Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store | Hacker News Reader

Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store

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688 pointsdavweb472 comments

There's also https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428415192480698371.

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255798, which we've merged hither)

> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

...

> This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service.

Insane reading.

The new FTC chair, Lina Khan, read this like Birdman, rubbing her hands.

Is she more ethical than Ajit Paid?

Yes

That would not be hard.

Did you think that said FCC?

Shout to bird man!

I don't think she has that much power just yet, my only hope is that the powers that be behind US's industrial military's complex got scared into (re-)action by China's recent moves against the likes of Jack Ma and Tencent, they might just think that the Chinese are right and employing that much human capital into what's essential add- and attention-seeking business is not a good military defence strategy long-term.

With those powers behind her she can do some harm, otherwise I'm afraid she'll be just a sitting duck in front of FANG's lobbyists.

I can see the justification for this in Android's early life. Every Android phone having its own app store would have been a disaster for everyone: users, developers, Google, and even telcos in the long run.

Hard to believe, but Google Play (nee Android Market) was pretty damn shabby until about 2013 or so.

Has it become "a disaster" on PCs or Macs?

No, but that's not the disaster we'd have. We'd have what feature phones were like where you'd only be able to use the carriers store.

On PCs, we had something before app stores. We just called it software distribution.

>> 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores

Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE. Despite Adwords' incredible profitability, Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits... Their Revenues @ were far lower than proportional to their market share, and costs are the opposite. Better to just take your share of monopoly profits than work hard competing, unless you expect to win their place.

This stuff is the norm. Maybe we should switch to being surprised (delighted?) when these guys compete at all.

^https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/08/apple-c...

> Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE.

It's actually between $8-12 billion now. [1]

> Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits.

This is an exaggeration though. MSFT made nearly $8 billion in revenue last year from search (mostly Bing), and the business has naturally high margins so it would be extremely surprising if it was unprofitable on an operating basis. [2] The reality is that search is so huge that it's worth competing in, even if the incumbent has 30X your market share.

[1] https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428416856038072321

[2] https://backlinko.com/bing-users

>>business' has naturally high margins

$8bn in revenue might not mean profitable. Google certainly spend a lot more than this on search and advertising, and well... software scales.

In any case, whether they make $1bn in profit, losses or something in between... This is <1% of market profits. Apple is making $8bn-$12bn, all profit, just on defaults.

GP is saying naturally high margins because it is a pure software play with close-to-zero marginal distribution cost and massive scale.

We don’t know if Bing’s profitable but GP is merely saying that with the circumstances above it is an interesting market for Microsoft to pursue.

Perhaps, but I think it's marginal in practice. Whether MSFT makes an internally accounted 10% margin or 10% loss on their $8bn in revenue, Apple collect >$8bn which is entirely profit.

Cooperating and accepting a slice of Google's monopoly profits is far more profitable that competing would be, in all but the most bullish scenarios.

IE, MSFT would need to be outright challenging Google's 1st place position in search marketing to have a hope of earning more than Apple do by doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.

Also, what would it take for MSFT to compete with Google in earnest? For one thing, Microsoft would need to outbid Google for such deals. They'd need to pay Apple, Telcos, and such more than Google do now.

> by [Apple] doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.

Apple did none of those things with respect to launching a search engine. Apple did all of those things with respect to building an audience of daily engaged (often affluent) users. That’s the investment Apple made to earn the position to cash Google’s check.

It’s likely the payoff is also to prevent apple from building its own search engine to compete. As googles payoff is so lucrative

Maybe, but Google Maps seems to do fine on iPhone. Google and Apple might have their own numbers on this that disagree, though.

Google Maps has a better data collection method (bugging their userbase to collect data for them, encouraging users to collect even more as Google Scouts) and also the dataset of Waze, while Apple has a much more laborious process where an Apple Contractor (initially in Austin or Cupertino) modifies points of interest, business hours, road alignments, etc manually.

Apple started to ship this operation over to India 5ish years ago, and their contractors over there produce much worse results as they are not hiring professional geographers with degrees like they did stateside.

I wish more people would realize they are literally working for Google without getting paid to do this work. If it's out of a greater sense of helping people and contributions, OpenStreetMap needs to be better known.

Russian tech giant Yandex (they mostly do everything that Google does: search, maps, email, etc) has a so-called "People's map", filled by volunteers who transfer rights for their edits to Yandex for free the use in their closed commercial project. I always wondered why these volunteers don't work on OpenStreetMap instead.

Perhaps they simply don't know about it. OSM is doing its own thing and doesn't market itself much to the general audience. But for things that Google/Yandex are grabbing for free (opening hours, whether shops still exist, etc.), StreetComplete should be known much better, IMHO.

It doesn't really help OSM that its home page is considered just an example of what can be done with the data and not positioning it as an alternative to Google/Bing Maps is somewhat intentional.

If the goal is just helping people, why would OpenStreetMaps be preferred over Google Maps?

I love answering questions on Maps and providing information for others (in my eyes: effectively working for them, not Google). Google Maps seems like it has a significantly larger user base, so my contributions help significantly more people.

It's very much a help-and-be-helped community, too. I can ask questions about businesses and have answers from other people in just a couple minutes. I don't imagine I'd have the same quality/speed asking questions on OSM (if they even have that feature?).

There have been reports and speculation that they’re doing just that. Of course it’s worth it for the negotiation threat alone, but Apple also really doesn’t seem to like depending on Google.

I personally can’t see them switching any time soon, as DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data.

That sounds like a cartel to me.

>DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible

I would like someone to make some objective research on that.

My experience is the reverse, so I strongly suspect our reticence is just one of changing our habit more than an real thing.

I switched to DDG years ago and it took a few weeks to wean out the tendency to compare searches, usually brought on by the fear of missing out something.

I very rarely have to resort to a !g search and usually if I can't find it on DDG, I won't easily find it on google either.

I don't feel like missing out on anything and I always find what I need (and if I don't, I can't find it in other searches either).

Other platforms have some strength in some area, like Bing and Google have more tools for image searches, and it's possible that one of these is better than the others at some specific domain, like research papers or patent searches.

But after switching to DDG, all these options are still available and -at least in my case- 99%+ of my needs are met with it.

I've found it's very dependent on what I'm searching for. DDG results tend to match my search patterns better, but it often seems they are missing pages with all the correct keywords that google returns. I suspect it just comes down to Google having crawled more pages, and having had more resources to invest in optimizing result hierarchies.

There is not much interesting stuff on the internet these days outside closed FB etc, so search is just not as important as it used to be.

I don’t use Facebook at all and I’ve never had any problem finding interesting stuff on the Internet (quite the opposite - there is too much stuff and not enough time). What interesting stuff is only available on Facebook?

That's a sad statement. I never even had Facebook and I love the Internet.

I think it's opposite. There is as much good stuff as before but it's drowned in crap, and that's exactly why search engines are so important.

Ironic for this debate to be happening here (publicly indexed, searchable)

You must be kidding. There are worlds of interesting stuff outside FB, in fact if FB ceased to exist this very moment, the amount of interesting stuff around would not diminish by even a thousandth of a percent. If you think interesting stuff is only on FB, maybe this is the time to try and broaden your horizons and actively look outside of it.

Having used DDG for almost a decade now, I indeed doubt any objective research would come up showing the results are never up to par or even better than Google's (or other search engines for that matter). Of course I'm also not going to compare DDG results with others when DDG immediately finds what I need so never really checked that myself actually..

Still, no matter how much I like and promote DDG, I'm definitely not in the 'I always find what I need' camp. I don't know why but DDG is simply bad in some aspects. Sometimes it can be circumvented by altering search terms, but other times I have the impression after all those years its crawling or database is still lacking. I encounter this almost daily, most recent example: searching for 'preamp for hypex' Google and Bing (in private search windows) immediately turn up posts from audio forums I expect to have these topics. DDG just doesn't have those probably, because instead it automatically "Includes results for amplifier hypex" (which I find extremely annoying in any case, and makes no sense in this case since the word 'preamp' is key) and after forcing it to quote each term instead then it still doesn't come up with the expected results.

As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what they want, and want the search engine to be smart and give them as broad field as possible, and if it doesn't, they call it "dumb". Some people need very precise thing in a sea of similarly looking things, and they need the engine to be strict, up to following the exact word order and keeping "filler" words in (looking for "to be or not to be" with common words filter on might be hard :) and so on. And if the engine is not strict enough, they call it "full of junk". It's very hard to find the right balance between the two, especially if you don't build per-user profiles. I'm not saying there aren't solutions but it's a very tricky business with a lot of failure modes.

I can't add research but perspective: I search in English, German, French and sometimes other languages. For EN DDG is hit and miss, I'd say 1/2 times it gives me the result that I'm looking for. For DE and FR the result quality is often much lower.

This means at least about half the time I end up with a !g I'm my DDG search.

I don't think bing will be a useful competitor in the long term, but a company that focuses on non-English national/linguistic markets, especially those with own character sets can compete in that area, innovate and hopefully also branch out on the EN market (see Yandex - RU; Yahoo - JP; various CN players).

I'm sure it is fine for English (American). I'll try it again, but as someone who is English (British) it was awful, and never could get UK localised searches correct.

DDG is so much better than Google for me.

Likewise for me. I think the primary reason for this is the huge decline in the quality of Google search results over the last decade.

my experience (sample size < 5) is that people that use Google with an adblocker have a very nice experience and don't have an adblocker have a miserable experience.

I would say that for the internet as a whole.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all devices for years. I’ve never had a problem finding what I’m looking for and have never felt the need to use a different search engine to get different results. YMMV.

Google results aren't much better, I feel that nowadays, if I want to find anything relevant, I need to use site:, and most often than not, it'll be either stackoverflow, reddit and some other french sites. Anything else is either spam/sales or ebay "proxys".

It's scary how the web feels much more narrower.

Yeah using reddit for a lot of searches is usually my default now.

Search for reddit/stackexchange/whatever pro forums, but on Google.

BTW I wish any stackexchange sites are under single domain.

I found it varies. When I don't find something with DDG, I use !g to switch to Google. Google often finds it.

But the reverse is true too. DDG is now my default, but before, when Google didn't find something, I'd switch to DDG.

There is an implicit learning curve switching search engines. The way one crafts searches differs in subtle ways I don't understand on a conscious level.

Instead of using !g as fallback, I prefer to use !sp. You still get the Google results but they are proxied via startpage.com for better privacy.

I used to mainly use startpage.com, but when they were sold to a subsidiary of an adtech company, I stopped using them.

I use DDG on all my devices, and my experience was very good. I fallback to Google in, perhaps, 1% of cases.

> DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data

Last I checked, DDG's search results are just Bing (aside from the infobox-type stuff which is from their own data sources), and Bing does collect data from Microsoft's browsers and toolbars https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

A year ago, after becoming fed up with my dad clicking financial scam ads, I switched his search to DDG. Thus far, he hasn't noticed.

The tide has shifted this year and ddg is returning better results

DDG search has been much better for me than google and has been for a few years. Google search has become a complete disaster. I'm curious about what you mean by DDG being so much worse.

I've been using DDG for years now and the results are entirely adequate. There are some niches where Google still delivers better results but I need them no more than once a month, sometimes even less than that. I guess it depends on which part of the data set you're hitting...

If I were Apple, I would spend at least $1B of that $7B on developing a secret new search engine :)

I think a lot of people overestimate how easy it is to make a search engine, and underestimate how hard it is to sell search to advertisers.

I think this is closer to a 50B problem than a 1B problem. Not impossible, but I don’t know anyone who has 50B that they would want to spend fighting uphill to kill google.

A 50B$ problem is only 5 years of these 10B$ per year. I’d be surprised if Apple wasn’t on it.

I find this really hard to believe.

Say, you manage to recruit the top-30 engineers who know all the in-and-outs of the google search engine. Add to that, their recent replacement of trad AI methods with full NN I believe, and I can't realistically believe it's not more than a 1B problem.

One of the reasons Google is going horizontal because their search engine can't be "magical" forever, this applies to their ad platform too.

Remaking Google requires engineering talent and lots of clickstream data (ie. Hundreds of Billions of search queries and information about what search results were clicked by which users).

Nobody else has this, and until they do, they won't be able to recreate Google.

Is it not like statistical certainty: i.e. you need a million or so queries to cover the range of your possible outcomes, and the hundreds of billions just takes you from 0.999999 certainty to 0.9999999999999999999?

You do NOT get added benefit from big data by taking it from millions to hundreds of billions. It becomes just a lesson in scale, without bringing any added benefit of insight.

With ML methods, they do benefit from taking data from millions to billions.

You can see that yourself with Google by searching for something obscure (eg. "how to unblock a drain jammed with cat fur") and getting three friends to click the 2nd search result. Come back in a week, and suddenly the 2nd result is now the first result! (ignore the videos and answer box)

It turns out just three new data points is enough to influence ranking for that query. It even affected related queries if you change the word "jammed" for "gunked".

Here are just a few of the things you aren’t considering:

* how many people worldwide keep their google places information up-to-date and not their local government office or their website.

* how advertisers can get value for their search ad campaigns; how to convince them of this

* how much google ad/targeting intelligence comes from off-site (eg Adsense, partner programs, xml ads)

* how many websites and website owners focus obsessively on their google presence making sure that even where Google’s tech gets it wrong they can get it corrected.

* how valuable the feedback loop is: google ads literally tells google what pages and terms are useful, what people like, and what to do more of at scale

* giving away free email and chat to build a whitelist of “good shares”

And that doesn’t cover video or the inverted index you need to provide governments access to emails and search terms. And so on.

These are largely not-software problems.

Apple has all that data, if not better, on a much more valuable audience at that, and can market themselves as "privacy friendly" because only they will leverage said data and won't let anyone in on their platform, and naturally you will trust Apple.

Hell they can even throw a spin on how it's about "privacy" and not about taking another way to bank on their walled garden monopoly and the Apple crowd here will gobble it up with "we are finally free from Google spying, praise Tim and his holy father Steve in heaven".

I've been arguing app stores are a monopoly for years now and the amount of cultist here that were like "Apple is doing it to protect me from bad software" and "I would not use my iPhone if there was an option to install a different store" was staggering.

Sure. Let's say Apple users gobble it up.

Apple's shareholders won't.

They'll want to know where their 10bn (ish) USD went that Apple currently gets from Google.

Is Apple going to increase their device sales substantially because of an Apple search engine? I think everyone who is going to buy Apple has bought Apple, so I think not.

On the other hand, if Apple sells ads on Apple search, and they charge the same fees Google does, they'll still need 50bn in turnover to drop Google; Advertisers aren't going to double their marketing budget, they'll split it based on the ROI, and unless Apple ads convert as good or better than Google, this is a net loss.

It's not a tech problem.

Google is valued like "real estate", it's the best address. And then you need the advertising network for it be worthwhile.

