I tried to simplify by leaving off the network, and that was a mistake. It is true, a business offering in-person user-facing software would have to design a protocol to get the data out of memory (ie a security boundary). But when a business offers the software over a communications network, such serialization formats are already a requirement. So I do have a second assumption of a communications network.
> Front ends often require sign up for read access
I have yet to see a popular consumer store that requires a signin to browse products.
> Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?
Because we're still talking about businesses who have chosen to make their software available over the web. That is complexity that they've chosen.
> Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?
Whomever, at your own individual choice, as they're not bound by network effects of selling products as well. I'd personally choose a local client from the apt repository or nixpkgs.
> If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API
So you're telling me that the back end engineers at Amazon just make whatever changes they feel like, remove the old version, and the front end engineers just deal? Or when the front end engineers want some additional data, they simply edit the backend code and deploy it directly?
In reality, there is versioning and change control going on internal to any large company. But once again you're blindfolding yourself to the common structure and customs that already exist, only to throw your hands up.
I really don't see how we can productively continue this conversation, as you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity and then point outing how complex it is, rather than focusing on my proposal as stated.
FWIW, look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation forever, while leveraging modern industry consensus to provide a massive market benefit.
No - they work as a team and make changes together without any regard for the needs of API consumers outside their company.
This is exactly the point.
Front and back end teams work together to make changes and don’t have to maintain a stable API for any other consumers.
> look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation
If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.
> you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity
It’s not orthogonal.
Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden on someone’s architecture.
This is patently false.
If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand, then it would be possible to reason about them, but simply denying them leads nowhere.
So you agree that they already have to maintain stable APIs for each other? Meaning the mandate would be just adding a requirement for external visibility into the existing internal process, not anything significantly different from what they're already doing.
> If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.
So are you closed minded to analogies in general, don't appreciate that the physical layer has its own complexity, or what? The same type of arguments you're making were also levied at micro USB, by companies trying to keep their bespoke proprietary connectors so they could charge $50 for a spare phone charger. In the end they lost and the market benefited.
> Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden
I agree there's a "burden". It's a small burden. One easy bound on this burden is that it is much less effort than developing a mobile app or another whole website specifically for mobile users. And most companies have eagerly done both.
> If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand
You keep using this word architecture. The current de facto deliverable includes XML or JSON documents. The deliverable for the mandate would be differently-formatted XML or JSON documents. Calling a second formatting an "architectural constraint" is a stretch.
https://blog.softwareag.com/in-future-retailers-may-be-missi...
Amazon doesn't do shit with marketplace inventory. Sellers are either stocking it themselves, or they are explicitly paying amazon to hold it in their inventory.
The difference matters because retail stores always have an incentive to sell the things they stock. Even pure consignment stores will refuse to consign items that they don't think they can sell. Amazon has zero incentive to sell marketplace merchant stock, as they bear zero cost to not sell it. So anytime they start to compete against their merchants, they can effectively hide competitors listings in a back room out of sight and never have to deal with the consequences of doing so.
These are almost all 'control brands'; similar or identical products from the same suppliers, but they don't have marketing spend allocated to them. The delta in sales between the control brands and the 'brand-name' ones allows you to calculate goodwill.
I’d like to see how well they would perform on Target/Best Buy shelves, they probably wouldn’t sell at all. Therefore the only origin for their success is an abuse of marketplace ownership, and it has distorted the market, and therefore has harmed consumers by simply reducing quality brand’s ability to scale, by imposing higher shelf costs for the same brand exposure, and therefore fewer sales.
Although it’s not a monopoly — and another law should be drafted against competing on a marketplace you own.
> and therefore has harmed consumers by simply reducing quality brand’s ability to scale, by imposing higher shelf costs for the same brand exposure, and therefore fewer sales.
How come brand name items cost more on the brand’s website compared to Walmart’s brands on Walmart’s website? There is no shelf cost online.
What is more likely is this is a simple example of price discrimination or price segmentation. Theoretically, you can earn the most money by selling each item at the maximum price the buyer is willing to pay. But if the buyers all have varying levels of income or willingness to pay, how do you scale this? Obviously, you can't barter with every single person for every $5 bottle of lotion.
What you can do is create various brands, and maybe differentiate the products slightly, or maybe not. Similar to binning with silicon chips where the chips with higher probabilities of performing better and longer get sold for higher.
So Walmart can go to Johnson and Johnson and say hey, you're selling Lubriderm for $5, make me some lotion that's similar or lower in quality (but still acceptable to Walmart), and we'll sell that for $4. Now, J&J get to sell their $5 lotion to people willing to pay $5, and a cheaper line to people wanting to pay less, but they don't have to lose the people paying $5.
And they do this in many, many layers. P&G, Unilever, J&J, and others all have countless brands they use to hit various price points. And the products may be the same, or may be marginally less in quality. And maybe it behooves some people to pay more for the extra assurance of quality.
I think the difference is that the playing field is more level. Most stores that I've seen won't make it harder to buy the name-brand version or easier to buy the store-brand version (aside from the store brand often being cheaper). They tend not to really market the store brand, so the name-brand version generally has advertising behind it and is often seen as superior, even when it really isn't. The two versions sit side-by-side on the shelves without preferential placement to either.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon gives preferential treatment in search results to stuff that gives them a better margin, regardless of whether or not it's a better product or a better value.
I don't necessarily agree that they wouldn't sell outside their own store, though. I generally look at the store brand as the usually-cheaper "generic brand". For example, if I'm looking for cold medicine, I'll never buy NyQuil, because the equivalent store brand is more or less the exact same thing and is cheaper. But I don't really care which store brand. If the CVS-branded version somehow ended up in a Walgreens, I'd still buy it. (Obviously CVS would never sell the Walgreens version, but... yeah.)
(Speaking of mom-and-pops, I actually find it annoying when I need cold medicine, walk into my local corner store, and only find NyQuil rather than the generic CVS/Walgreens/whatever store brand. The corner store usually sells NyQuil at an even higher price than the chain pharmacy would, and there's no alternative.)
I don't understand that comparison at all. Do you know what percent of the Target floorspace is Target owned brands? Or Ikea?
Imagine being a store that sells its own product, AND wants to augment their own product with some third party products. Like a sweatshirt company that also throws sunglasses on a rack. They arent really "making" either of these things. In one case they are throwing some branding over a product and having having it manufactured by contract. The other they buy generic wholesale. Because they want to sell both branded and unbranded goods they shouldnt exist? That would shut down nearly every retail business in the country overnight.
Where has the idea of a neutral marketplace ever been realized in brick and mortar America?
Last time I needed one, I was unable to buy an effective bandage wrap in person, I had to order online. My local Walgreens only had their own house brand "self stick" type that doesn't really stick at all.
Went to buy some wrist braces, again, only their house brand. Many styles of wrist braces exist, they sold one type, the type I didn't want.
