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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant.

Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge.

It's all very profitable.

If we cannot trust large companies to not abuse this kind of power, then they should be prevented by law from playing both sides. This may result in the breakup of some very large companies, akin to the 1934 Air Mail Act that broke up Boeing.

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Just think about all the development and financial data and ideas that google has a direct untraceable back door into through running gmail, android phones, and chrome browser alone...

I have resorted to using an old school notepad for my development ideas pretty much. A software company I used to work for got shuttered just 3 months after a big software company paid the startup a visit to observe operations back in 98, I've always been wary of corporate espionage since.

It always completely astounded me how countless professional businesses are casually and mindlessly handing over their most private internal communication and metrics to Google on a platter. And aren't Google's privacy policies and ToS's stating that all collected information can be used to "improve their own services" or something along those lines? Does that include 'extract business advantage' from your data? I don't know and IANAL, but I'd prefer some separation from such an ad-tech giant with my corporate intelligence.

(Not a Google engineer)

Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited.

The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.

So Google has all the "checks&balances" in place, and corporate managed to turn them into a flawless and perfect system?

And the source for that claim is not even a Google engineer, but apparently somebody who heard how Google engineers are "notoriously loose-lipped".

From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?

> The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.

It's much easier to believe once you remember how Google actually makes its money [0].

In that context it not only becomes believable, but it actually fits perfectly into their MO [1].

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/09/google_ventures_yield...

[I work at Google]

Your first link explains how Google doesn't actually give your data to anyone else. Your second link is about a company that Google Ventures invested in. The equivalent would be that some company claims a YC-backed startup stole some of their IP, and that somehow YC is at fault, which is silly. Google isn't even a party to the lawsuit (further, it's not clear that the company who sued even won and to an extent it looks like they might be a patent troll).

> From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?

A bunch of it is public: https://cloud.google.com/access-transparency. Access Transparency provides the access logs to the customer, and Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company. But yes, you could also go searching HN for discussion of these topics and probably find quite a lot from people.

> Your first link explains how Google doesn't actually give your data to anyone else.

Nobody said Google "gives data away", the article explains how Google monetizes the data.

> Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company

All Access Approval does is prevent individual Google employees from accessing the data, which is not the same as "Google as a whole". It also seems to have a long list of Google services were it does not apply as no AT logs are created or other exceptions apply.

And while that might be nice, it's neither special, nor does it change the nature of Google's business, it's just virtue signaling and building plausible deniability along the lines of "We really do care about privacy! At least in as so far as we don't want to get regulated!"

You know, just like claiming how Google "doesn't give data away", when in reality it very much sells all the useful insights, said data gives, to the highest bidder.

How does Google respond to secret FISA orders which by law cannot be audited or known by anyone but the direct receiver and one pre-screened attorney?

Most businesses on Google Workspace don’t see the US government as an adversary. If they do, they encrypt things or don’t use Workspace.

That's not my point. My point is by law Google must have secret and extremely challenging to audit processes for accessing user data, which can be abused for corporate espionage.

This. If US government on your things to worry about list, you host in Russia Cloud or China Cloud. Or roll your own data center in some non US allied country.

The whole point of the thread is that a shady executive could use the same backdoor processes to get whatever he wants in an untraceable fashion, the same way that our trustworthy and noble government does

The last case of ad bidding proves that while not everyone at Google knows whats going on, they are abusing the data they are sitting on.

Which case is that?

You can perform these analyses with 'anonymized' data to both observe the broad trends across a huge dataset, and still claim you haven't invaded privacy.

With the scale of surveillance data available to Google, this is how they have their cake and eat it too.

Once you know that note-taking apps (e.g.) are a hugely growing space, it's easy to use publicly available data to find the startups making a splash. Not once did Google's data tell them Startup X is an acquihire target. And yet, here they are at Startup X's door.

Sure, but that sounds much better than Google peaking into Startup X's emails and determining how much runway they have left, how management feels about their ability to succeed, etc.

That's assuming that there isn't another back channel to access that data.

And even if they don't access file or email content, metadata like access data like Play Store performance, Google searches for competing products, and Google Analytics data, might seem like fair game.