Apple, like Microsoft, can replace google as the default search, but that alone is not a big chunk of the market. It might not be worthwhile.

Otherwise, of course it can be done, and for even less than that.

If some company can sell something to people, even while perfectly fine analogues exist, and then charge double price and have people scream in delight about it - that's Apple.

It’s insane that Google spends more than Bing’s entire yearly revenue in order to buy a default spot and keep their competitors out of it.

Not really. It's a scale issue. Such an expenditure to Google is like a billionaire dropping ten thousand dollars on something, compared to a normal human asked to come up with ten thousand dollars.

Buying a default spot is the interesting aspect here. Google spending more than Bing's entire yearly revenue just means they want that thing, and tells you their relative wealth. I figure this applies just as well to corporations as it does to individuals: if you're going to look askance at Jeff Bezos etc. you may as well keep an eye on businesses with similar disparities of scale relative to their market sector. Not like we haven't seen all this before.

My phone has a hidden app store made by the manufacturer that automatically shows and whitelabels itself when it connects to a Brazilian cell network. The app is really just http://help.motorola.com/hc/apps/brapps/redirect.php (Redirects to https://moto.offerwall.com.br/appbox_moto) in a WebView with a carrier-specific header at the top and some way to install APKs which seems to be defunct as the page only links to the Play Store now.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Adam Smith, right?

yep, but try to consider google whenever a question forms (even in your head). Some questions are curiously resistant to this.

https://www.google.com/search?q=People+of+the+same+trade+sel...

I knew the quote before hand, I wanted to make it clear for others that you were quoting something and not just coming up with an opinion. I phrased it as a question to sound more polite, which seems to have backfired a bit.

Yes, the question mark makes it sound like a question. An option is "by Adam Smith". Trying to "sound more polite" may be the problem - I prefer either brutal directness or genuine kindness to sounding polite.

It's a very well-known quote. IMHO the language and phrasing are too archaic to come across as an opinion, even to someone it isn't well-known to. The curious will google (though it doesn't hurt for you to add attribution).

I hope you'll appreciate that my reply was helpful and charitable - though it too seems to have missed the mark!

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/08/apple-c...

I don't think this analyst is aware that DDG already has a lot of Google influence and isn't for sale right now...

I think this is huge news if the practice is still en vogue? And also defeats the point of Epic’s separate app store right? The major carriers could simply demand the same cut from Epic if it ever gets any traction.

> And also defeats the point of Epic’s separate app store right?

This is why Epic is suing them, to have a judge prohibit Google from illegally anticompetitive behavior.

That’s it, right? That’s the game? There’s no way the DoJ doesn’t have a slam-dunk case with that one quote.

With additional details and evidence, I'd hope so. I'm not sure how this could be seen as anything other than collusion and anti-competitive behavior.

Possibly, but when Janet Reno "had the goods" on Microsoft, she suddenly settled. Mind you, that was a lengthy case with the explicit purpose of splitting up Microsoft. Then, when it was all but cinched, she suddenly reversed and settled for just about ... no concessions. All Microsoft had to do was share APIs.

Even the judge in the case said that Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." [1]

This new situation may be a slam-dunk, but no dunking may actually happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

> Even the judge

This was Judge Jackson, who had his decision overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Also "the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct." A lot of grandiose things were said by people during these trials, many looking to enrich their careers.

Yes, but none of the findings of fact were overturned. The judge had been interviewed, which was the issue, not that the facts were in dispute. In the settlement, Microsoft also allowed PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.

> none of the findings of fact were overturned

Absolutely they were, that's what it means that most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned, and a new judge was appointed to determine penalties. Jackson wanted to break Microsoft apart and slap them with operating restrictions.

> Absolutely they were, that's what it means that most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned

Where is it said that, "most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned"?

If you are referring to the link I posted, the actual words were, "The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft."

Then, just five sentences later it says, "However, the appeals court did not overturn the findings of fact."

That's a technical term, because it's incredibly difficult for an Appeals court to overturn findings of fact. It would require finding the Judge clearly erroneous, and they didn't need to go through the hassle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/business/us-appeals-court...

"In a 125-page unanimous ruling brimming with palpable derision and frustration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nullified all three parts of Judge Jackson's ruling in the case and removed the restrictions he placed on the company's business practices, even as it made reference to many of his conclusions."

I thought this was public knowledge - they compete in some areas and cooperate in others?

For a long time Google was the Apple maps provider (exclusive) on Apple - they had near seamless integration there and in a variety of areas (search etc) - very much acting as one company.

They competed in other areas (google photos on iphone has always been very much second class), google music has struggled vs the apple music player etc.

All these monster players - they are so big that if they were fighting each other on every front it would be a huge mess.

Apple both bitterly competes against Samsung (who copies plenty from iphone) while simultaneously working as a big customer to them.

AWS has the same issues in many area - they will do things like cooperate in some areas with enemies (ie, they'll host Microsoft workloads and MS will facilitate) while competing in other areas (AWS vs Azure etc).

These materials make it sound like they have agreed to split the market such that any competition in areas that are vital to one of the companies involved is deliberately self-limiting. The examples they give is that Apple could potentially compete with Google for search, and that Google could push Android much more aggressively into market segments that Apple currently owns. So as consumers, we're not seeing the fruits of free market competition we're entitled to.

The value is in owning the customer relationship in most cases for the major players.

The capital scale of these solutions has gotten very to extremely high. That reduces incentives to compete in these spaces.

Apple doesn't particularly care to run a search platform because they can extract much of the value of search in allowing others to serve that market (ie, microsoft or google). Ie, these become high profit plays while letting someone else do hard lifting. I'd expect however they would fight like hell if you tried to take away their relationship with their customer.

Even in places they compete - not 100% sure it's worth it. They are fighting it out in maps at huge expense. You need to deliver a global map to your traveling customer base that is amazing (transit, traffic, local POI etc). This is not a small project. Then you have to monetize it. If you told me a smaller handset provider was going to launch a mapping solution - I'd tell you they are crazy!

That drives cooperation especially if a solution is a high capital requirement. Even intel is probably going to cooperate with TSMC (!!!). Some of these capital efforts are kind of insane - 30 billion per year capex type stuff. How many countries have CAPEX expenditures in this scale (ie, not just on operating costs / staff salaries?). These business are larger than countries in some cases.

Android / Samsung absolutely are competing (and copying) Apple in handset space. Ironically they will first denounce apple (not shipping chargers!). That's ALMOST always a guarantee that they will then copy them next cycle :)! I'm not kidding. I'd love to go back and look at everything from an all screen design (bad email machine), to dropping 3.5m jack (which I hated to see happen) to dropping chargers etc.

The Obama DOJ had plenty of quotes in the tech wage fixing scandal a few years ago. They didn't bother to enforce it in any meaningful way.

They even had quotes that showed intent and understanding of the illegality:

> "Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared 'verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?'", the Reuters news agency quoted the court filing as saying.

https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-google-settlement-idIN...

>> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

They're literally a cartel.

It's time to split the Famgopolies. Apple and Google shouldn't be in so many different businesses, killing everything in their wake.

Why the hell does Apple have a film studio? Why does Google have a game studio and cloud? If they keep going, they'll be the MGM and Whole Foods too. (Oh, wait!)

Famgopolies also shouldn't be allowed to dictate their payments stacks, software distribution systems, app approval processes, browsers, or monitoring. Especially not if they're going after every single possible market, snuffing out all of the oxygen in the ecosystem.

If a famgopoly does over 100 things, it shouldn't be allowed to keep growing like the blob.

I really don't want my startup to be a gazelle at the savannah, waiting for the lions to bite at the jugular because they like my idea and market. If I put so much on the line to innovate, only to have these titans duplicate and crush me, what's the point?

I never thought I'd ever cheer for patent suits given all of the trolls, but I was genuinely happy that Sonos won over Google recently. We need more of that.

Edit: incoming famgopoly downvote brigade.

You don't get it, what you describe is not necessarily a monopoly.

You don't need to be a monopoly to be a cartel or take part in anticompetitive behavior that would draw the ire of Congress or the DOJ. I think we've seen sufficient evidence in this to call for having both Google and Apple split up.

Famgopoly is just a play on words to describe these never before seen emergent phenomena. You're right - they're not monopolies. They're something new the world has never seen before.

Famgopolies.

Sure, but the examples you gave were not examples of this. Just because they are in different markets doesn't mean monopoly; only when they have overwhelming influence on a certain market would they qualify as such. Of which you rightly point out they most likely do in certain cases.

There are many huge corporations involved in hundreds of different markets that no one is concerned about because they don’t dominate (and skew) those markets. Corporations spread over many markets is not a problem, a corporation (or a cartel) dominating a single market is.

> monopoly

Most anti-trust actions have nothing to do with monopolies.

> monopolies

ok that's fine

To be fair, the breadth of FAAMG markets pales in comparison to companies like GE, Samsung, Mitsubishi and similar. The major difference is that those companies don't have a complete choke-hols on any one market, and definitely not on something as important as the modern public square, or something as insidious as PR.

Personally, and I know that this is a very controversial opinion, I believe that the biggest problem is the concept of advertising itself - an attempt to distort consumer behavior, whose natural endpoint was always what we're seeing today: massive data collection, use in politics, manipulation on all available channels.

To be fair, the companies you've listed need to be split up too.

Nah, I'm in favor of your comment. You're describing a completely natural phenomenon like it's something bad.

Cancer is completely natural, too.

At some point you have to examine whose interests you wish to serve, and why. Nothing new about that.

Do you remember the no poaching agreement started personally by Steve Jobs? They have been a cartel for decades. They share board members, they compete only as much as not to threaten the status quo.

Nitpick: more than a decade. Google as a company has existed for less than 25 years.

Doesn't absolve them of terrible business practices, just shows that they caught up with them pretty fast.

Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google starting between 2001 (so 2 decades ago) until 2011 and Apple board member between 2006 and 2009. He wouldn't have gotten the position in 2006 of Google and Apple weren't cooperating.

We're verging or even past 2 decades.

I've been saying it for years, but I never thought I'd see either company say anything like that as boldly as they did. It's like something out of a cartoon.

So if they actually said this, it's definitely anti-competitive collusion.

If someone can trace that directly to pricing ... well price collusion is definitely illegal.

Look no further than the price fixing both companies engage in when it comes to mobile app distribution and mobile app payments.

And people on the internet will can you names for using an opposing mobile OS. Ironic.

Enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act.

> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

> Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

A few years in federal prison for the CEOs of Apple and Google might change the situation.

Has anyone ever actually gone to prison under the Sherman Act?

Rarely.

> Jail sentences have also traditionally been lenient. For example, from 1890 to 1970, only nineteen individuals actually went to jail for pure antitrust violations for a total of 28 months. Thus, during the first 80 years of the Sherman Act, the average jail sentence was approximately 1.5 months.

https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2020...

As a CEO, I would love to see the enforcement of these laws. Increasing competition will greatly help our free market. People have lost faith in capitalism because of crony capitalism.

What's going on in America and why is there no actual antitrust enforcement action?

The Consumer Welfare Standard. You have to show that the cartel actually caused an increase in prices for end consumers. This is hard.

Here’s an FTC commissioner explaining the history of it and why we should probably change it. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...

Interestingly, this is exactly what's happening in the console gaming market today; Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have been paying subsidies of millions dollar to renowned studios as well as various preferential treatments on advertising, publishing and marketing of their games.

The difference is that the console market has real competitions which gives more leverages to developers. Google didn't have to do this thanks to its iron grip on the market until Epic have revealed its arsenal. This is why we need to bring more competitions in the app store market; Even if it doesn't bring any real alternatives, this tiny possibility of competition will force Google and Apple to yield more and more to developers.

The first step should be breaking the Duopoly cartel. It's only possible because Apple has no competitions and Google simply enjoys its follower-ship, enabled by their non-aggression pact. Force Apple to allow third party store and payment solutions to dismantle its unfair advantages against competitor apps thanks to 30% fee. This will force Apple to develop Web and Android version of its services which will effectively nullify the non-aggression pact.

Google and similar get 30% of all sales. Many companies will lose money in games and apps published in the store meanwhile Google profits. It seems an unsustainable model.

Force?

Force is the correct term for a government mandating a solution. Whether by introducing new anti-monopoly regulations, or even just enforcement of existing anti-monopoly regulations.

The evidence of collusion between Apple and Google coming out of the Epic case is amazing to me. I'd always thought it was a sort of unspoken "game theoretic" type of collusion (which I'm sure it is in part), but it looks like they've had very explicit communication about it:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428417681351348...

> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

Just incredible.

> "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

Personal feeling after the whole salary fixing case and now this, Google should be forced to move it's head quarters and it's top management to some place like Waco Texas.

These people use the Internet and cell phones.

The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual” punishment.

>I'd always thought it was a sort of unspoken "game theoretic" type of collusion (which I'm sure it is in part), but it looks like they've had very explicit communication about it:

Why would you even think that after the whole salary fixing scandal? There's no enforcement of antitrust law and no incentive not to collude freely and egregiously.

Had Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Paul Otellini, and everyone else directly involved in the wage fixing scandal, spent a year in federal prison per violation, the situation might have been different.

Fair point!

Is fixing wages illegal, like price fixing?

It violates federal antitrust law.

Do we have law and order?

If it's not it should be. You can't push free markets for everyone else then controlled markets for yourself (I mean you can, but it's hypocrisy). I'm tired of the double standards businesses and the capital ownership class have.

"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class."

-Final Fantasy Tactics

if the fine is the cost of the externality divided by the odds of getting caught, then the incentives are still aligned

Incredible that they would allow something like that to be recorded in writing! Apparently they are not even afraid of antitrust laws, judging by that.

This reminds a scene from the TV show, the wire when one of the main criminal character hosts a meeting with other gang leaders and a member of his gang is recording minutes, the main character says "Are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?".

Apparently none of the intelligent executives at Apple/Google figured this out.

While it makes an awesome headline for a tabloid or HackerNews, it's not necessarily imporant. See comments on Reddit that provide some thoughts on that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/p970st/after_another...

Obviously, I don't claim these two comments are correct. I do claim, however, that people are better served by not quoting random statements from a lawsuit without understanding either the context or the applicable law. Especially when only one side in the lawsuit is quoted from.

Those Redditors don’t know what they’re talking about. Documented evidence of two competing companies agreeing to “operate as one” is absolutely damning in an antitrust trial. There’s almost no context that could be given to make that statement not damning unless it turns out this was some sort of antitrust training seminar put on by the legal department and it was given as an example of what not to say when you’re giving the opportunity to collude with the competition.

By "damning", do you mean that the quote alone is obviously sufficient to materially tip the scales in favor of the government should the antitrust lawsuit occur?

If so, what is your best guess as to why the executives (who surely know that) might have chosen to use those words?

