Strong privacy stance on privacy for others (and in media)...but very quiet on 1st party inhouse ability to connect the dots.
I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them
In Apple’s case, I hope antitrust action comes before they stray too far and whilst their interests are still aligned with mine. I don’t want them to make any money from advertising, because then they have a conflict of interest and their pro-privacy arguments fall flat.
(Google is too far down that path for me to trust them in the future. Anti-privacy is also their core business, whereas Apple primarily makes money from selling devices).
I wonder if Apple is predicting that this wont be the case for much longer (lack of real innovation (excluding the M1) and market saturation), so they're being proactive to dominate another vertical. They will likely capitalize on their current image of being privacy kings.
Truly premium products respect your privacy.
It turns out truly premium goods aren't Google, Tesla, and soon won't be Apple, if Tim&co go down this path.
The problem is that apple intends to make maximum profit. The premium product can produce that, but if they smell that their customers don't care enough about privacy, they could _also_ sell ads on top of the premium tax. So until people starts dropping iphones because of it, they will proceed.
it's the same slow decline that happens over and over in these cases. apple is already focused primarily on services, which you can see in their financials. product has stagnated, while services continues to grow, and with it, more and more capital invested in chasing manufactured prestige awards like oscars and emmys.
You’re right on all the numbers stuff
1) shift from hardware to services 2) remaining hardware directions (VR) focused in separating users from the world vs augmenting
Absolutely. Advertising and professional services (read: consulting) are both inherently user-hostile channels of revenue, and dangerous enough they should be capped for a company's own strategic good.
Some paths are too seductive and dangerous to naively wander.
Microsoft primarily makes money selling software, too. Despite that they're really tracking happy. You'd think selling stuff incentivized less malicious conduct, but...
Another angle is that captive audiences will be steered to other Google or Apple products. But debatably this only becomes anti-trust worthy when Google and Apple will start to buy more businesses in non-core areas eg. To compete with Amazon as the everything store.
Microsoft is definitely doing this with gaming, buying up many huge game properties.
Using your dominance in one market (computers/phones) to muscle into another (ads) is about as anti-competitive as you can get.
Otherwise Facebook using its social media site to take over ads from Google would be anti competitive. Or Google taking over with AdSense by using its search engine. Or TV/cable stations taking over from newspapers or radio.
None of this is anti-competitive. They’re different markets that change as the underlying communication medium changes.
And it’s not like ads are somehow killed by Apple. It’s the surveillance based customized ads that have been made less common as customers can deny their use (or approve them!). Ads existed for a century without that level of surveillance.
i'd vote for anyone who promises (and has a realistic plan) to fund the anti-trust division with 100× their current funding (the IRS too) to crack down on all these distortions in our markets. i have little hope of seeing such a political candidate however.
I also don’t see how giving consumers choice on ad surveillance could be seen as anti-competitive. Where is the consumer harm? Where’s the monopoly?
Heck, even ad networks dying weren’t considered anti competitive when AdSense took the industry over when Google exploited its search engine, or when Facebook took on AdSense by parlaying their social media power. Again, you have to prove harm or attempt to create monopoly.
the precedent you point out is what helps apple claim they're not a trust, because the two components, ads and content, go together in one business model. with google, being paid to place ads is the business model, and competing in the various channels for those ads are potential anti-trust encroachments because they're different markets.
as is usual in these cases, the harm is an inflated market price above the non-distortionary baseline.
The only potential market this capability hurts is the market for ads based on surveillance on Apple devices. Would these be seen as an illegal/unfair practice? I find it highly unlikely to be seen as such by any western government.
Personally, I don't know that that's true. It may be easier for Apple to do it because the ecosystem is more vertically integrated. But that's a coordination problem, not a technical one. I don't think there's a single major player in the Android ecosystem who wouldn't be willing to go along with a plan to lock things down just as far as laws will allow.
I am also weary of giving "random" third parties access to my browsing. I think that my least bad option on iOS is Mullvad, with all blocking turned on. But the bad part there is no browser integration to whitelist sites.
I wonder if it would be possible for Mullvad to present their system as an ad-blocker to Safari, if you are running Mullvad VPN.