I'm not sure that's true. For example the video about serving 5 petabytes of data took 11 years to come out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082014

"It's to fight terrorism, don't tell anyone"

Who says Google doesn't have some secret group with security clearance, and only top management knows of its existence?

You missspelled Baidu and CCP there.

Google employs a huge number of engineers. It can assemble a very tight lipped group of people if it wants to.

Infosec teams that are competent tend to push back on that.

If there's no infosec and it's just infra and developers and CTO's signing contracts with vendors, even Google, you have an issue.

That's not what the comment you're replying to is talking about. They may not be trusted to control a marketplace, doesn't mean we have to entertain silly conspiracy theories about them reading your google docs! As another comment says below, there is no way that can be happening because google engineers would not keep it secret! Regarding your paper notepad, I keep paper by my laptop also, it's a nice medium. But seriously, to think it's protecting you against IP espionage is (a) tinfoil hat territory and (b) almost certainly a massive overestimation of your IP. You don't want to go through life miscalibrated in this regard; apart from anything else it will confuse those for whom you are a role model.

You forgot Chromebooks, that everyone around here is so eager to advocate, basically running their business on Google's infrastructure.

I would advocate Chromebooks and Chromeboxes only because once I remove the bootloader protection, flash the coreboot firmware and install whichever OS I want, from my point of view they're wonderful little machines. But from normal users perspective, once they discover that the hardware is locked to prevent the install of anything but ChromeOS, they are garbage, and probably it is what they become once the user has enough of the Google ecosystem then ditch them well before their physical obsolescence. Locking down hardware to prevent installation of other operating systems should become illegal.

Do you recommend any guides for removing the bootloader protection?

To my knowledge, this one is the best detailed and covers most devices.

https://mrchromebox.tech/

>You forgot Chromebooks, that everyone around here is so eager to advocate

Got a source for that?

Have fun, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

There are a few differences.

The big tech companies have a much higher market share. For phone app makers, the App Store is the only point of access to the majority of affluent Americans; Google controls access to the rest of the 1st world population (sideloading is possible on Android but 99.9% of normies won't use your app if it's not on the store). Amazon does have competitors and you can also run your own e-shop, but they are the gatekeepers for a large portion of the online sales market - getting kicked off of Amazon is going to hurt bad for any online retailer. Of course getting kicked out of Walmart is also bad, but there are lots of competitors that lots of people use (grocery stores which have regional chains as well as smaller local chains, Target, Costco, Amazon, etc.).

Which leads into the second point - Apple has a long history of integrating cool features/apps into their OS and then kicking out the original creator from the app store. This destroys the creator / original company and basically transfers the idea's profits to Apple. Retail stores and Amazon do make knockoffs, but generally the original product is still sold alongside it. In many cases the branded product is superior to the generic product and many people will pay extra for it; in many other cases the brand also supplies the generic label product so that's beneficial for both parties.

> The big tech companies have a much higher market share. For phone app makers, the App Store is the only point of access to the majority of affluent Americans; Google controls access to the rest of the 1st world population (sideloading is possible on Android but 99.9% of normies won't use your app if it's not on the store).

To use real figures, Apple has 60% of the mobile operating system market in the US[1], and Google has 40%. Apple's App Store has 100% more revenue than Google's Play Store[2], and the two are responsible for over 99% of all mobile app sales in the US. Both Google and Apple dominate the mobile app payment market in the US, as well, since they both ban all other forms of app payments on their app stores.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

[2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

It would be interesting to see the revenue split between App Store and Play Store in the US. Since iOS skews towards more affluent users, and more affluent users are way more likely to spend, it wouldn't be surprising if App store gets 90%+ of the US market in terms of revenue - finally dispelling the "it's not a monopoly" argument

If 92.47% of all stores in the USA were only Walmart then yes, there would be a national interest in determining how grocery store competition had been destroyed/denied and we would want to fix it.

In such a situation you would see a degradation of store product quality vs price. It might not be so clear with internet search because Google’s ascendence was coincident with innovation that it has hoovered up. But once you see competition restored, with things like the return of a Search API, or of more transparent ranking metrics, or of customizable ranking algorithms then you will begin to see what you are missing.