> The difference is that the console market has real competitions which gives more leverages to developers.

I see the exact same duopoly as in Apple-Google world. There's Sony and Microsoft(with no independent app stores). Nintendo isn't in the same market as the other two.

Don't Ubisoft and Epic have their own game stores inside of the playstation store?

And given how hard Sony and Microsoft compete to pursuade games to be released exclusively on either platform isn't it a bit of different dynamic?

> Ubisoft and Epic have their own game stores inside of the playstation store?

No. Sony PlayStation is almost identical to the Apple App Store in that there’s only 1 way to get your software working on retail units.

In fact it’s a lot worse in many ways, you need two specific types of hardware to even develop software- Sony is quite old school and draconian when it comes to testing, validation and communication.

At Ubisoft we had entire teams of compliance testers for Sony/Microsoft- and if you ever tried to get content outside of their stores (ie; loading after the game launches) they are quite aggressive about pulling the game down.

I buy my Sony PlayStation games on physical media in six brick and mortar stores owned by three different brands in Belgrade, Serbia. There are also a few online retailers who will send you the disc and you pay the delivery guy with cash. Sometimes I find a game at half the price at one store as compared to the others. I bought PS4 game three years ago in Oslo, Norway, and two years ago in Nicosia, Cyprus, both in different retail stores.

I wouldn't say visiting any of thousands of reatil stores around the world, or ordering online from any of thousands of online retailers count as "only 1 way".

Despite multiple retail outlets, there's still only 1 way for developers to get their game on the platform.

Want to release only on physical media for PS or XBox? Have to go through platform cert anyway.

All copies of those games were produced and sold by Sony.

It doesn’t really matter who resells them, unless it’s a used copy then Sony has been paid — and it doesn’t mean that I as a publisher have an alternative “store” on the PlayStation or that I can print my own disks, which is what the parent stated.

How many ISPs provide transit for the bits from Apple’s app store? Sony has a bottleneck upstream of your retail purchase that’s analogous to Apple’s App Store bottleneck.

The only thing I see that’s slightly different in your example above is the ability to resell the game once you’re done with it.

No. You could then say "how many NIC manufacturers" or "how many UTP cable manufacturers" etc., as though all of them got their cut from Apple's app store (although one could reasonably argue it is true).

If it is the same, why doesn't Apple allow third party stores even to re-sell apps from app store, competing on price and convenience? As this is what Sony does.

I'm by no means fan of Sony, but these are two completely different situations.

Sony doesn’t care what happens to physical copies of the game once it’s sold, hence: resale is not competition.

There’s no alternative to PlayStation getting their cut.

And it doesn’t matter anyway because brick and mortar resales are going away, PS5 has a “digital only” version of the console, and Xbox had the same thing last gen.

> And given how hard Sony and Microsoft compete to pursuade games to be released exclusively on either platform isn't it a bit of different dynamic?

It is different. Both Sony and MS buy studios that end up producing exclusives.

I don't think that is correct unless you have a very narrow "market" in mind. Both Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and PC vendors sell gaming hardware. And both Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and Steam own stores that sell video games. Sure, Nintendo's hardware and software has some distinguishing features. But, they still all compete for gamers attention and money.

As a case in point, it's clear that Nintendo themselves think they are competing with Microsoft, Sony, and the PC space. They pay tons of money to game developers in order for their games to not show up on Xbox, PS, and PC. That would make no sense unless there was some actual competition. I could mention Hades and Monter Hunter Rise as two recent examples where Nintendo paid money to devs in exchange for exclusivity.

Unless I’m missing something, these stores are NOT in direct competition because they all monopolize their respective platforms.

> I see the exact same duopoly as in Apple-Google world. There's Sony and Microsoft(with no independent app stores). Nintendo isn't in the same market as the other two.

Nintendo might be a running joke amongst hardcore gamers but ironically they're the most successful console manufacturer out there.

The Switch is going from strength to strength and I'd estimate it will outsell the Playstation 4 before Nintendo retire it (it's been outselling the PS4 since 2019 already but that's to be expected given the expectation of the PS5). And from the same trial that bought us this submission we've seen Microsoft admit that they've never made a profit on the Xbox. Let's also not forget that games on the Switch are typically more expensive than the same game on other platforms. And that's without even touching the topic of Nintendo's 1st party games -- they make an absolute killing on their IP. Animal Crossing, for example, was seen by many as the unofficial game of the 2020 lockdown.

I predict Nintendo's market position will only get stronger too. With many Xbox fans giving up on buying new consoles because they're basically just PCs at this point. So switching to PCs that can be upgraded over time and still have access to Xbox content. Plus the struggles Sony have had just shipping their latest consoles and many gamers there saying they might just stick with the PS4. Yet Nintendo have calved out their own corner of the market that sits between the ultra competitive hardcore market and casual gamers who want more than crappy mobile apps. And it's a segment that's increasing in size too.

It'll be interesting to see how Valves offering does. I can't see it competing with the Switch directly but it might take more market share away from Sony and Microsoft given Valves new portable offers the capability of desktop gaming on the move.

So anyway, back to your point. You might scoff but actually Nintendo are in a far more stable and successful position than Sony and Microsoft (with regards to consoles).

> So anyway, back to your point. You might scoff but actually Nintendo are in a far more stable and successful position than Sony and Microsoft (with regards to consoles).

I'm not saying its unsuccessful, just that people who play Detroit or Gears aren't going to buy Switch just because PS5/Xbox is out of stock.

You'd be surprised. If the other consoles are out of stock then those gamers might already have a PC or an earlier console (eg PS4). So they might instead buy a Switch despite it not having Detroit nor Gears knowing they already have a platform that does play those games.

A fair number of gamers are disinterested with the latest generation because they don't see the envelope being pushed enough (eg for many, the previous generation largely looked "good enough") but Nintendo offering something totally new (portable plus their own exclusives) offers something more for their money.

Maybe in a couple of years time if/when AAA titles stop offering releases on the PS4 we might see more people pining for a PS5. But a lot of the muted reactions are precisely because there isn't an urgency to upgrade.

Now you could argue that even if they don't replace their PS4 with a PS5, they're still spending money with Sony. But if these gamers also have a Switch -- which many will do -- then their gaming budget is now divided between Nintendo and Sony. Eg if they have £50 next week to buy a new game, they can't spend it in full on both the Playstation and the Switch. Even if they only spend half that on the Switch, it's still a 50% drop for Sony.

So Nintendo might target a slightly different market but they're still affecting Sony and Microsoft's games sales.

> Nintendo might be a running joke amongst hardcore gamers but ironically they're the most successful console manufacturer out there.

I don't think sales numbers are the parent comment's point. Rather, that "Xbox or Playstation" is a common enough question to imply there is direct competition (and there are lots of shared titles), whereas the Nintendo consoles exist more or less in a vacuum.

It's still more nuanced than that. As I've mentioned in my post, Microsoft have been pushing hard the PC side of Xbox. So it's really more Playstation, Xbox and/or PC. Then if you introduce the PC you have Steam and all the other stores too.

Also don't write the Switch off for serious gamers either. Most gamers I know who have an Xbox or PS also have a Switch. Why is this important? Because if someone has £50 to spend on a game, they cannot spend that same £50 on both the PS/Xbox and the Switch stores. So even if the Switch occupies a slightly different market, it's still taking money that might have gone to Sony or Microsoft.

It definitely seems like a lot of people have Xbox and switch or Playstation and switch whereas only the most dedicated gamers have both an Xbox and a Playstation.

You’re missing the point entirely. Microsoft monopolizes all Xbox stores. Sony monopolizes all Playstation stores. Nintendo monopolizes all Switch stores.

But I can buy the same game on all three major consoles. Plus PC. Plus Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic (where I can get it free), or even pirate it with little trouble (if I didn't have qualms with the ethics).

None of these stores do my email, dating, finance, math, fitness, banking, web. They're not fitting the computer role like laptops and smartphones.

Games are toys and have lots of healthy competition. Smartphones are monopolistic dictatorships.

Famgopolies are secretly colluding to take over everything and tax it. To make computing encumbered, unfree, unrepairable, and shackled in surveillance.

Who gives a damn about video game toys when the most important devices in our lives are turning into Big Brother meets Stalin?

90's Bill Gates wishes he was this evil.

Google and Apple need to be split up.

>But I can buy the same game on all three major consoles. Plus PC. Plus Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic (where I can get it free), or even pirate it with little trouble (if I didn't have qualms with the ethics).

You're still missing the point. There is no way to buy a game for Xbox without going through Microsoft's official channels and giving them their huge cut. There is no way to buy a game for Playstation without going through Sony's official channels and giving them their huge cut. There is no way to buy a game for Switch without going through Nintendo's official channels and giving them their huge cut.

Being able to buy the same game on different consoles is immaterial. The stores themselves are the monopoly.

>None of these stores do my email, dating, finance, math, fitness, banking, web. They're not fitting the computer role like laptops and smartphones.

What difference does this make? If they did these things, would it suddenly matter that the only way to get software onto this platform was to give 30% of revenue to the console manufacturer?

You're not getting it either. Consoles are subsidized toys. And there are half a dozen choices on the market, not to mention legacy systems.

Phones are life. You can't do without them. There are two choices, both locked down hard.

PCs went from free and open to Google + Apple duopoly. And the rules are draconian.

Maybe 1995-2005 was an era before your time (given that your username is Zoomer), but modern computing is worse than it used to be. You have no idea what you missed out on, and you're speaking about a status quo that is a definitive downgrade.

Steve Jobs put us in shackles and neck braces. But they're pretty and convenient, so we accept them.

You’re free to get a flip phone from 10+ brands, therefore Apple and Google don’t have any monopoly power over the phone market. Just get a different phone!

The argument of Sony and Microsoft not allowing 3rd party stores on their consoles is an open and shut case. There's no discussion needed there. Everyone already acknowledges that's the case. So the conversion moved on to a more interesting topic: whether Sony and Microsoft have a duopoly. The GP claimed they did and I was making the point that they don't.

The confusion here is you're reading my comment thinking we're discussing a different topic. So it's not me who missed the point :)

I consider myself a hardcore gamer, but I'm still buying an OLED Switch later this year.

If anything 'hardcore' gamers are more likely to buy a switch since they'll be deeply invested in certain franchises, vs a causal gamers who would be on IPhone

There's a massive difference between gamers who don't have 200 hours a month to invest in the latest AAA title and people who are just as happy playing Candy Crush. This is the genius of the Switch: it's accessible enough that casual gamers are happy to take a punt, while still having enough content on there to satisfy some of the more hardcore gamers too. But don't mistake it as a device aimed specifically for hardcore gamers, if anything it's more of a joke to many of them due to older generation titles (like Skyrim) getting re-released and often with worse graphics yet sold for £50 while the same game is available on other platforms for <£10. This mocking gets said time and time again by some serious gamers.

Define hardcore

If I’ve been playing Smash Bros since the 90s and I need to play the latest one , I’m buying a Switch. I consider myself hardcore, I probably play( or make ) games at least 30 hours a week

Of course I have a PC as well. I’m personally looking forward to Metroid and Advance Wars later this year.

My point wasn't that no hardcore gamers own a Switch. It's that hardcore gamers isn't the Switch's target demographic nor it's biggest audience. But you're looking at things too black and white in thinking that logically means I'm saying it's not something anything hardcore gamers would like; which isn't the case.

Like with any product that sells millions, there will be people that fall outside of the target demographic. That doesn't mean there isn't a target demographic or that the company are targeting the wrong group. It just means that either the person is an edge case or the product is versatile enough to be enjoyed by more than just the target audience. In the Switch's case, it's the latter.

In fact that's the point I've been making all along about the genius of the device. Nintendo have not only built a console that captures the imagination of a largely forgotten market, but they've done so in a way that has appeal beyond that market too.

But to be clear, this wasn't an accident on Nintendo's part. They've always marketed their machines as family systems (ie accessible gaming to be shared). That's why their 3rd generation console was called the Famicom in Japan (short for Family Computer). It's why the NES was styled the way it was (a grey box like a VCR so it looked at home in the families TV cabinet rather than looking like a kids toy). It's why the N64 was the first console to have 4 ports built in (ie without needing additional hardware). Why the Wii went down the gimmicky route when everyone else was making consoles for older kids and adults. And why Nintendo's IP is almost always cute and cartoony.

Microsoft tried and failed to make a third alternative and force competition, spending billions to make it happen. As they found out, app makers don’t want to build for yet another platform. It doesn’t matter whether you make an awesome mobile OS, you’ll never get the app makers to support you enough to convince the users, and without the users you cannot convince the app makers.

Meanwhile, in desktop land, there are real alternatives because almost everything you’d want to do runs in the browser well enough (for regular home users at least). But on mobile the browsers are locked down, so the web is not a credible mobile app strategy. Linkedin and facebook oroginally tried a mobile web strategy and discovered that mobile browsers aren’t good enough. The lack of real competition, especially on iOS keeps mobile browsers underpowered for apps and maintains the strong gatekeeping function of mobile app stores.

For me a possible solution is to force platform owners to allow real browser competition on their platforms (again: especially iOS) and hope that is enough to kickstart a browser arms race like we enjoyed on the desktop a decade ago, with the end result being that mobile web apps become a real alternative and we weed out much of the bad behavior by apple and google because they have a genuine competition for the native platform.

Why are you comparing consoles to phone app stores when the more clear comparison is console app stores to phone app stores? As far as I know, every console manufacturer monopolizes all sales to their platform, which is no different than Apple or Google’s app stores.

> Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have been paying subsidies of millions dollar to renowned studios

That's old news =] — now they just purchase all of the studios and "let them do their thing". Probably for significantly less % at the dev end, but, I digress.

Cartelization is nothing unexpected. Just like governments cut all sorts of deals to form geopolitical blocks, so do leading companies in any industry. It's win-win for them. As for "regulators", they tend to drag their feet for a long time, take even longer to build a case, and after all that time, their action tends to be more show than substance. I wonder why that is.

True decentralization is impossible without drastic change in human nature. We can only replace global powers with smaller, regional powers, or a single power with multiple ones. Despite cartelization it is better than absolute control wielded by one entity.

Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.

> Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.

I have also wondered the same, especially seeing not just the massive spying, but also the shoddy quality and extortionate prices that characterize government software auctions all over the world. Especially as multiple regional and local entities often pay for exactly the same management software. It would seem a no-brainer that a national/regional software institute would produce huge savings, better quality, and strategic advantages if it created a national/regional software stack that could be used everywhere.

Alas, I believe that cronyism, market veneration, lack of understanding of software, and the high initial costs are acting to prevent any such effort from even seeming a thinkable idea.

Every time European countries so much as hint that they may look at US tech corporations the wrong way, the whole US administration threatens a trade war.

So yeah, that's the reason.

That alone sounds like a good reason to consider doing it, no?

