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Comment by kfprt | Hacker News Reader

Buying a company to prevent even a hint of competition seems like quintessential antitrust. Over the last few decades society has really dropped the ball on antitrust.

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Yep, the whole of society. Most of us have a great deal of control over how things are run in this definitely real democracy

I completely understand your feelings regarding a lack of control and agency. Modern politics now essentially revolve around outrage. No politician wants to vote on something at all controversial, every vote they take is liable to outrage one half of the population or another. Every time they do they halve their voting base until it's an irrelevant tiny minority that agrees on everything. So they have outsourced their job to the supreme court, federal agencies, and the parliamentarian. If you can cause enough outrage you will find that they fold relatively easily.

There's plenty of things governments could be busy doing that aren't controversial, but managing the existing state doesn't have nearly the glamour (or reelection PR) of changing it.

These topics tend not to be uncorrelated, so making 4 votes doesn’t leave you with 1/16th of your base, but often with 31/32nds of your base.

How many of us here on this board specifically work at Google or choose to work at companies that integrate with Google or otherwise use their services.

It's always a choice.

It is most certainly not, when your economic survival is dependent on these services. It is a false choice.

I challenge anyone to try and live a normal life completely disconnected from the servers of Amazon, google, Facebook, and Apple. It is impossible.

There's a big difference though between minor ongoing consumption of their services versus choosing to work for these companies.

Please elaborate. Many of us avoid the services of the four entities you mention, completely or almost. Their «servers», or their intrusion (monitoring) more difficult, requires strategies, but there are ways. Where would those four crucial for one's economic survival?

A good majority of media takes advantage of AWS;

From [0]:

> Here are the names that are on record publicly as using AWS:

> Aon, Adobe, Airbnb, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Acquia, AdRoll, AEG, Alert Logic, Autodesk, Bitdefender, BMW, British Gas, Baidu, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Canon, Capital One, Channel 4, Chef, Citrix, Coinbase, Comcast, Coursera, Disney, Docker, Dow Jones, European Space Agency, ESPN, Expedia, Financial Times, FINRA, General Electric, GoSquared, Guardian News & Media, Harvard Medical School, Hearst Corporation, Hitachi, HTC, IMDb, International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, International Civil Aviation Organization, ITV, iZettle, Johnson & Johnson, JustGiving, JWT, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lamborghini, Lonely Planet, Lyft, Made.com, McDonalds, NASA, NASDAQ OMX, National Rail Enquiries, National Trust, Netflix, News International, News UK, Nokia, Nordstrom, Novartis, Pfizer, Philips, Pinterest, Quantas, Reddit, Sage, Samsung, SAP, Schneider Electric, Scribd, Securitas Direct, Siemens, Slack, Sony, SoundCloud, Spotify, Square Enix, Tata Motors, The Weather Company, Twitch, Turner Broadcasting,Ticketmaster, Time Inc., Trainline, Ubisoft, UCAS, Unilever, US Department of State, USDA Food and Nutrition Service, UK Ministry of Justice, Vodafone Italy, WeTransfer, WIX, Xiaomi, Yelp, Zynga and Zillow.

Just AWS (as of 2020, per the artice). Apple could even be included in that list, according to CNBC. How many more are on Azure or GCP? I would argue you're not completely avoiding their services if you're still a 'customer' of their customer, they're just getting a much smaller cut of your (or the advertiser's) money at the end of the day.

[0]: https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws

European companies and retailers are extremely sensitive to using Amazon and Google.

I have a long list of large customers that insist that none of their data is stored in AWS.

> Where would those four crucial for one's economic survival?

(Sidenote, I'm adding Microsoft. I assume your solution isn't "everyone should move to Azure")

I assume that most of us work in tech which, if it doesn't require actually working on software that is hosted by one of those five (or for them directly), requires looking at projects that are controlled by them. Do you use React or Angular? Maybe backend work in Go or C#? Ever use LinkedIn to network (or FB/IG), or use WhatsApp/MSTeams/Skype/GoogleChat to coordinate telework?

And 3/5 of those control all the major consumer OSes. Sure, maybe you run Linux as your primary device, but you probably have to develop stuff compatible with Windows, iOS or Android. So you need those to at least test.

Here's one article, probably not the best, of people trying to blackhole the major cloud providers and how that destroyed the internet experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-t...

I mean you can hardly buy a car now without it including shrink wrap terms of service for google or apple software. Or 3rd parties that share data with them.

I do it, daily, for several years now. In fact, I’ve left the industry entirely as a result of what I personally view as a complete lack of ethics on the part of every tech company.