Where are you getting 92.47%? Amazon's share of online shopping is well under that, no?

I’m guessing that number is in reference to googles dominance of the search market?

I’m assuming they are less than that with regards to the advertisement market (I’m not super familiar with the space, but as I understand Facebook is a huge player there as well).

What market though? There is no search market. It is a service given away for free. There is no such thing as a monopoly on something that does not cost anything.

Companies like Google and Facebook have pretty much cornered the market of the attention economy.

The vast majority of web users have their eyes and attention directly guided by one of these [0]. If they decide you do not exist, then you will effectively cease existing for billions of people on the web because they do not know a web outside of Google/YouTube or the Facebook ecosystem.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

> There is no such thing as a monopoly on something that does not cost anything.

This is the wrong way to think about it. How much would _Google_ be willing to pay to maintain that position? Well, Mozilla's primary source of revenue, is afaik, from having Google as the default search engine, so at least that much, for whatever percent of the browser market-share.

You're kidding, right? the first damn near full page of google search is nothing but ads which they make a killing off of.

If search wasn't profitable then ads in search and SEO wouldn't exist.

yes, in a scenario where wal-mart or costco is acting as marketplace rather than seller (i.e. their online stores).

when you see brand-name products on a shelf at wal-mart beside their own-brand, it's because wal-mart has purchased that product and is re-selling it. wal-mart has taken the risk of buying the stock in the first place. brands still have a chance to succeed.

when a brand acts as a marketplace, they aren't taking on the risk. they're selling shelf space, not buying things to put on the shelves. when they participate in the marketplace as well as operating it, they are competing with their own customers. that's the behaviour that's essentially a recipe to destroy competition.

> when you see brand-name products on a shelf at wal-mart beside their own-brand, it's because wal-mart has purchased that product and is re-selling it.

Goods on the shelf at stores in general are a mix of items on consignment, the vendor provided the goods and the vendor will be paid only if or when the goods sell; goods that were purchased on net-30 or net-N terms where the goods are delivered but not paid for until 30 (or N) days later; and also some goods that were purchased and paid for before delivery to the store (or store warehouse). Of course, even when the goods aren't on consignment, larger stores often negotiate favorable terms for unsold goods; typically the vendor must refund the store as well as pay for return shipping or disposal. A large amount of risk still falls to the vendor.

Anyway, store brands are fine, IMHO, but there's two things Amazon does that weird me out: a) in some categories they apparently have several store brands and it's not always clear it's an amazon brand, whereas Costco uses a single brand and most other stores use just a couple; b) there have been reports that Amazon will request supplier information from merchants of products that are selling well, and then Amazon goes to those suppliers and negotiates bulk purchases; it seems to me, that's making your merchants do all the work to discover items of interest and where to get them made and then Amazon swoops in and takes over.

The effects of costco and walmart's behavior is largely contained within their own retail space. Amazon.com has no such constraint.

I think my answer is yesno. It isn't about the action of making and selling the competing products, but about how the internet and FAANG scale changes the customer-business dynamics. Consider that when you browse wares in a physical store like Costco or Walmart, the selection is constrained to what can fit within a building, thus the absolute worthless garbage junk and knockoffs will be culled to make space for less return-prone items ( At Costco, I don't see 5 pages or aisles of identical products listed under different brands that are mechanically indistinguishable from 'kirkland signature' products). Costco also seems to care about counterfeits and whether or not something they sold was found to be bad (this has happened to me, a food item at costco was found to be the source of a few food poisoning cases and was traced back to a single item at costco, and costo went around calling everyone who had that batch on their purchase history to let them know). I've wound up with counterfeit pieces of junk off Amazon that I'm not going to go through the effort of refunding/returning/complaining about, so it's all slippage that AMZN gets away with. Returns and replacements are so fast at brick and mortar stores 5 miles away from home!