Back when I was a young software engineer, I worked for a large consulting company which frequently outsourced people to my country's government(s). As a consequence, I gained some insights into government software projects. And it's as bad as you'd expect it to be, or worse.

$gov pays 600eur/day for software developers (which they could hire for less than a third of the price). The pimps renting out these developers have zero incentive to ensure quality in any way. The longer a project takes, the bigger their cut. The developers don't care, they're being grossly underpaid by their pimps, so they ride it out until something better comes along. $gov has zero IT competence, and doesn't realize (or doesn't care) it's being ripped off. Government IT project failures are commonplace, with hundreds of thousands wasted per project, sometimes even millions. $gov can't hire software engineers directly, because governments have ridiculous rules about employment and wages and degree requirements. They can't pay developers as much as they could make elsewhere.

I think it would be a great idea for any government (local, regional, national) to start insourcing their own software developers. Starting small. There would be great value to having a few dedicated teams, in the true sense of the word, instead of a ragtag bunch of consultants. This will require changes to government employment laws. But in my book, it would be worth it.

Long story short: governments can't even get their own software in order. I don't see them promoting "home grown" software any time soon.

As Thomas Sowell has put it:

„Why anyone would expect better decisions to be made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong is one of the mysteries of our time.“

Aint it interesting, how often governments are crippled by inability to hire talent because that talent is improperly credentialed / whatever; but those problems never prevent the mayor's cousin Cletus from being hired to run the Highway Dept.

Governments currently have a critical lack of ambition, they have been captured by global corporations and made to believe only privately owned entities can solve complex problems. This is why software engineering looks like an impossibly hard problem.

It doesn't help that the way to win elections now is to start a culture war, not to make the country they govern a better place (see the UK).

In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

20 years later, Apple and Google bundle not only their browsers, but whole irreplaceable app stores with no legal consequences.

I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.

The law sees it as they have been paid and blackmailed to see it.

There was a report yesterday that showed Apple's lawyers threatening to pull out funding of a minority education school if the state considered any sort of App store laws.

do you have a source available?

https://www.imore.com/apple-used-intimidation-and-lot-money-...

Wouldn't that be Apple's prerogative? There's no reason to do business in a state that's hostile to your interests or pursuits. That's not blackmail anymore than the attempted Hollywood boycott over Georgia's abortion laws a few years ago. There are plenty of well-documented violations of integrity to accuse Apple of, but using its philanthropic investments as a leverage isn't one of them.

"Leverage" doesn't go along with "philantropic".

> I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.

Regulatory capture.

Not only does Apple include its own browser, it forces other browsers to use Safari under the hood on iOS.

Ironically this is the only thing preventing a chromium monopoly with probably >90% of marketshare (Although this restriction is still not that great for the user)

so if this restriction was gone, it would make everything more sane for customer, while finally dealing with chromium monopoly.

sounds like a win-win to me.

How would a chromium monopoly be a win (for anyone but Google)?

I think the poster was thinking it would make Google a clear monopoly, making an anti-trust case easier to pursue.

exactly this.

The tying claim eventually got dropped from the case, though, since the govt couldn't prove that the harm to competition outweighed the benefits of having a browser built in to the OS.

Not in Europe though. We had a WinXP version without IE and a prompt at first install to choose the desired browser

I was really excited about the "browser ballot" when that judgement came through. In the end though it appeared on tragically few installs. I never even saw it in the wild.

It was a mess for other reasons too, but it felt at the time like it represented a turning tide against anti-competitive behaviour in software.

You can only explain this by corruption. I think three letter agencies slept on that one...

Edit: Not sure why accusation of corruption is downvoted? It's a very difficult crime to prove and requires resources to pursue, so there is no appetite to prosecute. Big companies and civil service know that. If these companies pay off developers, they would have no reason to pay anyone else in their way and that would unlikely result in any consequences.

Marketshare. The law sees marketshare.

* Google and Apple compete against each other, so there is no monopoly.

* Microsoft had no effective competitors.

You don't need a monopoly for antitrust, but it sure makes for a stronger case.

In this very document you have Google and Apple claiming that they effectively do not compete in terms of app store pricing policies.

What is Apple's market share for tablets in the US?

> * Google and Apple compete against each other, so there is no monopoly.

[source needed]. The only tariff change Apple ever made was ... due to a real threat of an anti-trust lawsuit. And Google followed straight away.

I can't recall any competition between both companies, they just have their own distinct market.

They both offer a highly integrated platform for mobile computing. One offers devices as well, the other relegates that part to other companies, but anyone in the market for a mobile phone today effectively will pick between those two options that do pretty much the same things with similar UX. That totally looks like competition to me.

In theory I do agree, competition between both could exist. In practice though it does not happen. There's some pretty clear market collusion.

>Marketshare. The law sees marketshare.

As I understand it, the law sees detrimental effects on consumers.

Google and Apple have been caught colluding before on trying to keep software engineer salaries low.

They also conveniently had the exact same app store fee for years. Doesn't make much sense if they were actually competing with each other

> have been caught colluding before on trying to keep software engineer salaries low.

Wow they are really bad at this then. 200-400k without even requiring a college degree is pretty wild. It’s about what my brother made as a doctor and he had an undergraduate degree, medical school, an internship, a residency program…

Every former co-worker who I've talked to when they left Google did so for at least a 20% bump in total comp. The few Googlers I've talked to who left for Apple got equal or even a little less total comp.

Anecdotal, but once you get some years of Big Tech experience under your belt, I do think you become comparatively more valuable to smaller companies.

Without the price collusion engineers might make 600-800K. Not sure why you are defending a Trillion dollar company illegally working with another Trillion dollar company to lower worker wages. The reason software engineer salaries remain high despite big tech collusion is that startups not in on the deal were willing to pay higher, which forces big tech to continue paying for talent.

not sure why doctor wages are brought up, supply and demand determines prices. Google and Apple tried to artificially distort the labor market

I judge compensation based on what value people bring to society. I look around at the world created by software engineers and I'm not impressed. For every dystopian nightmare being foisted upon us, you have an "engineer" saying "Yes sir and what else would you like us to do to them?" to their higher ups at these trillion dollar companies. I'm sure hitman pays well also but I don't have to root for them to get higher wages.

The people that are archetechting the dystopian nightmare are capturing the excess value here, not sure why you think that's somehow a better situation.

That's actually quite exactly the behavior you expect from a competitive duopoly. In a duopoly, I know that if I lower prices, you'll match. Operating at the Nash Equilibrium isn't anticompetitive.

I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion -- I agree that they are colluding -- but the logic isn't right.

I'll tell you a secret. Game theory and economics is mostly voodoo wrapped up in statistical mumbo-jumbo. In other words, if economists could explain what is happening, why are they poor and have to go to work to make living?

I'll tell you another secret: Basic economics works pretty well and isn't very hard.

Economists are poor because there isn't any competitive advantage. Any competently-run business of any significant size should have plenty of people able to apply basic economics. Engineers who don't learn basic econ are at a disadvantage, on the other hand.

What is basic economics for you? The supply and demand model which only works if you assume 2 to 10 things (depending on the author), where atleast 1 of them is completely irrational or doesn't reflect reality?

They do indeed compete but doesn't Apple have a monopoly on IOS with it's app store and Google on Android with PlayStore?

At least on Android you can install you own market if you're so inclined. I have yet to find an alternative app store for ios though(might be just me not knowing where to look though).

Edit: Forgot to add that when you're talking about Apple vs G I don't see it as 1 big "smartphone" market. It's 2 different ones. Apple hardware running iOS vs generic hardware running Android.

From the very Twitter thread:

"Our vision is that we [Apple and Google] work as if we are one company."

The law is interpreted according to different standards over time. NPR has a really interesting 3 part podcast series that explains how antitrust laws have been applied over time. Marketshare was the significant metric at one time but more recent judges have used impact/harm to consumers based on price. Under recent case law, if the consumer is still able to get the good cheaply, you can basically own the entire market.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...

> Google and Apple compete against each other, so there is no monopoly.

They effectively have a monopoly over their customers from other customers and can leverage that monopoly to control their vendors.

And Google and Apple secretly working together as "one company" literally defines trust behavior:

'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'

You should read the actual page before you comment!

From the article: After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

I want to know how opulent the celebration at the plaintiff's lawyer's office was when they found that.

I can't even guess. That could be a huge factor.

"The Law" is pretty patchy, inconsistent and self contradictory. A lot of them are old. A lot of definitions are sketchy. There aren't many precedents, and the normative precedent of what doesn't get prosecuted is vast and confusing.

>> You don't need a monopoly for antitrust, but it sure makes for a stronger case.

The realities of being a primary OS, App Store, or browser vendor today are both more significant, and more well known than in the 90s. They have financial consequences many times greater.

I don't see how you can come to an intelligible concept of monopoly, market power and such with a general, legal-friendly theory of monopoly. The logic needs to be reversed.

NEW UNDERPANTS PLAN:

0. Forget about proving a monopoly exists to strengthen your case that X is acting as a trust.

1. Use evidence that X is acting as a trust, as to make the case that monopoly exists instead.

2. ???

3. Profit.

The problem is that we don't have a step 2. What happens when markets mature into an monopoly dynamic? We need an answer, because some have.

I've once worked for a large corporation that got hit hard by antitrust. Think a few tens of billions of dollars. Why? A seller was caught giving freebies if they bought their products. That's it. That's all it took.

I know because due to that incident we had to follow online formation every god damn month about antitrust. You don't have to have a "monopoly" to trigger antitrust legislation. The mere mention of "deals" or "cooperation" or "understanding" in the same conversation that involves competitor can be enough evidence to cause huge trouble.

What Apple and Google are doing is a lot worse than handing out freebies.

Why aren't they getting hit hard by antitrust?

That was my point.

I know, I was just adding an honest question to it. (I should probably have started the first paragraph with "Yes, and... :) )

I guess the reason that megacorps can get away with even worse behavior is that the system is corrupt.

What? Antitrust isn't solely about marketshare and having a monopoly. You can behave in anticompetitive ways that break antitrust laws without having a monopoly.

>In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

That reductive summary is repeated but isn't accurate.

Microsoft didn't get in trouble for adding its own IE web browser to Windows. (Software companies always add new features and enhancements.)

The key nuance that triggered the government lawsuit was anti-competitive actions such as using obscure/undocumented Windows API functions to cripple Netscape and forcing computer manufacturers to avoid other software when licensing DOS/Windows. All of that is in the long document: https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

His point still stands, especially on iOS where other browsers isn't even allowed and every browser has to be basically a reskin of safari. That way others can't add features or stability, forcing developers to use the app store and give Apple a large cut.

This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.

Does it make a difference that Apple is the hardware manufacturer, whereas Microsoft just provides the OS for PCs in general?

You mean Apple's monopoly position is even stronger because they can put roadblocks at the hardware level? :)

The problem with that line of accusation is that Apple having a monopoly on the production and maintenance of Apple products isn't a very compelling threat.

In a more reasonable market, like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly. There are alternatives.

Often the measure used for market share is not a linear one but a squared one.

By that measure, there is very little competition in the smartphone segment—it is highly concentrated and so the major players (both Apple and Google) should face greater antitrust scrutiny.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman...

Keep in mind that the words "reasonable market" and "alternatives" are doing a lot of work here.

From the linked documents:

> If Android competed with iOS on app transactions, the market competition would make Android apps cheaper for users and attract developers to launch their apps first (or even only) on Android. [...] After a meeting involving senior executives of Google and Apple, notes of the meeting were exchanged between the two companies. The notes reflect: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

Epic's lawsuits are alleging that both Apple and Google have engaged in anti-competitive behavior here, albeit sometimes in different ways. Even bolder, they're claiming that Google and Apple engaged cooperative anti-competitive behavior that benefited both companies. What consumer-ready alternatives exist for users outside of Apple and Android? If a developer announces that they're building a smartphone game, and that it won't work on Android or iOS, do you think it's reasonably possible for that developer to make money with that game?

Apple has massive amounts of competitive leverage over the smartphone ecosystem; they control the most profitable app store. And the vast majority of non-iOS phones are running the Google Play Store. In that context, locking down the hardware has much bigger implications than it would in a truly competitive market. I think the question is, do we actually have a competitive smartphone market when it comes to smartphone app stores and OSes?

Non-sequitor: I hate that it's going to be Epic that really gets this to take hold. If it were anybody else. This is like watching a sports game where you want both teams to loose. There's a lot of Apple iOS policy I don't like, but I also don't like Epic (personal reasons). This would put Epic on a pedestal that I'd rather not see.

I do shudder at the day of seeing websites that only work on Chrome for iOS, an app that I will never use.

In the entertainment industry not having an iPhone literally hurts your career. If you can't use iMessage people look at you weird and you are literally excluded from social circles. I know someone that was in tech and went into music and even though she prefers Android she ended up caving and getting an iPhone.

I work in the entertainment industry. You're full of shit.

You may not be aware, but you can send from imessage to an android. The other way works, too.

> like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly.

A monopoly is not needed for anti-competitive behavior to be illegal. All that is needed is significant market power.

Apple has 50% of the smartphone market. Which is around where courts have stated that anti-trust laws start to apply.

50% of a highly concentrated market is not a slam dunk anti-trust case, by any means, but it is within the realm where courts might rule against it, depending on numerous factors.

> A monopoly is not needed for anti-competitive behavior to be illegal. All that is needed is significant market power.

Have any references where someone was sued for antitrust while having <50% marketshare (of course, using the market determined by the court at the time)? If what you say is true, is the cutoff for antitrust action just "when media outlets report on it long enough to actually be put in sight of regulators/congress"?

Here is the definition that the government gives.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

The cutoff is as follows "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors"

If you want statements from a judge, regarding the 50 percent specifically, you can look up the following court cases and read from the primary source.

"See Hayden Publ'g Co., Inc. v. Cox Broad. Corp., 730 F.2d 64, 69 n.7 (2d Cir. 1984) ("[A] party may have monopoly power in a particular market, even though its market share is less than 50%."); Broadway Delivery Corp. v. UPS, 651 F.2d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 1981) ("[W]hen the evidence presents a fair jury issue of monopoly power, the jury should not be told that it must find monopoly power lacking below a specified share."); Yoder Bros., Inc. v. Cal.-Fla. Plant Corp., 537 F.2d, 1347, 1367 n.19 (5th Cir. 1976) (rejecting "a rigid rule requiring 50% of the market for a monopolization offense without regard to any other factors")."

But yes, typically, if a company has less than 50% of a market, anti-trust law does not apply. But the word "typically" does not mean "always". (And Apple has 54% of the US market)

And whether it applies, would defend on "other factors", as according to the quote I linked, and there is a good argument, IMO, that a duopoly would be a reasonable "other factor".