You think you are able to, but you just got lucky so far.
Focus code is very buggy and work for only a few sites. It's very hard to contribute fixes, so I expect it to stagnate even more. And since the sites we, the tech elite, read are similar to the ones the few maintainers do, those will be well served while all the rest of the internet will not see any improvement. IMO it will probably rot away like reader-mode.
Also, it is trivial for publishers to evade it :( just not a effort anyone even bothers with because of the low traffic.
Real firefox for android allows you to install uBlockOrigin. The only actively maintained adblocker that is being gasslighted everywhere. And that you was never allowed to install on IOS devices thanks to Apple the company.
1Blocker in particular has a great UI for homebrew element targeting, while AdGuard Pro supports arbitrary lists and relatively rich blocklist filter rules.
Both are very actively maintained. The innovation from AdGuard is surprisingly rapid, they are not just resting on feature sets from long ago.
If this article is true, this is some terrifically anti competitive behavior
I’m using Firefox Focus with its native Content Blocker.
Think those are related? I think they are. Who knows. I just respect tail call elimination.
0: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...
We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone.
Phones have become an important generic computing platform, which is why in different jurisdictions there’s political action to force Apple to loosen control. That wouldn’t be happening if it was so obviously illegal monopoly abuse because then it wouldn’t be necessary. Yet it apparently is.
Interesting example. I found that their service is definitely going downhill.
I’ve been using them almost since they came on the scene. in the past two months I have had to double check search results against Google, where as I expected the results are far superior.
In the previous years I’ve almost never had to double check a result.
So, I don’t know about the future of Apple at all, but I hope the quality stays higher than your example.
Even in their biggest market, the US, they barely pass 50% and the rest is all one very successful competitor. Pretty significant competition.
Additionally, they have and continue to enforce regulatory authority on their platforms, which is the role of government, not a private company. It's anticompetitive for a massive private enterprise like Apple (or Google) to arbitrarily use its' distribution platform to control the economic fortunes of the companies built on that platform.
Remember how Microsoft had 95% market share and how they were actively and overtly abusing that position to embrace, extend and extinguish any threats? Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere. The worst they got was the EU forcing them to put up Windows without Windows Media Player, which then got bought by nobody, and the browser choice pop-up they got rid of after a few years.
If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.
Yes, that's completely consistent with the Brandeis view of antitrust. Cartels are not a competitive market.
> Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere.
Not facts. It resulted in a successful prosecution by the Clinton DOJ, and Microsoft was ordered to breakup in 2000. The company appealed (dragging past the election) and it was settled by the Bush DOJ, which obviously resulted in weaker policies since the Bush lawyers subscribed to the Borkist view of antitrust.
> If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.
Guess we will see. Seems to already be happening based on the defensive moves these companies are making in response to more aggressive regulators, but I agree new laws would help move things along. I didn't "somehow" inflate it. I looked at the recurring revenue streams from the app store instead of device sales, because app store revenue is a massive stream of profit, and devices are low-margin commodities.
DDG does track how you interact with their search results and search ads, same as Google.
Check it for yourself using your favorite browsers developer console, there are no cookies, unless you set preferences and if so, the cookie is a very short string that indicates your preferences and is obvious not usable as a user id.
What they do is log what is searched for and what results and ads are clicked and that is not tied to you. Because they don’t have a concept of ‘you’, only of that one search.
And that is definitely not ‘same as Google’, Google automatically sets a user identifying cookie once you open the homepage, tries all kinds of tricks to tie this user id to your Google account and tracks anything you do to that account and remembers it forever. That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks. Even if you clear your cookies. That’s Google tracking you. DuckDuckGo does not do that.
And it is really unfair to just accuse them of being ‘same as Google’. They are not same as Google, obviously they are not perfect but they do make the sacrifices while still making it work without tracking everything you do.
> That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks.
I don't think that's right? If you search for things about cars and then click through to a page about cars you'll get tagged with all sorts of advertising cookies, same as if you did that with any other search engine. But I'm pretty sure just searching for something on Google won't affect either (a) what ads you see on future Google searches or (b) what ads you see on non-Google pages around the web.
(Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google, though not search ads.)