As others have pointed out there are differences between the big internet companies and the physical chain stores however I think for the purposes of drafting a law, unless it applies only to internet commerce, it might be reasonable to write it as applying to any store above a certain size as well (I guess we want Ma to be able to sell her homemade preserves at Ma and Pa's country store)

In your analogy you name two large brick-and-mortar retailers. Allow me to posit my own analogy: If Amazon is the Walmart of the web then who is the Costco? Who is the Target? There isn't any.

Retailers stick their neck out to put an item on the shelf because space is limited. The product is made. It's on the shelf. If it doesn't sell then someone loses money. If Equate brand sucks I can choose an alternative. If everything on the shelf sucks I can go to another store.

Costco, Target and Walmart all have their own online presence. Your entire argument makes no sense.

They were obviously just using an analogy with real names to say Amazon does not have a similar-size competitor or three.

Walmart is a similar sized competitor, though. Depending on how you break it down, eBay is as well. The analogy makes no sense. Walmart is a competitor, Aliexpress, Flipkart, etc.

What percentage of online revenue does Walmart make? How much does Amazon make?

7% vs 40%. Definitely a huge difference, but the majority of commerce in the USA is non-Amazon. If you do worldwide it's way worse.

in no way is it a "monopoly." If you look at growth rates Amazon is slowing and others are gaining

not to mention the comparison is foolish to begin with as Amazon doesn't have physical locations. a better comparison is total amount of sales, in which Amazon isn't even the plurality.

You're moving the goalposts. I only meant to highlight that Amazon has no real equal online and that is it. I'm not talking about physical stores and I'm not saying they're a monopoly.

No, I’m not. I already showed you that Amazon isn’t the majority in the USA. Prior to Covid, when everything was shut down, Amazon was only like 20ish percent.

There is urgence in banning Walmart from selling home brands next to competitors, because it has hampered the discussion on the GAFA monopolies every time it was asked! For its own sake, this is causing harm to the customer…

Do you have an argument against that?

the difference is in the measure of fair competition; anyone can compete, it simply can't be unfair; these tech companies are competing unfairly and to the extent it's not only obvious to participants, it's obvious to government. One doesn't typically build a case without supporting evidence as would help generally in situations like this.

Trader Joe's pulls the same thing with the house brand. House Brand, undercoat, whatevers. If you want Capitalism to work, then everything need to be a market. For markets to be efficient we need protocols and interfaces. For this to work we need to disambiguate to the root, the post office should probably deliver milk and potatoes.

Can you explain how Costco is relevant here when they make most of their money off membership fees and not sales?

Would you say the same about Amazon promoting its own brand, if Amazon made more money off Prime than sales?

I'd say in the case of Amazon, store brands are missing the point. They can let sellers take all the risk of determining what the market will support, while profiting whether the seller is successful or not. If successful, Amazon can reach its own deal with the manufacturer and compete with the very same branded product, possibly at a lower price, without having to pay into the marketplace, and with the capability of manipulating the search results.

As someone who's been involved in developing financial exchanges this concept is bizarre. There is regulation and participant agreements that would prevent NYSE for example from running its own market making firm and abusing it's position as exchange to benefit over other participants for profit, if it did this others would leave and the exchange would eventually die.

Not only is adtech virtually unregulated compared to financial exchanges, it's also immensely more fragmented, and ad networks like Google AdSense are tremendously sticky once they've been exclusively integrated on the long tail of millions of publisher sites. See https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-... for all the parties involved. There's a lot less transparency for all parties involved (see the work of , and arguably some version of an SEC for adtech is long overdue. If ad exchanges were operated with the transparency of broker-dealers, initiatives like https://checkmyads.org/ wouldn't need to exist.

The notion of: "it's a little bit like X, a little bit like Y - but it's neither X nor Y, therefore we it's a wild-west anarchy without any rules or regulations" - this is such a glaring loophole in our legal system that it must be intentional. Derivatives bubble, ad-tech, gig-work, crypto-mania, AirBnB, and many other socially-parasitic enterprises exist solely because our legal code is missing "try-catch-finally" clauses

They didn't have any trouble during the drug war when new variations were made because they weren't illegal -- the government made all variants illegal and continued on. That's what they do when they care. When they don't care they pretend there's nothing they can do.