There were cases like that in the pre-Bork era (i.e. when the courts interpreted the law as people who originally wrote it actually intended). Here's one example:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/

"In 1955, the date of this merger, Brown was the fourth largest manufacturer in the shoe industry, with sales of approximately 26 million pairs of shoes and assets of over $72,000,000 while Kinney had sales of about 8 million pairs of shoes and assets of about $18,000,000."

And even more relevant:

"Another important factor to consider is the trend toward concentration in the industry. It is true, of course, that the statute prohibits a given merger only if the effect of that merger may be substantially to lessen competition. But the very wording of § 7 requires a prognosis of the probable future effect of the merger.

The existence of a trend toward vertical integration, which the District Court found, is well substantiated by the record. Moreover, the court found a tendency of the acquiring manufacturers to become increasingly important sources of supply for their acquired outlets. The necessary corollary of these trends is the foreclosure of independent manufacturers from markets otherwise open to them. And because these trends are not the product of accident, but are rather the result of deliberate policies of Brown and other leading shoe manufacturers, account must be taken of these facts in order to predict the probable future consequences of this merger. It is against this background of continuing concentration that the present merger must be viewed."

Because the whole device and experience is the product. It's not just an OS.

yep, that was the argument against the rebates and disbundling Windows from laptops.

But the contrarian opinion would amount to forcing companies to interoperate, which is a massive endeavour of standards and committees - usually only undertaken for natural monopolies to avoid tragedy of the commons.

Are smartphones a natural monopoly? And at what levels? Hardware (including plugs and jacks, physical button locations and functions?), software, data federation? Like where do you draw the line?

If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles? It's a similarily integrated device. Would Microsoft be forced to allow unlicenced 3rd party software on the Xbox?

> If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles?

One may argue that people rarely need a gaming console to pursue job opportunities, for instance. A smartphone, on the other hand, has become practically mandatory in many industries.

Do you think the consumer would have been better off if Microsoft was the hardware manufacturer too, back then?

It feels like I could find a line, to rationalize what happened or not to MS or Apple.

But in reality, in the wake of 9/11, USA thought it was more important to have extremely large companies, and it let them grow.

(And MS’ EU fine was related to not giving the API doc, and perhaps using fines as a political weapon).

Clearly, if US applied the anti-monopoly laws, it would shoot its own companies. In my opinion however, no single entity should dominate, govt or enterprise, and we must parcel large ones to keep competition fair, replacements rolling, class mobility high, the american dream possible for new entrants and more importantly, so that governance of our daily life is regularly given to the next generation.

What does pro-corporate policy have to do with 9/11?

It marked a shift in thinking and foreign policy

I don't know, it seems to me there was a continuous trend in pro-corporate neoliberal policies you can trace back to the 80's or mid-70's.

Can you give any evidence of what changed after 9/11 in terms of pro-corporate policy?

"In the wake of 9/11" is lazy writing. Kinda like businesses saying "we have crappy service, because of COVID."

Antitrust enforcement has more to do with the party in power than anything else. The Bush Administration wasn't interested in suing businesses, and now the Biden Administration is again.

Microsoft DOES sell hardware. The Surface series anybody?

It does now. The discussion isn’t about Microsoft in the present time, it is about Microsoft in the time when they lost their anti-trust lawsuit.

If apple prevented its licensees for the iPhone to bundle Safari rather than another browser... then this would be more applicable.

However, Apple isn't extending its dominance in the smart phone area (Apple has 53% market share of mobile devices, Microsoft had above 90% market share for intel compatible PCs https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... ) to its licensees for iOS.

Apple not forcing Samsung to bundle Safari on the Samsung branded iPhones to the exclusion of Chrome.

Yes, Apple isn't licensing iOS to others and that's a key difference. Furthermore, Apple has half of the market dominance that Microsoft had in its day.

Just because they make both iOS and the iPhone doesn't mean they get a pass to be anticompetitive on their platform.

They can be anticompetitive on their platform as long as their platform doesn’t have a lock on the market. So say, if you didn’t need to buy an iPhone and could buy an android instead, and if that actually happened in practice, Apple could reasonably argue they didn’t have a monopoly on the market even if they had a monopoly in their own platform.

Not when their platform holds the majority of users in the US and when they're colluding with the "competition".

A majority of users choose apple. but they didnt have to

Just like the majority of users choose to use Windows back in the day? They didn't had to. Linux was always a choice.

No it wasn’t. Android is a consumer friendly replacement Linux wasn’t

Why am I getting downvoted. Are people surprised its hard to compete with apple and android size organizations. You arent entitled to as many sophisticated phone OS's as you want

54% is a majority, but its not a vast majority.

> and when they're colluding with the "competition".

Unless you have evidence for that, that's just libel.

Libel? It's directly from the material referenced by the tweets that we're talking about:

> 'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'

Which they already got busted for and had to pay fines on. If you mean they are still doing it, then provide evidence, don’t just assert its true.

Nobody here is talking about things that Apple and Google got busted for already. Everything that we're getting today is new.

So no link to evidence?

Can you not access the tweets being discussed here?

By the HHI, Apple absolutely has a lock on the market.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman...

With 53% market share, Apple alone contributes over 0.25 to the HHI. 0.25 for the entire market is regarded as highly concentrated.

"Samsung Branded iPhones"? This can't possibly be a thing.

Well, not at the current model with Apple's abusive position of manufacturing both the iPhone and iOS and Safari.

Different times. Today we have more alternatives. iOS users have windows and hundreds of linux distros from which to choose. Back in 2001 there weren't any real alternatives to windows and so it was under greater scrutiny. The walled garden of iOS is a choice rather than a prison. Apple can get away today with things that Microsoft could not in the past. Times change.

Desktop OSes aren't alternatives to mobile ones. They serve different purposes.

Except when they are. There were windows phones briefly. And linux will run on phones. And Android laptops. Such choices were not around in 2001. PC users in 2001 would have killed for the number of options available to phone users today.

The 2001 decision was comparing desktop options at a time when they weren't any. Today's mobile users have plenty of options, plenty of brands and OSs to choose from.

Windows Mobile may have had the same kernel as the desktop counterpart (but I believe it was heavily stripped down), but the userspace was entirely different because the usage paradigm is entirely different.

Android is Linux under the hood. It just doesn't use any of the cruft that desktop Linux usually has, like Xorg.

Linux wasn’t a viable alternative to windows in 2001 and I don’t think a Linux phone would be considered a viable alternative to google or iOS. There are 2 mobile OS’s, which admittedly is twice as many as desktop OS’s in 2001. As for hardware, there were a ton of options on 2001, probably more major brands than what phones have today, that’s not even including mom and pop custom built PCs.

Did you ever use Linspire? It had a posh, user friendly app store with a ton of useful apps, Firefox, Flash Java and most other things worked without issue. Not a bad experience in the early 2000s on a Pentium 3!

I believe I tried out their live cd, which was a neat concept. Mostly I ran redhat though.

> Back in 2001 there weren't any real alternatives to windows

- Mac OS X Public Beta (2000)

- SUSE Linux 7.0 (2000)

- Debian 2.2 (2000)

- OpenBSD 2.7 (2000)

- Solaris 8 (2000)

- AmigaOS 3.9 (2000)

- and so on... [0]

Hardly “no alternatives” in my humble opinion.

And in office space, MS-DOS was still a thing for quite some time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_operating_systems#...

None of those had the broad software options of windows. Everyday users who wanted to complete office tasks, use the internet, and play games were locked into windows. (The 2001 ruling also took a while and was based on pre-2001 behavior by MS and likely future behavior.)

In 2001 Linspire had a huge software library you could install from with a single click right from Click N Run (a pretty app store with the app icon, name, description, storage required and user reviews.).

Firefox worked, as did Flash (hello NewGrounds!), Java (RuneScape), you could do a ton and be nigh invulnerable to all the malware on the internet of the early 2000s.

Curiously enough, 2000 was also when the first public versions of OpenOffice became available: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

It's interesting to think that the project has survived for so long, even if nowadays the Libre office variety is more widely used.

We should still call for breaking up bad busoness practices regardles of whether something is a monopoly or not. We forget that even considering a monopoly to require gov intervention is a somewhat novel concept. Right to repair comes to mind, especially for things like tractors. Im tired of paying for products and not truly owning them in the way I want to. Be it in the literal sense or being locked into iOS' walled garden or otherwise.

Based on this previous case Apple isn't violating the law because they also sold the hardware.

I would argue that makes it worse.

Are you saying that Safari requires hardware-level apis?

Nope, all PCs came with Windows and OEMs willing to sell alternative computers didn't had volume discounts.

It was a choice, but most decided to cave in and only sell PCs.

Here that isn't the case, most shops selling iPhones also have other brands available. Customers aren't forced into buying iPhones.

You raised the bar that is required. It is more appropriate to look whether iPhones are a dominant brand, not whether they are the only brand.

Which they are not.

As it turns out, they are. [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

You have 45% phones to chose from.

That's another switch of the goal posts. Clearly, any brand with 50% or more is considered dominant.

Not at all, we are still talking about choice, and clearly the law decides how it goes, not random Apple haters on HN.

Anti-trust cases aren't decided on binary terms. It's the overall act that's illegal. In other words just because the situation with Apple is different from Microsoft's anti-trust case doesn't mean Apple could not be violating the law. Paying or accepting money for the purposes of a company receiving an unfair competitive advantage is also covered under anti-trust laws such as the Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....

> This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.

Even more so when you consider how much larger these companies are set to get yet (Google will double in size again within ~5-7 years). It's the Microsoft case if Microsoft had been allowed to continue to build its power out for another 10-15 years unchecked. In the 1990s a parade of magazines ran stories about how Microsoft wanted to set up a toll road on the Internet, to position itself to take a bite out of all ecommerce. They were of course meant to be scare stories to garner attention as Microsoft wasn't close to accomplishing something like that at that point.

And yet, here we are two decades later, Apple and Google control two big Internet toll roads and are drastically larger and more powerful than Microsoft was in the 1990s. IBM was seven times larger than Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft of the 1990s looks downright quaint by comparison, an emerging big tech company playing at being giant (back then there were still far larger and more powerful corporations); today, Apple and Google - big tech broadly - are the most powerful and largest companies. Caterpillar, GE, 3M, General Dynamics, GM, Ford, Honeywell, etc look like sad jokes standing next to Apple or Google.

Google for its part has three monopolies which have amazingly been left entirely alone: search, YouTube, Android. They must have signed one helluva protection deal with the intelligence apparatus back when PRISM was getting set up, they got a ten year get out of jail free card (it's in the interests of the intelligence community to have these giant intel-hoovering companies that sprawl and span the globe).

Firefox works fine on iOS

You mean safari with a custom skin

As the parent post says, Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox. It doesn't run Gecko, it's barely more than a skin on top of Safari.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5...

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

How much does this really matter to the typical user? I’m not using Firefox because it’s JS and rendering engine are significantly better than webkit. Can’t really tell the difference honestly. I’m still getting all the other features of Firefox that actually distinguish it from it’s competitors. The so-called skin is more like the guts from a user value perspective.

The reason I use Firefox for Android is the ability to use addons. According to this, they don't work on Apple phones: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios

The user doesn't notice, but it stifles innovation at that level of the stack.

I would notice the lack of ad blocker/no-script.

Safari lags behind on many web standards. On other platforms, when that happens (e.g. IE), competitors provide alternatives that can do better.

Apple doesn't develop things like push notifications via web app, which might compete with the app store.

Question to downvotes:

I’ve seen people saying in these comments often that you have to use safari. I am using ff on my iOS device right now, what am I missing?

The technical reason is that a very powerful system call is blocked on iOS that’s required to build a custom language runtime needed for a browser. This is done to increase security of the device. The trade-off is that the JavaScript engine and renderer must be shared by all browsers on iOS.

But if you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?

Thanks, appreciated greatly

iOS platform restrictions prevent Firefox for iOS from supporting add-ons. That is a rather striking difference.

> But if you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?

Firefox on Android supports add-ons, in particular uBlock origin. Firefox on iOS does not. That's a huge difference.

In general, WebKit has more bugs and fewer features than gecko.

If Apple allowed other browsers beyond Safari, Google (and others) would stop supporting Safari and force people to download Chrome (or FF, their supported also-ran). We'd be back where a giant company 100% sets web standards.

Apple standing against that is important for the open web.

which is basically nothing compared to google/apple of today.They are basically forcing you to use them as a middle-man for any app you want. While getting a cut from all transactions.

Non-google app stores cannot automatically update aps, side-loading is hidden in menus behind scary warnings.

IOS forcing you to use safari no matter what, and there is no way to side-load apps, nor any non-apple app stores.

chrome de facto sets web standards, giving them slight edge over other browsers - and they do use chrome specific APIs to cripple other browsers - like YouTube working worse on Firefox due that reason.

And that's even without taking into the consideration all the tracking in form of telemetry on the devices, coupled with their own ads markets.

> Non-google app stores cannot automatically update aps,

They can in Android 12.

> side-loading is hidden in menus behind scary warnings.

The warnings are minimal.

-- 1) Open Chrome.

-- 2) Find and Download APK. https://i.imgur.com/ZFZb1uE.png

-- 3) Accept warning and Open APK.

-- 4) Go to settings. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/R8FzTzP.png

-- 5) Toggle Install Unknown Apps for Chrome. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/K0ADO2q.png

-- 6) Click back (This only has to be done once)

-- 7) Click install. https://i.imgur.com/xVSndex.png

-- Done. https://i.imgur.com/fyasTK9.png

Once you do this for the first time, the process reduces down to 4 steps each time after: Open Chrome, Download APK, Open APK, Click Install. Done.

The ZOMG SKERRRY WARNINGS only show up once when you toggle the permission for that app and if you look at the screenshot, it's a reasonable disclaimer.

We have plenty of things to bash on Google here for... the sideloading process, however, is not one of them.

> chrome de facto sets web standards,

Chrome became the most popular browser simply because it is better.

If Mozilla could get their shit together, they could potentially reclaim their number one spot... but Firefox lost that spot multiple times. Not because of subterfuge, but because they continually drop the ball.

Chrome didn't exist in a vacuum and it didn't have the advantage of having a host operating system that had it installed from the start. There's a reason it's the primary engine now. It actually works better.

If that bothers you, use Firefox or De-Googled Chromium. Or if you really hate yourself... Safari.

Chrome had the advantage of having the #1 search engine with 90+% market share show warning modals saying "Works best in Chrome" while they actively gated features or degraded features for other browser users. Swapping user agents would cause G Suite to perform much better in non-Chrome browsers.

> If Mozilla could get their shit together, they could potentially reclaim their number one spot... but Firefox lost that spot multiple times.

Mozilla never had #1.

And I don't know what world you live in, but Google has pushed Chrome with the equivalent of billions in advertising. There's simply no way Mozilla can compete with that considering the kind of budget they're on.