For some house brands, such as Costco, they provide a huge competitive force in the marketplace. An example is Costco Diapers, which are rated really well, and basically establish a price at which other "name brands" have to complete. There is a possibility that they are creating a downwards pressure on the price of diapers overall. (Or that they are colluding to ensure prices don't fall too far, huh, never thought of that angle before!)
My local grocery store's brand is generally untrustworthy. I hate it when they are the only option for buying something. The 3 times I have tried their yogurt coated pretzels I have gotten an upset stomach, and I normally have an iron stomach that allows me to eat street food around the world with aplomb.
Funny enough their house brand "sweetened flavored sparking water" is really my preferred brand, so they get it right some of the time.
But from one perspective, isn't this argument hypocritical of us? If I go to a baker, I kinda expect everything in the bakery to be "store brand", and in fact many bakeries been scandalized for not selling their own goods! Heck if I go to my local farmer's market I expect what the farmer sells what they grew, and again if they are just reselling produce, social media scandal!
This entire idea of stores being a "marketplace" for multiple brands is only a recent aberration.
So maybe what are seeing is just things are just slowly returning to a world where everything is "store branded".
Replace marketplace with platform, anyone who calls themselves a platform and competes on the “kill all competitors” level should be regulated as common carrier/public space.
There are numerous ways to identify platforms vs marketplaces and not all of them are related to total market penetration. But I think the legislation should look in that direction, give the FTC the power to declare a company a platform in its space and then allow it to regulate that company in the same way utilities are regulated but obv updated for the internet age.
I think the biggest hinderance to this sorta thing is that all law makers are increasingly biased and refuse to acknowledge their favor. They pretend instead that they are in fact impartial and any appearance to the contrary is simply necessary due to the importance of the issue at hand, or the extremists involved (“I’m really a centrist, they’re just nazis, so I appear to be far left” and vice versa).
Nope, total Apple and Oranges.
Forbidding other HTML rendering engines on iOS, prevented other massive players (Google) from forcing their browser platform onto Apple’s user base and Electron-ized Apple’s ecosystem making iOS a marginal runtime.
Or worse, Adobe could have spun their own Adobe Flash app “now with web access too!”.
It’s not competitive advantage, it’s strategy
You don't use the right back end, therefore you aren't cool.
It's absolutely absurd. I mean, about on par for teenagers, but gah... I can picture the conversation about "Your "friends" are complete morons, and you shouldn't feel ashamed or ostracized at what is probably one of the most silliest social signaling practices on the planet."
It hurts being an engineer sometimes. These networks are marvels of human ingenuity, and people take them and use superficial differences in UI and completely miss the point.
God bless. I keep thinking UX/UI can't get any worse, but what humanity takes out of it never ceases to amaze.
Ha! They're teenagers. They will invent new divisions as needed.
Imagine if Google suddenly made their Chrome browser behave differently on Google websites compared to others, like 0.5 the performance for no reason. This could be seen as a strategy to increase engagement on Google properties, but I'm fairly sure most of us would see it as an attempt on monopolizing the web in Google's favor. Why is it different for Apple and browsers? They are intentionally making it impossible to create competitors to their own browser, for no technological reason besides "we don't want that".
I don't have to imagine. https://tech.co/news/google-slowed-youtube-firefox-edge-2019...
From a market dominant position it would be Antitrust material. Not in this case: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
(rhetorical question, I know)
Besides, there’s plenty of choice on the market, unless you want to complain about a car manufacturer selling only their own models...
> car manufacturer selling only their own models...
My car doesn't tell me who or what it's willing to transport. Yet.
I think that these things should remain under the control of the operating system.
I've not seen the argument about desktop shortcuts?
Notifications are one of those features which has already been added and is a nuisance in 99% of cases, but I can see there being one or two use cases where a website sending notifications without requiring a full native app (and approval process!) is worthwhile.
The "should this hardware be available to the browser" fight happens for every feature.
And to complete the scenario: 1 dominant supplier whose interest is not ideal UX but just invasive and pervasive tracking, and all other actors - being marginalized to mere window decoration - don’t invest a penny in challenging the dominant‘s position, and content themselves with scooping some adware crumbs left over from the market dominator.
Does that sound familiar?
It does seem like you get it wrong on purpose.
It's 100% competitive advantage. The main driver of Apple's lack of support for Flash was to damage the web's ability to distribute DRMed video and force it into apps on iOS, where Apple could rent seek a 30% commission from subscription fees.
Perhaps the decision to not include flash could have been due to performance/battery?
Remember: Adobe was dragging its feet on MacOS because why bother, Windows PC is the market, iPhone was mostly welcomed as a “won’t fly” and Flash for iOS would have been another drama of unfixed vuls, shoddy performance and battery drain. (I guess everyone forgot or wasn't still around, reminder: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...)
Not unreasonable to imagine Google making Chrome engine prio 1 on Android and “perhaps later” on iOS.
You can imagine how well Jobs took that.
They now allow it by the way. I don't know why. I am using Firefox on iOS and it was supported for at least half a year AFAIK.
Your point still stands obviously.
So yes, you're using Firefox, but you're still using the same rendering engine for your browser, as any other browser on iOS. Effectively limiting how powerful browsers can be on iOS, as Apple has full control over Webkit and doesn't allow anything else, literally anti-competitive behavior.
With this in mind, when you’re asking for alternative rendering engines, you’re really asking for Google to be able to get their hooks into iOS. It would be nice if Mozilla were free to develop their own engine but that’s not without downside and the most likely outcome is an iOS dominated by Chrome and ad-tracking.
The impacts go beyond iOS. The reality is that Safari is the only thing standing in the way of Google having IE-style dominance of browser usage share. As of now, Chromium has just under 80% usage share. If Chromium were as dominant as iOS as it is on desktop, it’s usage share would likely exceed 90%
Alternate engines are a fine idea in principle, but we need to consider whether a Chromium monopoly on the web is indeed an improvement from the status quo.
One could claim since Apple IS the iOS market, for them to disallow competitors in certain app categories but not others, they are indeed abusing their position as a market owner, especially since they are the only one allowed (by them) to develop a browser engine.
This is what PWA really boils down to isn’t it. It’s not about standards or openness it’s about money. It’s about bypassing the App Store to do whatever the fuck you want.
As to your other point, yes if Safari started doing anti-privacy things, I would ditch the iPhone and go Android. Right now, they seem to be supporting my privacy.
Same goes for Apple - with no ability to build an alternative browser engine the market IS handicapped, especially since Apple is abusing this restriction to prevent web applications from competing with applications from which they charge tax on every single monetary transaction.
Apple on the other hand are preventing alternative rendering engines. It’s a very different situation. That’s not to say that it isn’t problematic, but it not as simple or as cut and dried as “but Microsoft and IE!?!”