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

> ...any chemical "substantially similar" to a controlled substance listed in Schedule I or II to be treated as if it were listed in Schedule I

It is intentional - the legal system defaults to absolute freedom in absense of laws. Besides have you seen how goddamn inept just rulemaking is when done based upon the old standards which have nothing to do with the advantages and limitations of the new medium?

Look at attempts to prelegislate things which do not really exist yet and you get utter embarrassments of law at best and at worst hamstring your nation by laws which assume that a TI graphing calculator has the potential to go rogue and start deliberately killing people.

Small and medium vendors can't abandon Amazon. And with enough of them you create the largest marketplace on the planet.

imagine your Netflix and have to pay Apple massive % to be on their devices... then comes Apple with its own service and they can charge less because they don't charge them self's the % giving them very anti competitive advantage.

interesting point. I wonder if an incremental regulation can be passed whereas if the marketplace decides to become a participant/competitor, those in which it competes against no longer have to pay the marketplace fees to "even the playing field" at least from a financial standpoint.

doesn't even have to be regulation. these companies can do it in good faith but alas, life's not fair.

No, it would be a competitive thing. In chess capturing your opponents pieces to weaken them is a valid strategy you will see in any tournament. Capturing Netflix's marketshare by offering a cheaper alternative is competitive. Putting your enemy in disadvantaged positions is just part of the game.

I don't understand how your analogy is even remotely relevant. In chess, both sides can make the exact same moves. Neither side can change the rules. Neither side can impose any extra costs on the other side in an asymmetric way. It's a classic example of a level playing field, and it's the exact opposite of the asymmetric roles that Apple and Netflix play on the iOS platform.

The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV. But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware.

The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.

>The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV

That is an option for Netflix. If they made their own platform they could offer a more competitive price.

Apple was created in 1996. Netflix was made in 1997. Maybe a good strategy of having a dominant streaming platform in 202x would have been to launch a mobile platform. Netflix had the same chance as Apple to take that path, but they didn't. Apple can now capitalize on good moves that it made in the past. In chess you can't just recognize that you are in a bad position and then ask a tournament organizer if you can be reset into an equal position again. Either you continue playing that bad position, or you resign.

>But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware.

If you have no choice but to charge more than your competitors and you can't justify the extra cost with extra features or whatever and people stop using your service and you go bankrupt then you have lost the game.

>The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.

It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.

>That is an option for Netflix. If they made their own platform they could offer a more competitive price.

It may be an option for Netflix. It may be an option for Facebook. But it's not an option for 99.999% of app makers and it would be bad for consumers. Very bad. Imagine you had to buy one device per service you're using. I don't want to buy a Netflix device to watch Netflix movies. This is just bonkers.

>It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.

No. It's more than just useless. It is a great demonstration of how every ideology becomes insanity if you take it to its extremes.

>But it's not an option for 99.999% of app makers and it would be bad for consumers.

Then you will just have to live with being disadvantaged to a platform's creator when competing on their platform. They have the home field advantage.

>No. It's more than just useless. It is a great demonstration of how every ideology becomes insanity if you take it to its extremes.

You are the one making it extreme. If you think the strategic decision of developing your own mobile ecosystem is silly then there is always the option to not do it.

There is no rule in this game that it has to be profitable to release stuff on the app store. Apple could just decide one day that third party apps are a security and privacy problem and then remove them all leaving only Apple apps.

Ah so now you have changed your position from "it's competitive" to "it's not competitive but it doesn't matter".

But you're wrong about me just having to live with being disadvantaged. Apple is built on top of a platform as well. It's called society. And society makes some rules that govern what advantages platform operators like Apple can enjoy as a benefit of having created a successful platform and what advantages are unfair and/or damaging for consumers. So we'll see about who has to live with what.

>Ah so now you have changed your position from "it's competitive" to "it's not competitive but it doesn't matter".

I never did that. Take for example the capture the flag game made. Some parts of maps are stronger for one team than the other. That doesn't mean the game is not competitive it just means that it is something you need to take in mind. What I described is a spot on the map where Apple has an advantage.