If you want a fair estimate, look the time it took for Firefox to slowly grind market share from IE6, despite an abyssal difference between the two browsers.

Netscape was the dominant browser from at least 1995 to the end of 1998. It overtook Mosaic to become #1 with Mosaic being a very, very distant #2.

At its peak it had 90+% of the market share.

Firefox nearly overtook IE until Chrome was released. If Firefox had not been consistently a dumpster fire, I think it could have maintained at least 50/50 with Chrome.

I switched to Chrome not because Google had good advertising but simply because it was _better._ Firefox has always had issues and Mozilla can't seem to make a browser that doesn't shit itself every now and then.

> If Firefox had not been consistently a dumpster fire, I think it could have maintained at least 50/50 with Chrome.

It took 6 years for Chrome to gain 50% market share. In 6 years, firefox had barely taken 25% from IE.

If you're arguing that this difference in success is explained by the technological gap between chrome and firefox being much larger than the technological gap between firefox and IE, you need a reality check.

Otherwise, you need to acknowledge the fact that Chrome had something firefox didn't have, and it was not a technological advantage.

Firefox made it to about 32%.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/internet-browser-market-sha...

Chrome took more away from IE initially than it did from Firefox.

And yes, I'm arguing a technical difference. I've used every version of every browser when it was still new, all the way back to Mosaic.

Chrome introduced per-tab instancing which was a HUGE leap ahead of everything else and Firefox took years to catch up to that one feature alone. Firefox was bloated, slow and unstable.

It still is.

What about alerting users that Firefox is potentially malware and that edge is safer? That seems extremely anti competitive to me

Apple have undocumented instructions now let alone APIs

On a perhaps related note, I have noticed that a Google Meet that consumes just over 1Mbps on Google Chrome consistently consumes close to 4Mbps on Firefox. Same settings, same window size, same participants. I cannot help but wonder whether Chrome has implemented some standard browser feature more efficiently, or whether it has special native features just for Meets.

Or they're using a different codec which is not supported by Firefox.

Change your useragent to Chrome. Google often gates performance improvements to be Chrome only.

I hope Apple treatment of low performance iOS webviews will be treated similarly

I don't know every detail of the case, but I used Netscape in the 90's, it worked just fine. I don't think it was crippled by any means.

> I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.

In these cases, generally, the law acts when other parties push it. Mainly big actors. The app stores are generally build by those major actors. May be regulations will happen in several years.

you're mixing up the details of the MSFT lawsuit.

Also, there's nothing antitrust about bundling web DLLs in an OS, or using the web shell for applications. That's what a Chromebook did.

What MSFT did was abuse its monopoly position to take advantage of other companies and customers.

Fair enough. Merely bundling some software was not a violation by itself, but that bundling was also additionally reinforced with "concerted series of actions designed to protect the applications barrier to entry", which caused "consumer harm by distorting competition" [1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

>>I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.

Let's make a point of starting here. There's room for the legalistic standpoint, especially if we're trying to understand legal processes... but this isn't a law forum. It's near impossible to discuss antitrust usefully from a mostly-legalistic perspective. The laws, precedents, legal doctrines and economic doctrines they relate to are extremely patchy, flimsy and often barely exist.

I think a core part of the problem is a weak, badly grounded antitrust framework in the first place. Key definitions like "monopoly" use contradictory conceptual frameworks, from different eras. Generalizing from one instance to another is difficult. A lot of key concepts don't have definitions at all, or really wishy washy ones.

I think the nature of monopolies has a lot to do with this. One possible definition of monopoly is an singular market entity... IE not generalizable, by definition. Are courts supposed to be punishing violations, or structuring markets and doing industrial policy? Are they supposed to be regulating monopolies, preventing them, or declaring their existence so that a different set of regulations kick in? Is monopoly a normal occurrence in market maturity, or market failure?

At some point, Peter Thiel gave away the game when he said that "monopoly is the goal." If you read microeconomics basics, but conceptualize it as software companies instead of a auto manufacturing... you tend to think of monopoly, rather than commoditization as the equilibrium point that's never quite reached. Successful tech companies don't try to make money by competing in a level field with lots of competitors. That's for appstore app developers, salesforce plugin consultants, spotify artists and such.

The whole premise of the tech miracle is that monopolies are the bull case. How else to expect/justify/realize tech company valuations.

Imagine pitching an investor like Thiel on your idea to spend a billion dollars making youtube content for ad revenue? That's all wrong. Your bull case is that you'll temporarily profitable, if successful. Even if you're very profitable, its temporary. There are zillions of youtubers and squillions who could be. They'll copy you, or maybe your content will just get stale over time. A youtube policy change could wipe you out. In the turbulence of youtube's free market for online videos, profits don't last at scale. To get Thiel's attention, you need to go for your own monopoly.

"Commoditize your compliments" has long been a tech motto. Well... what's the corrolorary? Monopolize your market segment.

Commoditize PCs. Monopolize the OS.

Commoditize smartphones. Monopolize the OS.

Monopolize consoles, Commoditize games. Platform/Content. Market/Vending. Users/Advertising. Data/Advertising.

Yes, exactly. The law needs to be updated to account for this new world of "platforms".

By platform, I mean an ecosystem a private entity creates which they monetize through content created/uploaded/deployed by external parties.

AWS and others fall under this definition too. The truth is, cloud computing should be a low margin industry in the long run. Yes, software has close to 0 marginal cost of production, but the same is true of your competitors. Basic economic principle implies that in a competitive market, the price to customers should be close to the cost of production.

In the old days, the economy was largely physical goods based, so it was very easy to simply buy a competing product if you don't like the one you have now. That by and large didn't entail becoming entrenched in a whole ecosystem.

Laws need to be updated to tackle the inherent monopolistic elements of platforms, social and so on. China is taking this path, so it will be interesting to see how that develops.

It's important to recognize too, that leveraging a monopolistic position to produce excess profit is effectively a direct transfer of wealth from the littler guys to the bigger guys.

e.g. Apple taking a 30% cut on the app store directly takes from app creators, who may raise prices 30%, which ultimately hits customers.

>> The truth is, cloud computing should be a low margin industry in the long run.

The free market ethos, IIRC, suggests that all industries should be low margin in the long run, no? Innovators and shuch are supposed to be compensated with high margins, but not perpetual high margins. The whole idea is that 25%> margin do not exist in perpetuity.

Yes, exactly. If the market is perfectly competitive, and cost to switching is low, margins trend towards 0.

The same should be true in software, regardless of how cheap it is to produce an additional unit. Of course, because it's cheap for anybody else to produce that additional unit too.

The reason we see such high margins in software is a combination of "first mover advantage", pseudo-monopolistic like elements to the business, and the fact that industry is so new, VC money does not tend to go towards creating direct competitors as there is ample opportunity elsewhere.

In the short run, first movers and innovators will be able to generate high margins of course. And sometimes business X really does produce a better product than the rest, as some would say Apple does. But given that software is cheap to maintain once built, you would expect many viable and roughly equivalent competitors to be built in the long run.

At the end of the day, legislation should be written to foster "competitive capitalism", as that produces the best result for the public at large.

For example, it should be as easy to switch between SaaS providers as the flick of a button. Apple should have to allow competing app stores and not give preferential treatment to their own... And so on.

If you think about the App store example in isolation, the fee they charge is a direct transfer of wealth from app creators and app buyers to Apple. Would they be able to charge 30% if there were competing app stores? Maybe, but I doubt it over the long run. Certainly at least they wouldn't be able to charge Epic that amount, as Fortnite is big enough to entice people through side channels for loading the app.

Looking at it as choice of Apple or Android is not an appropriate level of granularity for anti-trust IMO.

We must recognize that markets created within a platform also must be competitive, not just the gateway into that ecosystem. Cost of switching becomes high, which leads to de facto Monopoly power by the platform owner.

The MS decision got gutted on appeal, which merely emboldened the monopolistic practices which developed since the dot-com boom.

The different is crystal clear. Microsoft was considered a monopoly. You really had no good choice but Windows.

Apple and Google aren't. You have a choice between iOS and Android, both vibrant and thriving.

It really is that simple. And it's not just the legal but common sense definition of monopoly too -- do you control the market or not?

Now you might have other criticisms of app stores, but basing them on the Microsoft-monopoly-argument isn't going to be helpful or useful. You're going to need a different legal foundation for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly

The monopoly criterion is so outmoded. Anti-trust laws were enacted to counter organizations that cornered basic things like steel, railroads, power, communications, etc. 100 years ago, almost everything they could imagine was a commodity that was easily replaceable.

But app platforms are not commodities. There is considerable vendor lock-in, by design. It's not like one just takes an iOS app and instantly ports it over to Android when Apple's terms no longer suit; there is considerable sunk cost. Platforms cleave the market into captive audiences that can and are abused.

And what to do if you are little guy who invested everything in one of those two platforms and didn't have the foresight to write your app in a way that it was easily ported? Well, screw you.

So these platforms actually compete with each other to offer "value adds" which are really just like traps for vendor lock-in.

Anti-trust laws are full of flawed and antiquated reasoning that is unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century marketplace. And there is precious little understanding of these technological issues in courts and legislatures.

An oligopoly (i.e. a business cartel) it's just as bad as a monopoly. Even worse, I would say, because on the outside it gives you the illusion of business competition, while with a monopoly you kind of know loud and clear what you're dealing with.

> In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

Microsoft got out of that, though. They barely paid a fine. I don't disagree that there are antitrust concerns with all sorts of big company behavior. But this is the world we live in. If you want the government to regulate this stuff for you you need to elect a government willing to do that (or rather, willing to appoint judges willing to do that).

> In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

You're forgetting how that ended. Remember, the DOJ threw the book at Microsoft. It was an intensely publicized trial, with pretty much all the country hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Waffling over the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby" email, the Halloween documents and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. That all came out as part of the DOJ antitrust suit. It's hard to remember how visceral the hate for this was. During the height of that, The Simpsons decided to portray Bill Gates on the show, not positively [0]. A game developer released a title called "Microshaft Winblows 98" to positive reviews and very good sales [1].

The judge makes their final verdict. Microsoft clearly stepped over the line, there were no easy answers. They were too big a company, the only possible remedy is to break them up. Into at least two companies, but probably more; at the very least, the apps and OS needed to be split up into the "Baby Bills", they were going to be called.

Then George W. Bush comes in, guts the DOJ to a fifth of their size, and basically all but tells them "never do that again, please". The case quickly and silently went to appeal, where it was reduced from "Microsoft needs to be broken up" into a small fine [2]. And after other tragedies in the early 2000s, the nation quickly forgot.

So, no, despite the fanfare, despite the judgement and ruling, the DOJ antitrust case had very limited effect on reality. And the message from above seems to be "try that again, and get your budget demolished even more". That's, uh, why antitrust isn't a thing anymore.

Except, well, it did have one effect. In the midst of everything, Bill Gates was basically forced to resign and go into philanthropy to clear their image, resulting in Ballmer taking over. Some believe that was the true punishment for Microsoft.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_SZRhWr1s [2] https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/bush-administration-a...

People both inside and outside the company have also asserted that Microsoft was quite gunshy, both during and after the trial. It seems to have had a pretty dramatic impact on their behavior.

This kind of glosses over the fact that they were found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in the EU.

They got a massive fine and were and forced to do things like open up the client server protocol used between Windows Domain Controllers and Windows Clients.

They came pretty close to being forced to open up the Office document formats, but the EU backed down from that one.

The Office formats were forced open anyway. Note the dates:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_forma...

I cannot find any references online to the DOJ budget being slashed by George W. Bush let alone by 80%. That sounds quite outlandish to me. Do you have any more information on what you're referring to?

A sibling comment pointed out that you're wrong about the Microsoft case. You're also seemingly under informed about monopolies. One of the core issues in the Microsoft case was that they're a horizontal monopoly. Microsoft's monopoly affects all players in the market because a majority of the players use Microsoft's OS. They used that leverage against Netscape and many other companies.

Apple on the other hand has a vertical monopoly, they control the whole stack from hardware to software. While their influence on iPhones is absolute, they don't have outsize influence on other phone vendors. Also while popular iPhones don't have a majority of really any phone market.

Antitrust considerations are different for different monopoly types. Unless a company with a vertical monopoly also had a market monopoly position and used that position to actively influence/harm other companies it's really hard to legally pursue them. You can't fault a company for building their own products and trying to make money from selling them. If a Samsung washing machine has some cool feature when paired with a Samsung dryer, just because Samsung has a monopoly on Samsung appliances doesn't mean they're violating some antitrust laws.

If anything Google is in bigger danger of antitrust suits since they have a more horizontal position in the phone market. While they have token entries in the hardware market they're an OS and service provider. Which is likely why they're supportive is sideloading and alternate app stores, if they behaved like Apple but with a horizontal monopoly the DoJ would be all over them.

Apple and Google control almost everything. Horizontally.

Yes, HN has had to constantly remind itself that a monopoly doesn't mean literally 100% control of the market and is legally defined in terms of market power.

> While their influence on iPhones is absolute, they don't have outsize influence on other phone vendors

Apple isn't exclusively a hardware/OS company. They compete horizontally with digital media services like Amazon (books), Spotify (music), Netflix (video), etc. They use their OS and APIs to squeeze out weak competitors and suck up to stronger competitors. They make more money from apps than hardware.

Keep in mind, it's not just current competitors. It's also the potential competitors that don't even bother to start due to Apple's predatory practices.

You can definitely replace Google's app store, see Chinese phone providers, Samsung App store, sideloading, etc... You can also make any browser the default.

Apple I agree with.

Maybe intent matters. Until now, maybe, there's been nothing demonstrating intent like the "cut off Netscape's air supply" quote the DOJ used in the Microsoft antitrust case.

Look I'm fine punishing Google too, but it has to happen either after Apple or at the same time.

Apple literally has banned competitors. Google at least allows them, even if they make every effort to keep them out, it's still possible to install them without hacking your phone (which hasn't really been possible on iPhone for years).

I just hate that they're grouped together as if it's equivalent.

It's a lot more damning than the MS case because internet impact and integration in ones life was minimal. Today society is hybrid and appstore/googleplay are the digital interface to a boatload of public and private services.

Though it's been much lambasted by investors, I think it's inevitable that the US will begin down the same path China has recently with their tech companies.

It's pretty easy to see that FAANG-esque companies are totally dominant at this point, and have many pseudo-monopolistic elements about them.

Beyond specific names, there is a vast difference in both the scale, and the "ecosystem" or "platform" nature in modern software that effectively invalidates the applicability of anti-trust law as it is written.

Going even further, many laws protecting private companies likely will change in the coming years to account for different paradigm that software brings. Sometimes difference in scale is also difference in nature.