You being defeated isn’t the same as being unable to live without FAANG.

As far as I see it; Google, Amazon, and Facebook all offer "moral hazard" pay.

A friend of mine is paid quite handsomely to work at Google and considers their compliance with company practices bought and paid for.

Interestingly, they're quitting due to the WFH policies.

Work from home during the worst of covid was the best time to threaten a strike.

Everyone loaded up on extra TP, a work stop was all of not opening laptops for 35-40% of the country.

But feudal exploitation by the rich and each other locally is preferred.

> a work stop was all of not opening laptops for 35-40% of the country

Strikes are social events, you don't do it alone. There's usually a minority of agitators/organizers that are respected/trusted among workers and that call the shots/organize the fun. So working from home is very much anti-organization and hinders strikes. It isolates workers.

Literally isolates.

I seem to recall an invention called “Internet” which allowed for concerts, talk shows, and numerous other social events to occur during covid.

The problem is "mob dynamics". A visible picket line, a blocked street - that creates attention and draws more workers into the strike. On the Internet, these crowd dynamics don't work nearly as effective as they do in the meatspace.

You don’t think Amazon would notice orders not coming in?

Google wouldn’t notice code not being checked in?

Call centers wouldn’t notice Q’s backing up?

No one would notice if Reddit’s front page was days old?

Commerce now relies on people being at computers daily at scale.

Amazon and Google will notice but your local news station will not. Without press coverage forcing the company to negotiate employees have very little bargaining power.

You seem to be of the opinion the stoppage of e-commerce supply chains would be a quiet little event no one would notice?

I don’t care whose grandpa did what 80 years ago. I don’t owe deference to a figurative identity they want to carry around if it’s also literally abusive to the species as a whole.

Industrialist power is a privilege, not a right.

Isn't Twitter a thing?

> the whole of *the USA-n* society.

Being pedantic, I know. But this distinction does matter a lot in this context.

From Europe, where we have our own issues and politics is not better; just different. But where anti-trust cases against American companies is taken serious, both EU wide and by smaller local governments. And where many of us can vote for a myriad of parties, some with "taking large US monopolies down" as a primary point. (pirateparty, Volt, that I know of). Parties who make real chance of taking the lead or getting people in parliament.

Yeah its when Tencent acquired tons of Western story telling IPs in the Video Game space so they can control the narrative of our society.

What I’d like to see is a coalition of companies pitch in and develop an open platform to dethrone Android and iOS. If every big corporation with an app contributed to Mobian, say, it could be done.

I'd like that too, however outside the HN bubble this isn't anywhere close to possible.

Surely if there's one thing the HN bubble is capable of, it's rallying a critical mass of contributors around a project like this.

The HN bubble has intellect and skill, but certainly not the 10's of billions it would take to make a viable android/iOS competitor. At this scale only the government has the power to effect change.

Don't sell us too cheap:

People connected to "HN Bubble" controls hundreds of millions if not a few billions of dollars.

Not every of those dollars are liquid, far from that, but, in addition to the raw monetary value of certain people here HN also commands a lot of attention.

I wouldn't oversell HN either. Arguably the value of HN lies in how relatively few users it has compared to FB or Reddit. Bringing to market a competitor to android/iOS that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions. HN doesn't have that much clout, nowhere close.

> would cost literally tens of billions

You keep saying this as if it was somehow true or relevant. At this stage, we have no real need for an OS that grandma will want to use. That can come later. She can stay on iOS/Android for the time being.

> that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions.

We need a name for this, the classic "someones parents can't use it and therefore it can't work fallacy".

My parents don't use Mac.

In fact most people don't, including me.

Doesn't prevent Mac from being a huge success and a viable platform for developers.

Same with a good number of applications: A few hundred or thousand hard core users. Bonus if one of them is an oil giant, a defense giant, the armed forces of a wealthy country or something.

How much of the HN bubble is already comfortably employeed by these giants at golden handcuff level salaries? I don't think I'd look for disruption to come from here.

At this stage, contributing to Mobian is not a matter of writing "apps". It's more of a boring job of hardware enablement and bringup on existing devices, probably best coordinated via postmarketOS (which has a successful history of upstreaming support to the mainline Linux kernel). The differences between pmOS and Mobian are comparatively trivial, so any work done on the former can easily benefit the whole FLOSS ecosystem.

While I love the FLOSS ecosystem I don't see how it's anything but a rounding error for consumer electronics. Unless there was a massive societal shift I don't see any future that includes a plurality of users owning FLOSS PC's or phones. The best place to start would be to get software freedoms included in the school curriculum.