Right now, Fortnite.
Got a better example?
And Apple has the moral high ground wanting a cut of proceeds because they make it easy for children to get to the casino? Not a great analogy.
Rent seeking on things you find immoral?
> Perhaps Epic didn't want to abide by these rules and used the fees as a cover?
Is this something Apple has alleged? Because otherwise it looks like you're speculating wildly to appeal to emotion. "It's ok because maybe they're bad people."
I did say perhaps which, last I checked, is a sign of a rhetorical thought.
Apple is not perfect, I don't like Apple, but epic is selling crack to kids in my community. at least apple keeps intermediaries between them and their child slaves. I'm not taking sides here. All these huge companies are deplorable and should never have been allowed to grow so large.
> android is just handicapped because I can't run a different OS, or screw around in the OS and change things to my whims
You totally can. I've been running LineageOS for a while, it's great. Improves my battery life, allows me to quarantine apps, gives me more access to the firewall for adblocking, and lets me get rid of cruft like the launcher. You can even completely de-Google Android, or install a community-maintained shim called MicroG that enables some of the features without the tracking.
The Android situation could be much better, this is why some people are excited about Linux phones. But I don't know a ton of Android users who are clambering to make it harder to use storefronts like F-Droid. I literally can not imagine going to a phone platform that didn't support NewPipe, I watch too many videos on my device, using the official Youtube apps would degrade the experience way too much.
I do think that the number of Android-exclusive things you can do is much lower than it used to be. It used to be pretty easy to make a compelling case that if you cared about flexibility at all, you bought an Android phone. I don't think that's the case anymore. But Apple still hasn't really stopped being Apple, so while the differences have become a lot less glaring, they also haven't completely disappeared. And sure, you can get some of this functionality back by jailbreaking, but in comparison the vast majority of the stuff you do on Android won't require root access, and all of the apps I listed above can be installed on a stock Android device without flashing or breaking anything at all.
Whether or not iOS users actually care about that stuff... :shrug: I suspect many of them don't. I'm not going to try and make a giant case about whether your average person on the street wants to be able to emulate Gamecube games on their phone. But I also don't really care; I'm a consumer and I want to be able to emulate Gamecube games on my phone. I'm a consumer, and I want to be able to install alternative Youtube front-ends that increase my privacy. I want to be able to block ads in my browser.
At the moment, Android provides an alternative for me. I'm very lucky that I never got locked into Apple's ecosystem so I don't have to make a choice between losing access to my credit card and being able to have a user-respecting Youtube client. But if you are locked into Apple's ecosystem, making a switch between phone platforms can be really prohibitively expensive and time consuming, so I sympathize with people who are in that position.
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[0]: To be fair IFTT is pretty good, but it just can't offer the same level of functionality.
[1]: I know someone will jump in on this, but adblocking in Safari is just not comparable to Firefox. There is no way to get what I would consider to be adequate adblocking on the web in iOS.
[2]: Microsoft/Nvidia have only been able to launch on iOS using webapps, which given Safari's current limitations are arguably a worse experience than having native apps.
To say that you can just install lineage is disingenuous. I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch so my argument stands against these phone manufacturers as much as they do against Apple.
Simply, my perspective is that people are going too hard on apple and not hard enough on Google. They both need to be broken up and forced to allow more programs on the products they sell. Epic is tainting the argument and trying to disingenuously spin their self interests as a benefit for consumers.
> I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch
Valid concern, but this is less a Google problem and more a hardware problem. Google isn't doing anything to block LineageOS, it just takes time to support the new hardware. You'll see the same problem with consumer laptops and Linux. This is why we have increasing movement to try and get Open hardware/firmware. Nevertheless, the situation with LineageOS is still comparatively much better than it is on Apple hardware. At least with LineageOS, you don't need to find a jailbreak to get it working.
Part of the reason Apple dominates these conversations is because it's the most obvious, clear example of what we're talking about -- not because the situation on Android is ideal or because we wouldn't like the Android situation to be better. Check out the discussions about the Librem 5/Pinephone if you're interested in getting involved in the effort to make hardware compatibility better in general.
> epic seems to be dominating the discussion
It's not so much that everything revolves around Fortnite, it's just that Epic is currently one of the biggest forces in play surrounding antitrust. It's a bit like how Google and Oracle dominated the conversation around API Copyright -- not because Google was a saintly company, but because they were currently arguing about it in front of a judge, and that's a newsworthy event that might have large effects on the industry.
That being said, I'm also a little bit confused about why you're voicing this objection here, because this article doesn't mention Epic at all, and outside the comment thread that you started, I don't really see anywhere else in the comments where anyone has brought Epic up. Fortnite was 1 out of 10 apps that I mentioned in a comment thread that was originally talking about Apple's refusal to allow alternative browsers like Firefox. So while Epic is certainly getting a lot of coverage in general, it's not like nothing else is being talked about. I certainly didn't zero in on Epic in my comment other than to list Fortnite as one of multiple examples of apps some consumers might care about.
On the note of "unequal coverage", it's also worth mentioning that the legislative effort being covered in this article is targeting both Apple and Google and would affect both companies equally. So I'm not even sure it's accurate for you to say that Google is getting a free pass legally. The Judiciary Committee is certainly not ignoring Google right now.
If Apple didn't position itself as privacy-focused, then not allowing other browsers would be clearly violation, but if this is basically part of the product description - and many people buy iPhones in the first place because they don't want or case about other browsers - they want safety - why should Apple be forced to do it?
When there's articulable harm.
Microsoft forcing the junk that was IE, and all their other thuggish tactics, is articulable.
The differences between chrome and safari are insignificant enough that you'll bore most people when trying to superficially explain how pretty much the only people negatively effected are advertisers, who have been avoiding their public reckoning over the straight up horrific things they do in closed rooms.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios, but that'd be news to me.
Well, developers of modern web apps can offer a qualitatively better experience on those other platforms in some ways than they can with iOS Safari. The offline working features are one clear example. The use of open (=> cheaper and sometimes better-performing) standards for things like audio and video content is another.
Unless you contend that the only reason any web developer ever uses the features available in other browsers but not iOS Safari is to abuse or exploit users, in other words that no-one is (or would, if Apple supported them) make any legitimate use of those features that would improve the user's experience in some way, it is clear that users are materially disadvantaged by the limitations of iOS Safari, unless they have the choice to use another browser that does offer those features instead.
Users don't object to a lot of things when either they aren't aware of them or they believe they can't do anything about them. That doesn't mean they aren't still being harmed.
Not sure of Apple’s full motives, but I think this is at least part of the reason other rendering engines are not supported.
Okay so WebKit cannot be used as is, but then why forbid other alternatives [1]? Seems like a Catch-22.