If you look into the aims of a lot of China's recent regulations, they are actually setup to create a competitive market, rather than have a few tech companies become dominant. Competition is ultimately good for the public, as it leads to lower costs to the consumer, and more incentive to innovate (once entrenched).

I don't suggest we go to the same extremes, but it's inevitable we'll start heading down that path, whether it be the next few years, or decades.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428415009860714500.html

I've grown pretty pessimistic about the prospects of the Internet as a motor for entrepreneurship. Today it is theoretically still "free" but wherever you go you'll find gatekeepers like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft that keep a tight grip on who is visible on the net and who can offer a service or software product on a given platform.

In my view, the market dominance of the big players has led to a new type of hidden taxation and a "winner takes all" Internet economy. Almost all digital markets require you to pass through large companies to get visibility or offer your services, and they get increasingly good at extracting every bit of profit you make. This really needs to stop.

I think this is just the natural evolution of any market. Unfortunately it leads to this. There's not much competition in the railroad market, or the telco market anymore, which used to be massive spaces for innovation.

There are two options:

- We have to wait for the next technological revolution.

- It is simply just more costly to be an entrepreneur. It's not about throwing together a website or app, it's much more costly to break through the existing monopolies. While you can still make a website or app yourself, I think you do need more and more capital to market it.

There's competition in the railroad market in the EU,because they want there to be a market. In particular they mandate separation of infrastructure and operation, and force rail infrastructure owners to give open access to all (for a toll, which has to be the same for all operators). Once you can't use infrastructure as a moat, competition is much more possible.

The US which only regulates rail safety but not the market, has a bunch of local monopolies and calls that a market, being in total denial that markets need to be regulated to actually allow competition.

Are there any indications that a market for rail is actually more efficient?

It's not! One of the end results is taking trains across national borders is way more annoying than it should be. That in turn I believe has lead to warped statistics on the viability of rail for long distances!

International passenger rail is a bit of a niche of the overall rail market, but if you compare north America to Europe here, Europe is doing much better.

Maybe not yet, but as someone who lived through the annoying breakup of the telecom monopoly in Norway I'd never ever go back.

I guess this will be the same.

In 1998 I remember having to dial 1521 or something before the number I was planning to dial to use the cheaper minutes with the competitor. I also remember having to learn to use 8 digit numbers for everyone instead of using 5 digit numbers locally.

Annoying, but forgotten 4 years later when you didn't have to prefix numbers anymore and we got cell phones with contact lists.

Same will happen with rail I guess. Annoying today, but I guess 4 years from now no one on their right mind will ever want to go back.

Oh, BTW, the same with the mail monopoly. A lot of complaints, but the result is I can now get my packages shipped overnight. I literally contacted my broadband provider on chat a Sunday afternoon during the last 30 days and had a new modem in my mail as I woke up the next morning.

No way that could have happened with the old telecom and mail monopolies in place.

That's why the web is so important. When the proprietary platforms get the upper hand you get eg. Apple taking a 50% cut off revenue in their news app.

It's simultaneously true that big tech is too big (and set to get far bigger yet) and there is no scenario where you can escape being under the influence/impact of platform owners.

Want to advertise? You had to go through radio stations with license monopolies. Or maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper in a given city (2-3 times larger than its smaller competitor). Or maybe you had to go through one of the few big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). Just a few behemoths dominanted television.

Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now.

Maybe you needed a lot of vehicles for your business, circa the 1950-1970s. Say hello to the GM and Ford oligopoly, your dependency.

Maybe you wanted to buy airplanes, it's 1971 and you're starting a version of Fedex. How many choices do you have? How many suppliers are there in terms of dependency?

You want to get something on a store shelf across the country? Let me introduce you to Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, McCrory's, May. That's 50 years ago, they owned retail.

The new boss, same as the old boss (today some of them are even bigger, that much is true). You can't escape it. Unless you own all the platforms, you will always have to go through other platforms, other gate keepers. The best you can hope for is to intelligently diversify your risk exposure, so it takes more than one of them to cripple you.

> maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper

what you 're describing is NOT a monopoly, because the winners were local, physical separation prevented monopolization, and crucially there was more than one dominant player. There is a whole new world on the internet where for every verb there is one, single monopoly for the entire world. In the end , one can look at the money flow: How many people were employed in newspapers vs how many people are in googleplex

> Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now.

And regulated as a common carrier[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

The endgame of entrepreneurship is monopoly, if possible. The (western) internet has no physical barriers so is infinitely scalable so it got monopolized very very quickly. Whether those monopolies are forming a cartel to prevent new entrants is another matter; it might well be the case that it is now closed for new entrants. There is some innovation in things like decentralized finance which are inherently orthogonal to the current state. There is also the old internet which could never be centralized, it's still out there but it's unmonetizeable now.

If there is going to be competition for the big players, it will come when closed markets like Russia or China develop enough to threaten them. It is possible that Europe at some point will also follow their example.

Thankfully I think Web3 (dapps made from composable protocols collaboratively developed by everyone) will form strong competition and maybe even replace Google in the next 5-10 years. Services like social media, finance, gaming, productivity, etc will all be interoperable by default providing a seamless user experience and be built by millions of developers around the world. Each company coding only what they specialize in and being built on top of existing protocols leads to massive efficiency and what looks like exponential growth.

Tech monopolies will likely fade away over time like the early industrial revolution monopolies did just at an accelerated pace due to things working at internet speed. Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.

What are the more successful DAO or dapps we can study, to evaluate this model?

An example I find interesting and easy to explain is Pool Together which is a no-loss lottery where you can buy $10 in lottery tickets for a chance at a $3,000 weekly prize but if you don't win your tickets still work for the next round and even 10 rounds from now you can withdraw your full $10. It works by putting everyone's money in the same account which earns ~6% interest savings account and the winner actually gets the accrued interest as prize money.

This project was built by a team of maybe a dozen people but is rather complex and needs a stablecoin (DAI from MakerDAO), an interest bearing account (Compound), an account system (Ethereum public/private key), and the running of the protocol (the smart contacts are run free for devs by Ethereum and users pay to perform actions) to make the system work. All of these dependencies took other teams years to build and the small Pool Together team leveraged that to make a cool little product by just adding a small amount on top. The ability for small teams to make functional products which can then be used by others to quickly spin up their own experiments and products is incredibly exciting to me and it's a much better method of development then the traditional closed vertically integrated tech giant where innovation is limited by bureaucracy.

Is there an example that is not related to gambling or moving around money? As it doesn’t seem to be very productive in countries where online gambling is restricted or regulated…

6% interest paid by who?

Compound is a lending protocol so people take out collateralized loans out and pay an interest rate on that loan which is paid to the lending pool the money is deposited into.

It's a Ponzi scheme, which depends on more people buying in.

I'm pretty pessimistic about decentralized (blockchain-based) apps as well, almost all projects have been overtaken by speculators and fraud seems to be rampant, so I would not go near any of those. There really is no need to use blockchain technology to build decentralized infrastructure, most Internet 1.0 protocols are decentralized & federated and none of them relies on cryptocurrencies or a blockchain to function. So, sorry, but for me this whole movement is BS and seems more like a pyramid scheme than a real effort to build something useful.

> Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.

Google literally built their business on a decentralized worldwide developer network.

Why would my mother or yours, as internet users, care about anything that you just said, in a way that justifies a prediction that Google, Facebook or others will lose their monopolies in 5-10 years?

The UX will be much easier for normal people as they don't need to create a new account, find their friends, etc each time they go to a new website or use a new app which by itself is a pretty big driver of acceptance. Users tend to care about what we call "network effect" which is what gives websites like Facebook such lock-in. Web3 apps that use your existing social graph let you simply use new features and use cases without needing to build the entire social graph from scratch.

With an open ecosystem where anyone can add features and create new apps that complement the existing use cases the amount of utility and innovation will likely outstrip organizations like Facebook which is already becoming bogged down in bureaucracy and losing ground to networks such as TikTok. In the Web3 world the equivalent of Facebook and TikTok wouldn't be directly competing as they are part of the same network and function as networks of two different user groups while allowing further experimentation of use cases that might compose different aspects of both systems into something new without users needing to re-create everything from scratch.

The lower barrier to entry for developers to innovate and UX improvements for end users stemming from a seamless unified ecosystem seems like a better experience for everyone. It'll be interesting to see how everything plays out.

People don't care about brands, they care about functionality. There's a reasonable problem in the market that every company is now trying to take over the gatekeeper role, which kills the value proposition - Netflix made a heck of an inroad on piracy, then everyone else launched their streaming services and suddenly it's almost back to the bad old days - and certainly it's very hard to discover where to watch things now.

This is also why Steam has mindshare: I just plain don't really want multiple "I am your games platform" apps - to the point I ignore new releases till they're on Steam.

So if someone creates a decentralized platform that can provide those things more easily, that'll win - but, I'm pretty skeptical it'll happen: decentralized platforms have been atrocious at providing the type of services companies actually need, like a payment system that is just "I enter my credit card number and you give me services I requested" or "being easier to use".

But one place to get everything? That's a killer app.

> Larry Page told Steve Jobs in 2010 that "There will always be places we compete, and places where we cooperate."

> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

> That is a damning little piece of evidence.

Looks like it’s exactly the meritocracies Google and Apple claim to be, nothing monopoly-like to be found here... /s

And as we all know, everything between Google and Apple has remained exactly as it was in 2010

In business school lingo, this is called 'coopetition' which is just a portmanteau of the two positions: cooperation & competition.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or serious, so I looked it up. It's for real.

I'm not sure that they invented the term but it was, and probably still is, prominent in the F.I.R.S.T. robotics competition.

At least in that context, as a mentor, I thought it was a decent message for the students. Work together to get the robots as good as possible so that you had an enjoyable competition.

https://www.firstinspires.org/

In the DOJ’s world, it’s called collusion.

I think what the government calls it depends greatly on "donations" and promises of do-nothing "consulting" positions with outlandish salaries.

first time I read this but I'm not even surprised the term exists .. it's probably a natural and very old phenomenon right ?

They also cooperated on illegal recruiting practices to stifle tech wages:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

90% of things mentioned here should be super illegal and the punishment should be 150% estimated income they achieved through such deals.

100 years in the electric chair!

This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc. It's an industrial structure. The competition is competition for monopoly, a superior & highly profitable market position of some sort. Those are what make Google, FB & so profitable.

Google competed with Yahoo & Microsoft for years in search marketing. I don't believe either ever made significant profits. Their "market share" in terms of users may have been 10%-20%. But, their share of market revenues was a fraction of that. Their share of profits was negative.

OTOH Google pays (for example) Apple $7bn per year to make Google Search default. That's better than best case scenario profits MSFT or Yahoo could have hoped to make, unless they managed to replace Google in the no. 1 position.

Competing is just a lot less profitable than cooperating in a lot of cases. What is Apple supposed to do, say "keep it, we're good?"

>This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc.

I disagree - governments legislate their markets so it is absolutely punishable if defined as such.

I think parent’s point is that a one time slap (as big as it might be) as we do with other crimes wouldn’t solve the issue. The punishment has to be more structural, legislating for instance as you suggest, or dramatically changing the entity’s structure as we did with past monopolies.

Depends on what you think the goal of the free market/society is, e.g. is this even in our interest to solve - better to redistribute these ill gotten gains to the benefit of society and let the free market solve its own problem - if they do it again, another fine.

just like parking /speeding tickets arent considered structural problems

Your point seems to be that we would have good metrics to evaluate the actual impact of these anti-competitive practices, including everything that didn’t happen because of them, and can apply proportionate punishment that would repair the damage done.

I don’t see any of these two assumptions to be true today, and if the point is to apply heavy enough fines that Google’s behavior radically changes, we’re not that far from for instance just breaking them up or applying specific restrictions on them.

I disagree: Shatter monopoly platforms with extreme prejudice, jail the CEOs of Google and Apple, and the market with self-correct. Investors will be wary of harmful business models and CEOs will hesitate to make monopolizing decisions.

Right now, tech companies are massively overvalued because the risk of government regulation is viewed to be nonexistent. A market correction is overdue.

For Standard Oil, splitting it up actually increased shareholder value massively.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-ups-and-stock-price...

The same could happen with big tech. The market correction could be upwards, just spread across lots of new stocks.

I really don't think it's likely, but I suppose what "break up" means in practice is a crapshoot.

Many of our current, data & user centric monopolies are more complex. Price setting, monopoly rents and economies of scale exist, but they're often not the main point.

"Economies of scale," for example, tends to work backwards these days. Google & FB have access to a ton of advertiser-relevant data, and a ton of users. That makes one unit of Google output better, not just cheaper. The dollar value of a Google of FB ad is much higher than MSFT's or a 2nd tier social network.

It might also be cheaper to run, because of economies of scale. Often though, that's very "in theory." IRL, FB probably spends more per user than most of their competitors. They have it to spend. Reddit is a competitor to FB, for example. The defining aspect of "scale" in their rivalry is not that FB can spread their costs across more users. FB makes many times more revenue per user, because they are bigger.

Large companies have massive governance issues. When you get that large, you end up with an endless stream of people nattering on to compromise values for profits. Eventually, leadership gets sick of fighting or misses the impact of a big change. It's all downwards from there (the next piece of garbage in the room appears more quickly).

I think the only way out of this for companies - and governments - is to build AGIs and put them in charge.

I realize this will sound radical today, but we are getting closer and closer.

If we can carve a path where the AGIs see us as similar to parents, and we "teach" them similar to our kids, I can see how this could all work out (writing about this elsewhere).

My two cents.

Interesting, considering that last time I checked, the Play Store was full of predatory shovelware.

This is like another layer on the stack of dysfunction in the contemporary (mobile) gaming market.

How is this different from giving developers a larger cut of profits? It's a pretty common sales trick to do "cash back" instead of reducing price. If this is what Epic is going with, they're grasping at straws more than I had imagined.

It isn't. Epic literally decided to not use AppStore/PlayStore because they weren't happy with how much money they'd make, so Google decided to improve the money game devs make... They just complain because Google didn't sign a secret extra juicy deal with them only.

As much as I am for healthy competition, and would love for the revenue cut to be smaller (even smaller than the current 15%), my main concern as a mobile application developr who has focused predominantly on the Android ecosystem is further fragmentation.

If another major store comes onto the plaform, then I am certain it wont have guaranteed access to play services, meaning more headache when selecting what services to use and when.

If your application is taking payments directly through the app (not using ads, and the app is no extension to the primary web portal) then a split community could cause havoc to the already struggling app developer.

There is a reason most developers do not create versions for the Amazon Fire, and this might end up being similar situation (if it goes the worse way possible)

> If another major store comes onto the plaform, then I am certain it wont have guaranteed access to play services, meaning more headache when selecting what services to use and when.