We don't need a plurality share of the market, we just need it to be useful for power users, like FLOSS operating systems on PC are today. That will make for a great starting point already - disruptive innovation will do the rest.

This has got to be absolute peak HN bubble.

OS's success is almost entirely defined by network effects. This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it. It wasn't better in any way, that came later. 'Disruptive innovation' in software is a myth.

'Power users' on HN are 95% software developers who have a very good experience with FLOSS because everything from the OS to the apps is written by them for them. This is absolutely not the case for anyone else. The number one reason people don't use FLOSS is because they can't get Adobe and MS Office. Without users FLOSS will never get these. Until FLOSS products are the plurality available on store shelves it will never reach the mass market. No one who isn't a software developer is switching to FLOSS and without a massive restructuring of society that will remain the case. I just wish we could be more realistic and work on finding strategies that would actually move the needle. Chiefly by lobbying governments.

> This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it.

Right, which is more than you can say today about Android given the reality of current mobile hardware lifecycles. Make Linux-for-mobile available today, and people will gladly use it to extend the usability of their otherwise "obsolete" devices. The overall setting is in fact remarkably similar.

I would very much enjoy seeing you trying to teach my grandma who has a deep fear of technology to install Linux on her obsolete iPhone.

I don’t care how we get there but I’d like to see a pic revolution of sorts for phones. I’m continuously let down by how quickly modern computing is being locked down. Unfortunately the opposite appears to be happening, PCs are becoming more phone like.

Real scary next step is locking all PCs to MS Cloud and preventing consumers from accessing high performance computers.

Indeed. On the bright side PC gaming may save humanity.

You've obviously never read global chat in Chivalry 2. ;-)

We need a way to manufacture our own computer hardware at home. We need hardware manufacturing to be as easy and democratized as free software development. Until then, we'll forever be at the mercy of these corporations.

That’s infeasible.

Do you expect to be able to press your own semiconductors?

Maybe one day someone will create new technology that will enable manufacturing electronics at home. I don't know.

It all comes down to concentration of the industry. Open standards thrive when one company isn't able to just roll their own stack from the hardware all the way up to the applications; in-housing and locking-down thrive when one company is big enough to just do everything itself.

When Google was small it embraced an open OS, the open web, email, RSS, etc. Now it's big enough that it doesn't need (and therefore doesn't want) open technologies.

Google would block access to its services from that os. Just like they did with windows mobile. And that would be the end of it.

The companies in the best place to do this would be the chipset vendors, who essentially do all the work for Android already. However I don't see the incentive, there are probably legal obstacles, and finally companies generally fail at trying to replace their customers.

> who essentially do all the work for Android already

They don't, that's the whole point. They do the bare minimum of booting up a barely-usable, heavily hacked downstream kernel, and call it a day (or rather, move to the next device release). "Proper" support is left to the community.

Look, I kind of agree with the sentiment, but I think your comment doesn't paint a very realistic picture of the situation. I'd estimate that there are above 3 orders of magnitude more people working on Android at the chip vendors than there are people working in the community. Which, these days, includes quite a lot of user space work, as well as the kernel.

Essentially, any phone vendors other than the big names expects to get a fully-working Android image with their chipset to ship with the phone. And Google also punted a bunch of lower-end userspace work off on the chip vendors as well. Chip Vendors don't just ship drivers in that market. Not if they expect to sell any chips.

Source: Worked at a chip vendor.

OK then, replace "kernel" in my previous comment with "kernel plus a bunch of lower-level userspace". If anything, this makes things worse not better. It means we're re-introducing the possibility of duplicated effort and gratuitous breaks of compatibility in that lower-level userspace, which is exactly what we were trying to get away from via AOSP.

This makes it more important rather than less to work on an AOSP alternative that's far more in line with existing Linux practices in the mainstream, non-embedded ecosystem. And let's face reality, the chip vendors aren't doing it.

Sure. But what happened in non-embedded was that a lot of the chip vendors were eventually persuaded to lend their support to the Linux ecosystem. If that doesn't happen in mobile, the community faces an uphill struggle.

The chip vendors came around because the community was standing behind the ecosystem, not for any other reason. We've been through this before.

> Buying a company to prevent even a hint of competition seems like quintessential antitrust.

Then someone else will buy them then, given that Google was about to buy Twitch but dropped it due to the same reasons and instead went to Amazon.

Won't be surprised to see them do it again or another >$1TN company do this. Who knows, maybe one will create a bill which prevents >$100BN companies from out right buying out other multi-billion dollar companies. Oh wait. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/13/hawley-antitrust-bill-trus...

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