> It seems like an engineering challenge to expose these features to arbitrary 3rd party frameworks in a way that doesn’t allow these features to be abused.
How does literally every single other platform manage this? AFAIK none of Android, Windows, the many Unix-like OSs, even Apple's MacOs have such restrictions on browser apps.
And I think it'd be unfair to characterize the users of those other platforms as being "abused" by their browser apps. E.g. Firefox seems pretty trustworthy.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ - "2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."
They don’t. All of those platforms are less secure than iOS.
Do you have a source for this statement, specifically in relation to browsers?
Let's consider Android. I wouldn't automatically assume that using Safari on iOS is more (or less) secure than using Chrome or Firefox on Android - they are all provided by well known tech companies with years of expertise building browsers and a focus on security.
Controlling the execution environment is part of iOS’s defense in depth strategy. Focussing on browsers alone is a red herring. You have to look at the whole system.
It’s true that Google or Mozilla may be able to produce an equivalent level of security in a browser engine, but that’s a false comparison, since alternative browsers are not limited to just these companies.
You can also verify that the world is run by lizard people by googling.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/
We kinda know because people keep using Google. If people thought the results weren't good, they would switch to bing.
Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is not. Microsoft compelled their hardware partners to not do business with competitors, Apple is vertical regards to hardware.
While I like protocols and interoperability, it’s hard to achieve that through antitrust laws because antitrust focuses on consumer harm and without monopoly power that’s hard to show. I’m trying to think of any anti-trust for non-monopolies or threat of monopoly and can’t.
Should my NAS have to include third party browsers just because they have a browser?
Given that Apple is very deliberately resisting the adoption of PWAs in order to protect their app store, I think it's fair to say they're playing dirty. I mean, why are they restricting other browsers from using their own web views?! So that they can't implement annoying web push notifications (which users can turn off anyway)?! That's a terrible excuse to hold the web back, and it annoys the heck out of me. Especially given the number of apps in the app store with a bunch of security issues and equally annoying push notifications.
As shocking as it is Microsoft's "bing" does the same... Some more: duckduckgo.com does the same as well. (ok it uses microsoft's stuff underneath)
To be fair I am surprised with the results.
If you search "earth" on bing or duckduckgo, google earth is the first result for both.
I think you are overreacting to how many searches give Google products as the first result.
The only products that do rank high are literally the most popular products. What do you think they should rig the results against themselves? Why would that help people?
What happened was that the DOJ did everything they could to get Microsoft broken up. They got pretty much the entire country on their side, and during the trials they extracted some hilarious quotes from Microsoft and Bill Gates, like arguing about the definition of the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby" email. Details emerged about their "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish" policy and their plans to try and bulldoze the free software movement.
Popular perception of Bill Gates and Microsoft at that time sunk to an all-time low [0], picturing Gates as a greedy global capitalist, and Microsoft as a cartoonishly evil company. There was no small fix, the only option left was to to shatter Microsoft into multiple pieces, the way Bell Labs had gone. That's what the final ruling said.
Then George W. Bush comes in, clears out basically the entirety of the DOJ, guts them to a fifth of their size, and tells them "never do that again". The case then went to appeal, where it was reduced from a mandatory break-up to a small fine.
The DOJ never went after big tech again. Bill Gates resigned as CEO, and decided to go into philanthropy to clear their image, like many capitalists do.
Because this is a Gish Gallop of weak individual reasons batched together to make it seem like a stronger obvious argument when it’s not.
> How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it?
They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads. You need to be more specific.
> How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace?
Go to a store, this is what Walmart, Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, etc have been doing for longer than any of the FAANGs have existed.
> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
> Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more general results?
Because it’s their algorithm to do with what they want. If they want to erode public trust by using it to advertise their products, that’s their choice. Other things they adjust the algorithm to do: filter malware, filter porn (by default), filter unreliable sites, etc. You’re going to have a really hard time defining what’s “fair” for a black box algorithm to do.
> They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads.
Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to put people into their ad funnel.
They control 50% of the mobile OS, 70%+ of the browser monoculture, and nearly 100% of search. They can order sites according to which ones use AdSense or AMP, neuter ad blocking (especially of AdSense), and collect behavior across the web even when website owners don't want it.
They're fucking up an entire set of technologies to further their goals.
That's not monopolistic. That's horrific. I don't think we even have a term to describe this yet, it's so bad.
We're all getting Big Teched.
You can call any company as a monopoly if you define its market narrowly enough. The hard question is making a good argument for your choice of market. Google is absolutely a monopoly in search advertising. But is search advertising the right market to consider? Google would argue the appropriate market is advertising as a whole, where they are clearly not a monopoly.
The ultimate question at hand is whether and to what extent consumers are being harmed by anti-competitive practices. I think in Google's case that's a hard case to make. It might be a bit easier for e.g. Facebook or Amazon, though.
It’s completely unfair that Starbucks is taking away consumer choice by not selling Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
They take their blood money.
Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
Furstly, which law or court case actually establishes that those business practices are right and proper?
Secondly, which law or court case establishes that smartphones can be equated with game consoles? There is a huge body of law that governs mobile connectivity, spectrum, emergency services, etc. that has no bearing on a gaming device.
The question in court will not be "is money laundering illegal" or "is taking money from random people illegal". The question in court will be "does this amount to money laundering, or is john just an idiot and it was not his responsibility to know".
Similarly, here we are discussing not "is market manipulation illegal", but "does the activity carried out by Apple amount to market manipulation"
Comparing Apple to game consoles is basically: "stop selling drugs" - "John does it too, and he is not in jail, so it's fine."
That argument only works if John has been to court and a judge has ruled that he is innocent. That's case law - it established that previously, in similar circumstances, a court has rules that this was / wasn't a crime.
Mens rea ("guilty mind") itself is not a uniformly applied principle. But it's the name of the concept you were attempting to address above.
See also actus reus ("guilty act").
And note that in tort liability (as opposed to criminal liability) other standards may apply. "Strict liabilty" is more typically applied in civil law, though there are (I learned responding here) some applications in criminal law as well. In the latter case it seems to be similar to my understanding of prima facie violation. That is, the fact of a thing is a violation of law, regardless of intent.
> Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
Letting anyone put any software they wanted on an Xbox/Playstation/Switch would diminish the platform's value by eroding security and trust.
For instance, compare online cheating ecosystems between those three platforms and the PC (where you can run any software you want). The PC is a much, much worse platform in terms of cheaters, scammers and account hijacks.
I have no problem with people running whatever they want on the hardware they purchase, but extending that to "I should also be allowed to be trusted when I do this" does not logically follow. In other words, feel free to reflash your Xbox, but don't expect to be able to play games or connect to your Xbox Live account from that hardware after your jailbreak.
This about not allowing competing browsers as a blanket policy. If this was trully about security, Apple can do as many security audits as they want. They can even charge for them. They can require affidavit, security officers, insurance policy, indemnity, etc.