If only Google had acted as a good faith steward of Android instead of pushing vendor lock in and closed source APIs in ways that make Bill Gates green with envy. Who am I kidding, their hilariously named "Open" Handset alliance even has a kill switch in the licensing agreements for anyone even thinking about competing with its services.

Who redacted this in the first place, and how would it have been sealed? Much of it is clearly redacted for PR reasons, and I don't really understand how there could be any excuse for keeping it hidden.

I think the lawyers from Google got to redact what parts of the filing should be available to the public. And yeah, there's no trade secrets here, just clear evidence of horrible abuses. Glad the judge ordered it unredacted.

It's not just about the public knowing: Legislators and regulators aren't privy to non-public judicial information, and this is key evidence that Congress needs to pass strong laws that break the backs of Apple and Google.

Can someone help me underatand: how is Google/Apple's app store fee different than when a game console company charges game developers a licensing fee to put their game on their console?

Why do people bring that up? Phone market is orders of magnitude bigger, bigger more important markets face more scrutiny.

Ok so no difference yeah?

I personally don't find the rent seeking in consoles acceptable either, but there are some important differences; Consoles are essentially subsidized PCs nowadays, so the seller is giving away the hardware and benefitting from long-term sale commissions. PCs are essentially open consoles, and most games are available on PCs as well. Just releasing a game for PCs is also a big enough market that companies can turn a profit without ever paying rent to the console platforms. Consoles also don't shamelessly spy on their owners, which is a most critical difference.

The silence of googlers when articles like this come up is funny. They jump in like a rabbit, about every google post. Showing off all their google stuff. When things like this come up they pretend they’re busy coding (something something api to help their ad company). We as devs made them mega corps, seriously. Even the worst privacy nightmare inducing API, was coded by someone. Money sure drives everything, people say decentralisation will take care of everything. But Web is decentralised. But somehow we as devs helped few companies to make it almost centralised. The next big tech which tries hard(web3, ipfs) will eventually become centralised again. Companies pretending to be humble, will come in to increase ease of use pull the blanket and repeat.

Edit: I understand during the legal case, employees can have life changing implications for commenting on it. Well the cases can end up dragging for years. So for all those years, are we just going to keep silent? I mean if our moral compass is controlled by how corporate thinks of it, I guess we are not free after all. The next big decentralised thing is a compromised dream already.

Also if you want to really make an opinion, for those who feel like voicing but cant, make an alt account. Every voice matters.

I'm not a Googler and I fail to see the issue here. I personally find no issue with this.

When you look it narrow, you will mot see it. But as you start to see the big picture, you start to see the similarities with our past mistakes. Companies that are so afraid of loosing their power over their consumers, will do anything and everything to keep it. If android and apple had an Open Store API, and their respective stores had the power, no problem. But closing their store apis for themself, payments to themself is bad. Do you think we would’ve had chrome and firefox, if IE used obscure APIs? Imagine Internet standards as controlled by Microsoft. They reject legit apps on daily basis without recourse.

To keep it more simple, think of how US let its telecom companies have so much power over its communication needs. How it’s affecting people.

I generally agree, but this is a very weird phrase considering history:

> Do you think we would’ve had chrome and firefox, if IE used obscure APIs

IE did use obscure, non standard APIs. It took web developers to get tired of MS' shit and starting to code to the standards to dethrone IE from its monopoly. This also kind of implies that IE was there before Netscape which is not true.

Actually I was intending to make the same connection, I apologise I wasn’t clearer.

I dispute your claim that I don't see the big picture and even if I accepted it you have provided absolutely no justification why the specific action is an issue in the big picture, It is just a bunch of non-specific anti-Google rambling. I give it as much credit as I do anti-vax and anti-mask ranting I see here.

Okay lets talk big picture the way I see it. Two companies that run Majority of the phones worldwide, wants to stiffle competition. There is an App which I want to use on iOS but since it doesn’t follow iOS design guidelines its not allowed on appstore, the dev submitted and appealed several times. To be fair he cannot adhere to design guidelin because its a garmin glass cockilpit addon for flight simulator which is not an IOS design. Despite several appeals, he cant get thru the support. Sure big names get credit for supporting the BIG2, but what about the developers like this case?

Googlers can't reply to posts like this, irrespective of where they stand on the issue, because this is an ongoing legal matter.

Disclaimer - I am a Googler.

P.S. Rather than passing snark comments about what others do, maybe try talking to any of them. Any employee of a significantly sized company could have guessed that.

so you as humans are controlled from voicing your opinion by your corporate? So your moral compass depends on your employer?

Edit: I did not mean to dictate what anyone must do, but as a person you are entitled to have an opinion, to stand up. If you are going to base your moral compass based on what others decide. May be one day, you wont even bother having it. Im not hatching a big conspiracy here, but we must always keep some actions in mind irrespective of what courts decide. Courts are run by humans too, and humans make mistakes.

no, all he said is you can't comment on ongoing legal matters. I have no idea how you went from that to "humans are controlled from voicing your opinion by your corporate".

this is pretty standard. even in personal matters your lawyer will probably ask you to shut up.

I made an edit to my original parent comment. Please do refer it.

Googler, opinions are my own.

100% this. Even if we come here and express our opinions, or even express them internally on discussion forums and email, or chat, any of those communications are open to discovery by the plaintiff. If the plaintiff sees any value to anything an employee of the defendant company says, said employee could then be pulled into the lawsuit, be deposed, and many other non-fun things.

Well I'm sure there are many googlers out there that would love to comment on this, for our own sanity, we likely wouldn't.

You could just use a throwaway account.

> Googlers can't reply to posts like this, irrespective of where they stand on the issue, because this is an ongoing legal matter.

Is this true? I know this to be true for actual parties involved, and I'm sure you can't speak on behalf of Google, but I'm not aware of any law or even company policy where private citizens are barred from voicing their own opinions, without divulging non-public information, in a legal matter where they aren't a party (though their employer may be).

As for "fear of retaliation" from your employer, that applies regardless of whether this is an ongoing legal matter or not.

I'm neither a Googler and definitely not a Google fan, but it seems pretty normal to me. At every company I worked for (nothing even close to a fraction of Google) the contract I had to sign contained clauses that would give them enough rope and bullets to hang and shoot me if I did anything that could harm the company in any way, including comments, and there were no social media back then. Googlers might be forced to stay silent, possibly also barred from participating in discussions to defend the employer, which in case of a lawsuit could make sense since what they say or write could be used against the employer.

If voicing our opinion is controlled by the corporate. Im not sure how free we are. Yes I understand the life changing implications of this. But, we every step taken back, is a mistake we might regret.

You're free to not sign. You're free to resign in protest. You're free to comment and accept the consequences.

And, you're free to not care about pointless comment threads on the internet.

This is a near industry wide abusive practice.

Facebook started forcing companies to use Facebook Credits and then forced a 30% cut. Zynga balked. Zynga and Facebook came to secret arrangement. If you were smaller, you were SOL.

EDIT: https://venturebeat.com/2011/12/12/zynga-history/11/

Netflix didn't want to pay Apple the 30% cut. Apple tried to keep Netflix. Eventually, Netflix got rid of new app store subscriptions.

EDIT: Apple offered Netflix concessions. https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/05/netflix-apple-in-app-purchase...

Look at Amazon's bookstore which forces sellers to not offer their books at a lower price elsewhere.

EDIT: https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/bookstore-files-antitrust-cl...

In broadcasting, the publishers bought off the distributors at the expense of creators, aka payola. Which was eventually prohibited, but continued nonetheless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

I'm struggling to articulate a payola analog for internet. I'll revisit Stratechery's Aggregation Theory, see how closely it fits. https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/

Meanwhile, if the tech titans want to claim the protections for platforms afforded by Section 230, they should probably stop acting like publishers. (aka having your cake and eating it too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

Don't Be Evil.

Project Hug.

Your antennae should go up whenever you hear phrasing like this.

Does any of this surprise anyone? I thought the custom deals with large companies was common knowledge. So were the pack in deals with Gapps and Play store. What is the new info here?

We shifted from “common knowledge” to “on the record evidence”, which is a pretty big step in my opinion.

The new info is that it is now available for legal action. The optimistic view would be that Epic is enough into it to bring more changes than Microsoft’s default browser ballot.

I don't understand Epic's complaint here. Google doesn't want want to lose business to Samsung, so they offer incentives to maintain a competitive advantage.

Doesn't Epic pay money to game makers to keep them (if temporarily) off Steam?

Is that materially different than this case? (Is it that Google already has a strong market position and Epic is an upstart?)

I'm reading the comments here and it seems like quite a few people are disgusted but not surprised by this behavior. My question to them: has it changed / will it change your behavior and what you buy?

It's easy to complain, but if that's all that ever happens, how do you expect anything to change?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21046008-epic-v-goog...

Let's say the allegations are true, and that they violate either Sherman, Cartwright, or the California unfair competition laws. Do the developers who accepted money from Google suffer any consequences?

Gotta love this. Marketing newspeak at its finest: "always had programs in place that support best-in-class developers with enhanced resources and investments to help them reach more customers".

   Thu Aug 19 17:54:55 +0000 2021
   1428415009860714500

https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428415192480698371/pho...

https://t.co/gq0m2tIVry

Google has a secret initiative originally called "Project Hug" that offers app makers like Activision Blizzard special treatment in exchange for paying the 30% fee and being quiet about it.

Read Twitter without a Javascript or browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071491

Maybe I should have put the line beginning with "Google" in quotes. I did not author that statement, it comes directly from the Twitter page.

HN then changed the thread not to point to Twitter but to the Verge.

> "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

Case closed, no?

Meanwhile Apple don't need to do things like that because they ban alternative stores from a day 1. I wonder is both evil.

Now this maybe why windows phone failed. It was gaining market share in other countries outside the US.

Can't read on mobile without a Twitter account

Twitter changed something recently where they no longer let you view most tweets without an account.

I think you just need to tap the tweet again to see the thread. But you could also use nitter.

This kind of collusion is shown to occur regularly in every industry eventually, every single time. History repeats itself over and over again.

Yet tons of people continue to believe in and join the chorus about the wonders of capitalism, the free market and competition whenever any sort of government antitrust intervention or regulations are proposed. Its easy to defend capitalism in black and white terms as opposed to communism/socialism while completely ignoring the vast middle ground between 0 government oversight and total control. I hope these stupid tactics are one day broadly recognized by voters..

Not that there was any question about whether these companies are monopolies but will this finally be the evidence that causes regulatory action? Haha, of course not.

So what? It's not surprising, bad, or newsworthy that Google would bribe developers to try to keep them in the fold

Yeah sure, let two mega corps which control mobile OSs, to become as powerful as they can. While their app store reject apps with AI and no recourse. Force devs to use their payment APIs. What could go wrong, its not like they’re American telecom companies, only they can be evil and lobby. Devs are saints, am I right?

I don't blame Google for doing it, but I do blame anti-trust agencies for turning a blind eye on this. Google is a business and by the very rules of capitalism, it does as much as possible to maintain their lead, sometimes skirting with the law. It's the onus of the FTC to ensure they are monitored and penalized in case of transgression.

Yet gaming on android sucks

This is clear anti-competitive behavior. Unregulated capitalism is dangerous capitalism.

I wish we did a better job facing this fact as adults. This is the Achilles heel of Capitalism and ignoring it or making excuses only hurts us all. I love Apple hardware, I love Android, but I also love Capitalism and having choice. Living under this economic system requires responsibility to regulate these things.

What monopoly? I use FDroid without any problems thank you very much.

Now if Google has a program to make happy its customers so that they don't leave... I wish all companies strategies were like that!

Great, but let me know when you can install thousands of other everyday apps, like slack? Can update apps seamlessly. And Fdroid is actually used by masses. Last I checked (week ago) unless you root, you have to go and click on every app to update it. Too bad if you had 25 apps. Infact Fdroid community itself complains, its limited in its functionality because there is no store API, inbuilt into android.

tbh, isn't it completely in google's right to do this? It's not a regulated market, it's google's store.

That's what the lawsuit is about. "Epic’s complaint alleges that Google’s payment restrictions on the Play Store constitute a monopoly, and thus a violation of both the Sherman Act and California’s Cartwright Act."

Maybe google should move to one year exclusivity on the apps in their App Store?

That would be a much better situation than the current status quo.

If Google moved to exclusive deals, then that would mean that they would be paying game developers, 10s of millions of dollars, instead of the other way around.

The current situation is the reverse. Game devs are paying google 10s of millions of dollars. If the opposite happened, then that would be much better.

> Larry Page told Steve Jobs in 2010 that "There will always be places we compete, and places where we cooperate."

> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

if it will be proven in court it's a firm base for anti monopoly/cartel case

Honestly, I don't think that's going far enough. That "our vision is that we work as if we are one company" line couldn't be a better basis for an antitrust case if they were literally trying to incriminate themselves.

That line, bereft of context, is being used as if the two companies don’t compete in many many markets. Do you really think that the original context was as broad as the entire company’s operations? Or even the respective phone ecosystems? They clearly compete with each other heavily.

Maybe they aren't competing, but merely simulate competition in many markets. Why isn't the app-store-tax getting lower through heavy competition?

In many cases, it looks like there's some mutual competition-simulation going. Google launches Google+ to pretend Facebook isn't the only social network, Microsoft launches Bing so Google can say "we don't have a monopoly on search", Google finances Firefox to say the same about browsers, Apple creates Apple Maps to pretend Google Maps has competition etc, but they always seem to put in no more than the minimum effort required.

Of course, they could be honestly trying to compete and they just suck at doing those things their competitors do really well. It just looks suspicious, and quotes like that add weight to that impression.

Yes, all capitalism is just a big agreement to channel all the assets to wealthy people. The only one not in on the secret is you.

Also, that line may be the only evidence... depending on who said it and in what context, it is very unlikely that a plaintiff would use a single instance like this as the basis for their entire case.

In addition what everyone else responded, even if it turns out to currently be legal, it doesn't mean it should be legal.

That’s kind of the point of the lawsuit, to get some oversight in a mafia and the mob kind market.

Thats for the courts to decide.

And apparently there are a whole bunch of lawsuits against google, in multiple countries.

My money is on them losing at least one of them, in some way.

All that needs to happen is for them to lose a single lawsuit, somewhere, for the statement of "its in their right to do that" to be wrong.

That is why we need trustless / censorship resistant platforms like “regular” web or the yet to be proven web 3 (led by ethereum)

No. We just need two things:

- it should be illegal to lock down a device against its end user

- governments should stop protecting companies and helping prevent adversarial interoperability

> governments should stop protecting companies and helping prevent adversarial interoperability

Do you realize that given our current laws in the US, that this is pretty much impossible?

As a person from a country that's not US... Everything being centralized around the US and other countries basically having no sovereignty is also a huge problem.

When two companies collude, it's illegal. When countries do the same, it's perfectly legal and is called a "trade agreement" because it's them who write laws.

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