Hacker News Reader

Comment by zibzab | Hacker News Reader

This is such a BS lawsuit.

It would be so much better for consumers if they had instead looked into googles firebase and play services shenanigans.

View on HN

I don't think this suit makes it any less likely that various governments will come after that angle also. There's quite a lot of anti-(Google|Facebook|Amazon) sentiment floating around in various government entities right now. I assume it must resonate with voters.

>I assume it must resonate with voters.

Most voters care more about things like their salary, healthcare, education, retirement and real estate prices, and in general just making ends meet, not which SV megacorp gets to be the defacto tech monopoly.

Perhaps, though if it's not voters, what is causing the uptick in interest among politicians?

Lobbying from equally wealthy competitors who couldn't become monopolies?

Seems odd that lobbying from what would be much smaller entities would somehow overtake lobbying from the giants.

Would you consider someone like Microsoft a small entity? Do you think they're just gonna sit back and accept that Apple and Google got to shove them out of the mobile space completely?

Not to mention much of traditional media are geared against the interests of the tech giants. It's older villains going after the newer villains.

Fear that tech companies were becoming more influential than the politicians. They're protecting themselves from a perceived threat.

Along those lines, the NYT isn't writing their 100th FB hit piece "for the good of the people", they see a competitor with a platform. And NYT has a lot of cultural power.

What are the Firebase shenanigans you refer to? First I’ve heard of it but I’m interested.

I'd imagine it's something like iOS where you don't get battery friendly push notifications without using services from the OS vendor and there's no way for the user to select a 3rd party service instead.

Which is fine for most users. I don't want every app doing its own inefficient push/pull notifications and tanking my battery, and I am as pro open source/etc/etc as most here.

The result of this is that every app does do inefficient notifications because in many cases it has no access to an external (to the app) notification service on the phone.

Just another crappy smartphone OS feature that works fine on OSes where the developers don't want to control every aspect of the device.

Well, it doesn't have to be a binary choice between that and google offering it. There could be an OS API where you can hotswap who actually delivers those notifications. Right now I believe the google server actually gets hardcoded into the apps using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com