But they dont because this is not about security, it is about controling the market
A large part of Apple's brand, at this point, is security from snooping, personal privacy, etc etc. It makes sense to control the browser on the iPhone for privacy than it does to seek to eliminate browser competitors. Safari isn't a crucial part of their revenue, devices with the security promise are. Furthermore, the browser seems to be the key space where use privacy is violated from, via cookies and other tracking software. If Apple want's to say they have a pro-privacy device, controlling the browser makes sense for that goal.
It just doesn't make business sense for Apple to be attempting to control the browser market. Maybe you mean they are controlling some other market through the browser, though.
Moreover, when one is selling something that involves transferring all rights in tangible/real property being sold to be transfered. Here apple is reserving the right to decide what can and cant run on the device. This clearly is a violation of property rights. Last I checked apple did not have people sign rent/lease agreements for the hardware.
I'll be the last one to prevent you from running your own software on the hardware you bought. So, knock yourself out: Wipe all the nasty, evil Apple software off of that device and have your way with it. I would not expect any help from Apple about how to do this.
This argument is straight up disingenuous- Apple is actively preventing you from running whatever you want on your property and they are preventing you from repairing it. You cannot get them to remove their crap from it.
Conjuring up some arbitrary boundary constrains device maker innovation, reliability, security, and other consumer value.
You are free to pick your own water line, find a device that draws the line there, and vote with your wallet — or make and market your own thesis.
For instance, to be competitive in terms of performance, a browser almost certainly needs to JIT Javascript. If a platform prevents apps from generating code and enabling the 'X' bit in PTEs then this isn't going to work. Even if the platform provides JIT services (e.g., pass in an AST, out pops a few pages of callable code) there is still a ton of added risk.
Designing and maintaining the security of a platform is a ton of work and a big investment (assuming it's done well). Security teams are already quite busy, and adding whole app categories that are suddenly able to break previously established design decisions is not easy -- "just do a security audit on a handful of titles" is a phrase that we've all heard, many times, and it sends shivers down our spines. Having seen it tried, and been on some projects that did it, I think it's impossible to do well even at a small scale.
Been there, done that, seen projects canceled because PMs couldn't internalize the nature of the risk to the platform.
To which the two biggest counter-arguments are:
1. “So don’t allow black box algorithms”
2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company which owns all the other products”
> 2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company which owns all the other products”
This doesn’t solve the problem. They can still alter top listings to push things for “preferred partners and truths”.
Anybody with Search experience confirm or deny this claim?
Pretty redundant if you ask me: black hat, SEO and crap.
/s
We here know that, politicians don’t seem to and they set the rules.
Regardless: the fear here is that Google itself is gaming its own algorithm — or just directly bypassing it because they can. I make no claim about the validity of this fear.
If society wants to make sure algorithms are fair, it may decide one option is to ban black boxes algorithms — if DNNs can’t be comprehended, that means no DNNs. Alternatively, if society says the only way to have a black box is to not compete in the domain the black box judges, then Google et al will have to change their business models.
The other problem with transparent algorithms is that they are trivial to game. Gaming is almost certainly worse than obscurity.
B. Hence the alternative of “don’t let the company which runs the algorithm benefit from the results of that algorithm”, which I’ve phrased differently in each post on this topic.
There are really clear conflicts of interests, even if you believe (as I happen to) that they are not exploiting their positions to the detriment of consumers: Google has products and services which people search for using Google’s own algorithm; Apple gets to write and enforce the rules of the App Store while having products in that store; Amazon sells both e-book readers and owns a e-book brand & platform, and would benefit from the Amazon.{com|co.uk|de|etc} stores listing the Kindle devices higher than they might otherwise be.
Again, I am not claiming they are actually engaging in anti-consumer behaviours (that would be outside of my expertise, and anecdotally I don’t feel like I’m being harmed by any of this), I’m saying it’s a conflict of interest and society is suspicious.
> The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
The iPhone is a general purpose computer, not a gaming toy. You do finances, email, chat, dating, games, spreadsheets, GPS navigation, photos, video - your entire life, all one one device.
For half of Americans, this is the only computer they own.
For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you can use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
That's mafia behavior.
Gamers can choose between Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC, Steam, Epic, and dozens of other platforms. There's lots of choice, and this is just one industry with a very narrow impact on consumers' lives.
Mobile computer (aka smartphone) users get to choose between Apple and Android for the entirety of everything they do, and both of these companies try to butt into everything. They even want to control banking and payments.
The App Stores aren't given to us benevolently out of the good will of a loving Apple and Google. They're means of exerting control and extracting profit in a monopolistic fashion. They both need to die.
> For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you can use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
30% (or even 15%) of $0 is $0.
Apple gets nothing from me for my finance apps, my email client, my chat apps, my spreadsheet apps, or my GPS apps, because they are free.
I can’t comment about dating apps as I’m not using any. Complaining that Apple charges for gaming, however, is weird given you choose to reject them as gaming devices.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3500919
I first seriously discussed how Google is a systematic internaliser with my cofounder in 2003. The next year Google together with a consortium of major publishers abandoned and wrote off a $350MM initiative to enable trading in traditional and print media and the Advertising Age piece even reported specifics why they were disbanding which read close enough to what we began doing since 1996. The reasons involve a lot of micro market theory and since there's a involved corporate history that's about as much as I can say other than it looked very clear to us that Google merely found that the traditional media had managed to stitch up their markets in similar ways without any theoretical appreciation for their actions.
definition :
Companies are people too!
What reason is this? As far as I'm concerned you should be allowed to install whatever you want on game consoles as well.
I’m just fine with saying this thing is an appliance that does what it does, including only accepting paired cartridges (gate-kept apps).
Consumers buy toasters instead of open grills for valid reasons, same for mobile devices. Forcing the toaster maker to support open grilling is over-regulation, the opposite of letting markets decide. If consumers don’t want a no muss no fuss appliance, they can buy something else.
This one is substantively different. Amazon claims it is a market and not a store, and is therefore not legally responsible for things like the quality of products sold there or how they are represented. They claim that both buyers and sellers are their customers, unlike an actual store where only the buyers are the customers.
So when Amazon decides to set up its own logistics company, no problem. When they use private market data to place their own products into their market, that's a different matter.
Amazon claims this, but at least in California they still face product liability: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-court-appeal...
While on its face the outcome doesn't seem surprising to me, this may nonetheless turn out to be a very important national precedent as California was, IIRC, the first jurisdiction to both clearly establish strict product liability for manufacturers and also extend that liability to intermediate sellers in the distribution chain.
The California decision makes a lot of sense.
Looking at their business model with their ownership of the customer relationships, control of the payment methods, and the co-mingling of inventory, it's hard to claim that Amazon is just matching buyers and sellers.