>But you're wrong about me just having to live with being disadvantaged. Apple is built on top of a platform as well. It's called society.

Sure, but it's with existing base ideas like freedom of association Apple can just not work with Netflix at all.

This ignores the network effects for users and integration costs for developers. Once a competitor gains monopoly/monopsony/oligopoly position with those factors introducing a new challenger becomes nearly impossible at any cost. Ask Microsoft.

Anyway, Apple began in 1976, not 1996. And by '96 they had both an established hardware brand and decades more expertise than when Netflix launched.

Apple was founded in 1976, which is a full twenty years before Netflix.

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge.

This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well.

While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeeaaaaal hard time finding any way that this sort of thing harms consumers.

This is a tired argument.

Amazon doesn’t work like a supermarket: a closer analogy would be a shopping mall also providing cash registers to the stores. Amazon doesn’t buy from the producers nor act as a distributor on most transactions. The risk is all externalized, and they face minimal penalty (no loss of shell space, no stocking risk) by having their product alongside the original one.

It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.

The Amazon brands I see as the ONE product they should (in theory) never allow co-mingling on and thus the safe one to buy for a known quality.

Agreed that this will happen, but I also think this is exactly the same thing that's expected of store brands: cheaper, but could be of lower quality.

Maybe it was never right that those stores were also doing that.

There's also a matter of the level of dominance that the platform has. Something like half of e-commerce takes place on Amazon; most online ads are via Google; and Apple literally invented the name "App Store".

As for consumer harm, when the market is manipulated to remove competition, we are all harmed. Not today, not directly, but every day after that.

I think the solution is two fold: 1) strong anti-monopoly law, and 2) holding brick and mortar retailers to the same standard that we apply to online retailers.

I think that you'll find that most grocery retailers have nearly as large a monopoly inside their geographic area as Amazon does in the retail space.

"This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well".

The analogy seems spurious to me. Do brick and mortar retailers charge other brands for being a market-place ? Don't they actually buy products of other brands ?

Yes, this is the crucial difference

Brick and mortar stores are dealers, Amazon is a broker. Dealers have inventories - they purchase items from the suppliers and resell them - if they misjudge demand, they're left off with useless goods. Brokers simply facilitate a transaction between two parties - there's no risk involved. The fact that brokers get to charge a higher mark-up than dealers is just bizarre

> Dealers have inventories - they purchase items from the suppliers and resell them - if they misjudge demand, they're left off with useless goods.

Everything is negotiable. If a retailer has more power than a supplier, then the retailer can demand a guaranteed sale clause in the contract, requiring the supplier to take back unsold goods and refund them.

https://www.comcapfactoring.com/blog/walmart-vendor-financin...

https://factor-this.com/walmart-supplier-financing/

The major brick and mortar stores are not solely dealers, they often have various deals where they sell items on consignment and do not pay for inventory until after they're sold, require payment for "shelf space", etc. That's transparent from a customer perspective, but from a supplier viewpoint they're often quite close to brokers in practice.

The consignment model and paying for shelf space are the exception in retail though, not the rule.

They tend to exist only where there is a huge asymmetry in power between retailer (usually large chains) and suppliers.

Isn't most of retail done by large chains with a huge asymmetry in power?

Depends on (1) what country/region you live in and (2) what brand you're talking about. For example: Yes, Safeway may be huge, but so is Procter and Gamble. Is there an asymmetry there? I'm not sure.

Anyways, large chains don't deal exclusively in consignment either.

Some super markets carry your favorite brand of frozen chicken nuggets, others do not. Makes me think there are agreements between producers and retailers and that those agreements are all about money.

I bet there are clauses in those agreements that state that the retailer should "make my brand of ketchup the first brand that customers see" and that they cater to that clause "for a small fee".

In the UK, the big supermarket Tesco were criticised heavily for how they charged their suppliers for various things: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/mar/30/tesco-reduc...

Surprisingly no (or at least not always). Think for example of the displays of idk, stacks of holiday branded coke near the entrance of Walmart. Coca cola pays Walmart for that space and a coke employee likely puts the product there.