I'm not really in the "break-up big tech" camp. We already have the laws needed to make companies play fair, we just need to enforce them.
That said, the whole Amazon Basics model is kind of questionable. I could see that being split off and forced to operate without access to private market data or preferential placement in the marketplace.
The garden department at your local department (Wal-Mart does this. So do most home repair places) store is operated by another company. So too is the salty snack aisle, soft drink aisle and many other departments where an outside vendor is basically renting shelf space, and paying the rent in margin at the register. In all of these cases, the store also has a house brand that is in the same aisle, competing with the big brands. So, what Amazon is doing is really the same, but in an ecommerce format. BTW, department and grocery stores were running their own logistics company long before Amazon even existed.
Ben Evans shares a lot of good arguments here: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
When people say they got a solution to “the problem” for me this sounds every time like they not even started to understand anything they are talking about.
FAANG is a sui generics case. And looking at Amazon’s service, I believe they do a lot of things right that others do not. And that’s part of “the problem”.
How can Microsoft control what games you play on Xbox or how can Nintendo control what games you play on switch?
Why are grocery stores allowed to sell private brand products that compete?
I'm worried we don't quite have a good grip on how to solve this problem.
All of these "What about x" points just make me think that we need to go further and stop those as well rather than using them as a justification to not bother.
Ha! Did you even check? Chrome is available from a long time
This book [1] has been very influential in influencing the approach.
For my part, I think the fundamental business model of profiting from user engagement (where screen time is money) is toxic, and we can’t fix anything until we find a way to effectively eliminate it.
On top of that, these companies spend millions on lobbying and have SO MUCH INFLUENCE among DC insiders that reform doesn’t have a chance. It’s more corrupt than anything Hollywood ever made about Big Oil.
I believe our elders called it Democracy. Nowadays they call it decentralization.
Direct government by the people is sometimes called demarchy, in contrast to democracy.
“The rule of the people has the fairest name of all.”
I think term limits, pay reduction, and abolishment of the Congressional pension would be an excellent start. It would eliminate some of the career aspects of legislating while forcing lobbyists to regularly deal with new people, somewhat limiting their influence.
However, getting this would require Congress to vote on something that’s against their own interest.
I mostly agree with the other changes, except for increasing pay as a means of eliminating the motivation to play games. If there's one thing we've seen play out over and over, it's that excesses and greed just beget more greed. Look at the number of executives, financial managers, and politicians who already had vast wealth yet STILL engage in shenanigans. Furthermore, the job of legislating is an elected one, which means it will always go to those who are best able to convince the most people to vote for them (frequently by promises and pandering), not those who will do the best job. Now, I don't think legislators should get pauper's pay, but I also think we should do what we can to limit it's use as a career path for power and wealth.
I have no problems with capitalism. If the market has healthy competition and the referees (regulations and the courts) are fair and transparent, capitalism is good. Unfortunately, many of those elements have gotten worse in recent decades. We regulate more than ever, but it's the small businesses who suffer the burden and have no real voice in DC.
Capitalism done right means that I'm not upset by Wal-Mart's success, as it's kept in check by other companies like Amazon and Target. If you think anybody is invincible, take a look at what happened to Sears, K-Mart, and Toys-R-Us. Capitalism done wrong means that big companies use regulations and unfair referees to keep out competition. The power wielded by FAANG today dwarfs anything Microsoft ever had.
You want the best? Usually have to pay more. People in congress are barely paid anything as far as the private market goes. (<$200k/yr and that’s while having to live in two places and frequently travel between them) Considering how many have law degrees and other professional degrees, being a congress person certainly is a step down in terms of certain income. They just make up for it with should be illegal forms of market manipulation. (And other things)
Secondly, I've never had any illusion about trying to attract "the best" in Congress. It's an elected position, both the House and Senate, and so it will merely attract those with aspirations of power and wealth who are good at campaigning. Oftentimes we also get people who forge a decades-long career by leveraging the access to power and influence they have in such a position. This last part is toxic, and won't be fixed by increasing pay.
[1] http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/decentralization/admi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
The don’t care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and you profit from it, as other investors also profit.
But causing stock to go down opens you to much higher liability, for hurting investors. And if you profit of it via short, you’re in much more legal risk.
They clearly do, as we've seen with musk's "funding secured" tweet.
SEC vs Musk is perfect example of how powerless/not interested in pumping stock schemes regulators are. Until stock start to go down, then they get more power.
"About 98% of political contributions from internet companies this cycle went to Democrats"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-electi...
https://observer.com/2020/11/big-tech-2020-presidential-elec...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/30/21540616/silicon-valle...
What do you think Trump and Zuckerberg talked about when they would have dinner at the White House?
Another way to look at it is to look at the PACs run by tech companies. These are paid into by employees (often they may sign up to give some small amount of their pay automatically, and then forget about it), but they tend to make donations in the companies interests (mainly to an assortment of politicians with an aim to be balanced in some way) and do not lean massively towards democrats, or even towards politicians that align with the companies’ stated values (I’m talking about values that tend to be pro-immigration or pro-lgbt for example here). Two big tech companies that don’t have a PAC are Apple and IBM. Microsoft has one that disappears for a few months when employees start complaining about it (but it doesn’t ask for its donations back from politicians which it can do with likely success)
Although these four corporations differ in important ways, studying their business practices has revealed common problems. First, each platform now serves as a gatekeeper over a key channel of distribution. By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy. They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them. Second, each platform uses its gatekeeper position to maintain its market power.
By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they have surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals, and have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive threats. And, finally, these firms have abused their role as intermediaries to further entrench and expand their dominance. Whether through self-preferencing, predatory pricing, or exclusionary conduct, the dominant platforms have exploited their power in order to become even more dominant."
Well they're not wrong...
Is this accurate? I would think control of the infrastructure is with companies like Comcast/ATT/Verizon/Verisign/ and others who you can’t bypass by typing in different characters into the URL bar.
Would it be more accurate to write the big tech companies have control of the network of users?
FAANG on the other hand all get their hands dirty in deciding what content people get to see and what not, which would largely be a non-issue if there was mainstream competition, but there isn't, so rather than change their behavior and support/make/demand alternatives, consumers (including politicians) want Big Brother to step in, somehow forgetting that rarely solves anything and will simply consolidate more power with those who already have it.
EDIT: I found the link further down the thread https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP...
Facebook and Twitter are profound influences on politics. I look on the politically aligned mainstream news, practices like gerrymandering, the general state of political discourse, do some quick joining of dots and ... well. Political involvement isn't going to move the situation in a direction I like.
FAANG is bad. I'll be on the record as saying whatever comes out of the House will be proven worse in time.
(At least in our part of the world that media seriously outstrips any kind of influence FB and Twitter yelling has.)
More people get their news from social media than from... let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's from people linking content from those sources, but the point being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social media than they are specifically checking their news media feeds.