Joe's corner store and Walmart work differently, only one negotiates brand deals.

Anybody can figure out what Apps are popular, or are well liked by their users. Any 3rd party could operate the Apple App Store, and Apple (or anybody else in the world) would still know what apps were popular on it, and Apple would still be able to implement them as features/apps for their own operating systems. To resolve the conflict you’re describing, an operating system vendor would have to be prohibited from distributing software.

Yes but. It's your country, you let them do these things. You set up your country to let them do these things. So no real reason to complain.

For real, do we have any more influence in this ?

Looking at what’s happening now, Apple and Google are not under scrutiny because of our collective petitioning or votes, it’s solely because of competitors with deep enough pockets to duck it in court.

As a proof of that, there’s no one to fight Facebook so not much effectively changes on that front, despite all the outcry and editorials thrown at them.

Complaining is how problems get fixed. If we took your advice we’d still be living in a country where voting was restricted to white male land owners and most of us would be dreaming about rate reductions at the company store.

That's not logical. Our country isn't a monolith. Lots of us are fighting for change so stop acting like 330 million people are all the same would be a great start. Complaints are one point of contention. Currently most people don't care much about their privacy if they find out it will slightly inconvenience them to try out an alternative. Until they get burned or FAANG does something particularly aggregious they just don't care much.

>>a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant.

Like the government?

The government is not a company, and does not have an overall goal of maximizing profit. That's what makes it different.

If the government is not meeting the demands of the people, we elect a different one (in theory).

we love these large companies. less people to trust, plus free-ish services

I can open a lemonade stand, I just can't sell my own lemonade, is that corrrect?

Now that's one hell of a straw man. Do you also plan on controlling this stand, allowing others to sell on your stand while watching every single transaction (and maybe the recipe so that the analogy is complete?) and while also having the power to remove them from your stand?

Because if you are only talking about opening a stand and selling your lemonade, then you don't have the same foothold as Apple, Google or Amazon.

> same foothold

Yes, this is the problem. Participating in the market they create is not. If that were true every grocery store that has a bakery, deli, or meat counter is a problem.

They are too big. Monopolistic forces are the problem.

Another example: FDA is funded by pharma companies.

No wonder people think businesses run governments when they use bad metrics of control like that. The earth itself controls oil companies and is therefore responsible for global warming by that logic!

What apps does Apple sell in the App Store that used to be sold by third parties, but were then banned?

F.lux. The examples are countless.

Well, not sold in this case, but given away for free to increase the moat, then banned.

Look at how the Notes app has evolved… There are apps for scanning documents, for example which are now superseded.

The Music app which now has a streaming service…

Spotify is still in the App Store, and iTunes/Apple Music existed long before Spotify.

Spotify launched in 2006. Apple Music: 2015.

iTunes is not a subscription service like Spotify.

The underlying assumption is that this behavior is bad.

Why is it bad? Especially bad enough to be regulated by a new law?

For one thing it's bad because of information asymmetry between the market owner and other participants. The market owner knows all the information but each other participant only knows a fraction of the information. If the information was all completely public it would be less bad probably. This is why in financial markets "dark pools" (private alternative execution venues) ended up getting new regulation from the SEC to prevent abuse https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/dark-pools#s...

Antitrust law doesn't come into effect just because something is bad in the abstract sense though, it comes into effect when there is harm to the consumer as a result (that's my understanding anyway). The harm here is due to the market distortion primarily (I would think).

It hinders fair competition, which hurts consumers. It misallocates dollars to these gatekeepers.

The current chair of the FTC has an interesting paper on this question (written before she became chair).

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...

Are you kidding? You don't think this kind of behavior disincentivizes innovation?

And it's not exactly new. Common carrier regulations have been a thing forever.

It is a conflict of interest that allows them to gain a disproportionate amount of control over the market. It causes direct harm to competitors, through both the access to confidential sales data and access to the market. It also causes harm to consumers (at least in cases of locked down platforms like iOS) since they no longer have access to competitor's products. In short, it is no longer a free market.

Because this kind of behaviour results in monopolies which stifle innovation and invariably harm people.

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