Most of the time spent in SM is consuming/sharing content from news media and their affiliated contributors.
Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust.
More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society.
Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.
“Over the first full week of 2021 (Jan. 4 through Jan. 10), CNN ranked first among cable networks (roughly 2.8 million viewers per day; 4.2 million in primetime) followed by MSNBC (2.3 million per day ;3.8 million in primetime) and Fox News in third (1.7 million per day; 3.2 million in primetime).”[1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-news-v...
Whether or not you use Twitter and Facebook, that's what journalists spend their time doing, so one way or another it's affecting the news.
Not sure what else to expect; they’re human after all.
Fox News pumps legitimacy into it. It's explicitly partisan but done in the style of a conventional news broadcast. That helps normalize and smooth the echo chamber that comes from the generalized outrage machine of social media. That allows the extreme wing and the supposedly moderate wing to coexist, while slowly shifting the Overton window away from the latter and towards the former.
So there's no way to say which is more important. They use each other, not always in ways that they like but ultimately towards keeping them pointed in the same direction. The combination is so much more effective than any of them alone, while simultaneously having enough redundancy that you could remove any one of them but quickly reroute around that damage.
Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address that. Is the idea that any proposals would require moderation practices that follow certain standards set out to avoid "political bias?" I can't understand this push as anything other than a punitive measure to hurt tech companies.
Those news networks have deplatformed Mike Lindell because him actively spewing conspiracy theories on the Dominion voting machines undermines their defense in that lawsuit.
Not all big tech business, just the no-prior-review dissemination of user-generated content.
EDIT: At least, without some kind of financial protection against publication liability, such as the user providing indemnification with proof of adequate liability coverage. So, things like say Github Enterprise would still exist but probably be more costly once all associated costs are take into account, but free-of-charge individual accounts would either not continue or, if MS could subsidize them from Enterprise profits and saw value in having them, they’d be much more aggressively scanned for “bad” content and summarily deleted if there were any signs detected. And the same kind of calculus would apply all over the net.
It would definitely narrow the voices that have reach, both in number and ideological distribution.
It might not be the single biggest economy-slowing piece of legislation adopted in the history of the US, but…ok, yeah, it definitely would be.
The idea is to return to the non-online liability regime where reduced (distributor, notice-based) liability for unlawful content generally requires the absence of involvement in crafting/altering/moderating content (though it does allow binary select/not-select, including with an ideological bias.) 230 allows immunity to publisher (on its face, and as applied by the courts even distributor) liability so long as its terms are met.
This probably wouldn’t help the cause Republicans nominally seek to advance with it (though it would help the cause of narrowing political engagement that they are pursuing through every other means, which suggests an alternative motivation to the public one), since while it might encourage providers to not moderate content from users while continuing to allow them to distribute material on the site, it would encourage blanket bans like the one Trump received, at a minimum, or shutting off public access entirely; its dubious that free public distribution, even with ad support, is viable online with distributor liability generally applied , and its clear it is not with publisher liability generally applied. Responding to notice of unlawful content on more than a best-effort basis (as distributor liability would require) is very hard to scale, and preemptively preventing it entirely as publisher liability would require absolutely does not scale.
It's a meaningless flag to gather behind, not something they ever wanted to actually do. They can shout their support because they know the Democrats will stop it and thus fall into the "bad guy" role. It's a wedge issue now.
I believe this is very detrimental to the web and the economy. Founders need to have that as an option for an exit though. What are the alternatives? Limiting ownership to 49%?
No they don't. To rephrase, you're suggesting that companies are entitled to getting bought out. That's ridiculous. Owning a company is a privilege, people who abuse that privilege, billionaires, should be stripped of that power. Corporate America is cancerous, consuming and destroying everything indiscriminately for vanity, numbers on a screen, and authoritarian control over the less privileged.
A privilege you think should be held by the government?
Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs of all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and wants of consumers without causing harm. When Companies, and the people that own and operate them, cause harm, it is the obligation of government to remedy these problems through action, forceful if need be, against the offenders. Governmental failure to remedy problems results in vigilantism without fail.
I didn’t.
> Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs of all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and wants of consumers without causing harm. When Companies, and the people that own and operate them, cause harm, it is the obligation of government to remedy these problems through action, forceful if need be, against the offenders. Governmental failure to remedy problems results in vigilantism without fail.
What has this ominous generalization got to do with the question?
And even if you limit discussion to only tech startup companies, taking away the option of selling the company in the future completely changes the risk calculation. You'd end up with fewer companies getting started, which would entrench the big players even more.
What happened to building a profitable company, or at least one close enough to ipo, and “making it” that way?
Nothing, the option is still there. Just depends if you want to risk it and work your ass off, or accept the security of a lower reward now.
I disagree. You can't name them because they aren't worth billions of dollars and they don't make any headlines. They're usually called "lifestyle" businesses on here, and while sometimes this site discusses them most discussions are about building the next Google.
Acqui-Hiring is the new recruiting model.
Very roughly paraphrased, assessing tech talent has become so painfully difficult that the most effective model is essentially to assign a class assignment to a set of founders, along with a few million in seed capital, to build some Minimum Viable Proof of Talent. The seed funders act as matchmakers to the buying (typically: tech monopoly) firm, and take a finder's fee. The project is shut down (it's done its work of demonstrating competence), and the team is brought into the acquiring firm.
https://hbr.org/podcast/2021/01/big-tech-and-a-decade-of-ant...
There is some talk about Office though.
Major units at Microsoft:
OS. This one is old, gone through anti trust stuff already. There's Mac / Linux.
Cloud. Azure is competing against AWS, GCP, everyone else.
Gaming. Xbox has Sony and Nintendo.
The strongest monopoly argument is still operating system/office, but even that Google is eroding away at office. The server market is dominated by *nix.
Microsoft do have enormous stockpiles of cash and are acquiring things and behaving similarly to the others. But their major monopoly has already been tested and their power is waning according to market share (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).
I don’t see their power waning. Their control of Office and Windows lets them bundle things like Teams and OneDrive, which puts pressure on smaller companies like Slack (sold to Salesforce) and Dropbox, who have a harder time selling when MS is throwing in OneDrive for free if you’re already buying Windows/Office/Exchange/Azure/etc.
Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat rooms aren’t innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-billion dollar rewards?
I made no claim regarding what ideas deserve what. Simply that Microsoft is not losing power, by showing the kind of effects it can have on other businesses.
And the server market is not dominated by *nix. Public facing websites, yes. Corps are full of Windows Server. Filled to the brim.
Ok but by that argument, Apple wouldn’t be considered dominant either.
They've reached a settlement which was not even a slap on the wrist. They've agreed to share some APIs and have a couple of people in charge of ensuring compliance for some years. Nine states + DC objected the settlement claiming that it didn't go far enough, but the appeals court dismissed their objections.
In my view Microsoft antitrust is blown way out of proportions and didn't achieve absolutely anything concrete. One can claim that it discouraged similar behaviour in the next decade or so, but that's about it. As to why Microsoft is no longer considered a monopoly, I'm more of an opinion that it's Microsoft's internal decisions that did that, not anything antitrust-related.
The only thing the law could really do to "fix" the problem would be to outlaw the "free app that harvests people's time and attention to make money" business model altogether. And every lawmaker who voted to do that would be voted out of office by all the people who are angry that they can no longer have their free apps.
The root problem is not "Big Tech". The root problem is us.
You’re going to need to get an entirely new electorate to get anything real happening.
I could only find one person with a technical background that is at least computing-adjacent.
(I didn't produce this research, I commissioned it, so there may be factual errors.)
Link to full research: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kbpQgU5YQSOmyyhOUCkmjCrrj4C...
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ANTITRUST, COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW PROFILES
Technical staff: Anna Lenhart
Anna Lenhart: Technologist - B.S. Civil Engineering and Engineering Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University (2011) - M.P.P., Science & Technology Policy (Artificial Intelligence), University of Michigan (2018)
Non-technical staff: everyone else
Slade Bond: Chief Counsel - B.A. History, Mary Washington College (2008) - J.D., University of Kansas School of Law (2011) - LL.M., Intellectual Property and Information Privacy, The George Washington University Law School (2012)
Lina Khan: Counsel - B.A. Political Theory, Williams College - J.D., Yale Law School
Phillip Berenbroick: Counsel - B.A. Political Science, Tufts University (2004) - Law, University of Virginia School of Law (2008) - JD, Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Amanda Lewis: Counsel on Detail, Federal Trade Commission - B.A. Political Science; Latin American Studies, New York University - J.D. Law, Columbia Law School
Joseph Ehrenkrantz: Special Assistant - B.A. English and Government & Politics, University of Maryland (2014) - J.D. Law, Georgetown University Law Center (2020)
Catherine Larsen: Special Assistant - B.A. Political Science and Government, English, University of Nebraska (2014) - J.D. Law, New York University School of Law (2020)
Joseph Van Wye: Professional Staff Member - B.A. Political Science and Government, Brown University (2015)
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY PROFILES
Non-technical staff: everyone
Perry Apelbaum: Staff Director and Chief Counsel - Bachelor General Studies, University of Michigan (1981) - J.D. Harvard University, 1984
Aaron Hiller: Deputy Chief Counsel - BS Biology & BA Philosophy, University of North Carolina (2003) - J.D., MPP, Georgetown University Law Center (2007)
Shadawn Reddick-Smith: Communications Director - B.S. Communications and Public Relations, Towson University
Jessica Presley: Director of Digital Strategy - Penn State University
Madeline Strasser: Chief Clerk - B.A. International Politics, National Security Policy Studies, Penn State University (2017)
Amy Rutkin: Chief of Staff
John Williams: Parliamentarian - B.A. University of Virginia (1988) - Ph.D. Medieval History, The University of Chicago (1995) - J.D. Georgetown University Law Center (2001)
Daniel Schwarz: Director of Strategic Communications - B.A. Political Science and Jewish Studies, Indiana University (2008) - MSc Politics and Communication, London School of Economics and Political Science (2011)
Moh Sharma: Director of Member Services and Outreach & Policy Advisor - B.A. and M.A. Economics, University of Connecticut - M.S. Global Affairs, New York University - J.D., City University of New York School of Law
John Doty: Senior Advisor - B.A. History, Middlebury College
David Greengrass: Senior Counsel - BA Government, Wesleyan University (1998) - JD, Law, American University Washington College of Law
Arya Hariharan: Deputy Chief Oversight Counsel - BA Law and Society, International Studies, American University (2007) - JD, The College of William and Mary – Marshall Wythe Law School (2012)
Matthew Robinson: Counsel - B.A. Yale University (2003) - JD New York University School of Law (2012)
Kayla Hamedi: Deputy Press Secretary - B.A. Political Science and Government, The George Washington University (2015) - M.A. Political Management, The George Washington University
Only government regulation is powerful enough to counteract capitalism's natural tendency toward aggregation.
You're probably looking at Facebook, Oracle. Netflix is a small fish.
So do you specifically mean "except the access layer" (not accurate) or "except the last mile pairs" (accurate)? I think the distinction matters when considering monopolistic behaviour, because it determines service quality (access speed, loading times, maximum throughput...)
I guess my argument is Comcast shouldn't be they only competition for coaxial internet if they can't offer an internet only service, without discounts, for less than their cheapest regular rate off contract package.
Every business that they are trying to "crackdown" against faces varying levels of competition in almost every space they are in, and consumers either have numerous options to choose from to get a particular service, or the default that they end up using on is actually the best among the available alternatives.
God forbid politicians focus on taking action against actual monopolies as opposed to these stupid theatrics.
If it cares about monopolies go look at comcast or Disney or big chunks of agriculture or Boeing etc. If the house really cares about privacy, it should look at the patriot act. If it cares about workers, go look at Walmart.
I guess if you think "success" means companies ending up as monopolies, I guess you're right. In general, capitalism gravitates to a "winner takes it all" situations as with more capital, you can also capture more of the market. But we also generally prefer to have many players in the market so competition still exists.
All this work here is trying to prevent monopolies from forming, because currently the US is very much lacking in any tooling to prevent monopolies, as we see in a lot of industries, not just technology.
A step in the right direction it seems to me.
That leaves us with 2 issues I think:
1. If people want competitive markets, that's fine but that's a new policy, and big tech is a bad place to start because it's much more competitive than many many other markets. You can pick 1001 other stores than amazon, but you will be paying with Visa or Mastercard...
2. We need to regulate a lot of new utilities. Are you sure you want the FCC deciding what innovations are allowed in search or social media? Aren't there massive free speech issues there?
https://nyunews.com/opinion/2019/10/01/disney-public-domain-...
Amazon only managed 35% of ecommerce. There are a lot of other companies trying to eat their market (Ebay, Shopify, Ali). Hence prices there stay low.
Technically, the barrier to kids’ media is low too, and there’s tons of it, for free even, but it’s mostly garbage. What Disney has is a curated, higher quality (according to the market) product.
People are tired, their products and services are becoming more and more pushing on a string with regards to quality of life.
The iPhone is more than 10 years old and nothing new came after that.
At the same time people see these mega organizations which are more powerful than nation states, with people like Bezos worth 200B.
When companies are worth 2T with founders worth 200B, the whole "what have you done for me recently" thing becomes pretty extreme, very quickly.
If they want to avoid being broken up they have to at least bring about nuclear fusion or landing on Mars (maybe that's why Bezos is doing Blue Origin).