Google's agreement with Samsung prevented Branch from launching: testimony
bigtechontrial.com
bigtechontrial.com
The answer to this question is really important, because if the first is true, Samsung is essentially forced to enter into whatever agreement Google puts in front of them (the alternative is it's own flavor of Android a-la Huawei). However, if the latter is true Samsung is complicit in this monopolist practice.
Does anyone know which one is it?
The EU is after them on it, but I don't remember a clear result yet: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_16_...
[edit] Google was found guilty and made some promises in 2019, but I'm not sure we've seen any change in substance ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Goog...
Come to think of it, Huawei or Xiaomi phones must come with their app storr, so the real test would be to see what defaults they have in EU ?
The Pixel launcher is deeply integrated with Google, so that doesn't support switching search providers I think. You can install any other launcher you want if you dislike searching through Google from the home screen.
They can't make Android devices without accepting Google's terms.
Amazon attempted to sell phones with their own fork of Android without permission, but didn't have much luck.
Interestingly, Amazon had to find a manufacturing partner that didn't already make Android phones for anyone, because one of the terms of Google's agreement was that you couldn't make any devices running a fork of Android for anyone.
Apps
>If a company does ever manage to fork AOSP, clone the Google apps, and create a viable competitor to Google's Android, it's going to have a hard time getting anyone to build a device for it. In an open market, it would be as easy as calling up an Android OEM and convincing them to switch, but Google is out to make life a little more difficult than that. Google's real power in mobile comes from control of the Google apps—mainly Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store. These are Android's killer apps, and the big (and small) manufacturers want these apps on their phones. Since these apps are not open source, they need to be licensed from Google. It is at this point that you start picturing a scene out of The Godfather, because these apps aren't going to come without some requirements attached.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
and services as well.
This isn't actually a very strong moat.
(Non Waze) alternatives to maps are becoming increasingly credible. Google Now and Hangouts are history. An alternate client to Gmail is easy, since it speaks imap, and the Android app isn't particularly amazing by itself. Youtube's possibly the toughest nut, but there are alternate clients to it, the web UI works very well in mobile browsers, and besides many would be satisfied with just having TikTok.
That's true for the likes of you and me, but for the other 97% of the population, not so much. Most people just go for the default or are completely unaware of alternatives or don't trust alternatives
Take that power away and suddenly you can have some actual competition. That of course would take a number of legal systems (laws, judges, governments) to hold the line. I'm not very optimistic about that.
I wouldn’t say it’s competition that’s involved, but that the state of the entire industry is such that all of the functionality present in winword.exe is now the minimum-viable-product in any information-system.
Or rather: anything you can do in Word, is now achievable in HTML; and given that no-one has a real need to print Word documents on paper, so it’s an ephemeral product that exists as a transition from paper-to-digital, living on borrowed time.
In conclusion, I see myself downgrading my personal Office 365 subscription from Professional Plus to just Excel in my next renewal.
They are increasingly being killed off by Google in their march to outlaw adblockers in the Internet
How do you give people something (so they can watch it), without giving it to them (so they can copy it)?
The more they try to prevent people from accessing YouTube without seeing their ads, the closer they come to the line of "actually, don't let people see the content they're here to see".
Outside China, however, that's a non-starter. Furthermore, many apps like online banking will refuse to work on phones that don't pass Google's Android Attestation, which is also part of the take-it-all-or-leave-it package.
If you want to see how hard this is, just check out the forums for GrapheneOS (a secure thus degoogled fork of Android for Pixel phones).
No idea what a Google Now or a Hangout is.
In addition, there's the sanctions angle. Bet this'd put them more in the crosshairs of the US. Can easily see e.g. the US saying you either stop the collaboration with Huawei or we slap tariffs on your phones.
ie. Google Play Services is the 'goto' way for ANY third party developer to implement push notification.
So Samsung wouldn't only need to create their own, whole alternative for it, but they would also need to try and convince EVERY major app developers to now implement the alterantive in their own apps.
That's what Huawei was forced to do, and to this day there are apps that don't work or have less features on Huawei phones then on "google's" ones.
“Forced”? By whom and to what end?
So yes, at the time Huawei were forced to try and build their own independent versions and it didn't work very well at all.
Microsoft tried to do this a long time ago for Windows Phone, and Google openly thwarted them every step of the way, changing APIs and so on to prevent those apps from actually working. And they of course refused to launch any apps of their own for WP.
If you need a smartphone to call, message people, browse the web, for maps/directions/location/gps, to display PDFs, you can do it on a Google-free Android:
- App "store": F-Droid
- Navigation: Organic Maps and OSMAnd. I guess you won't have traffic information nor radar warnings which seems a big thing for many people.
- Browser: Firefox or any Chromium-based browser found in F-Droid
- Emails : K9-Mail (has it been rebranded to Thunderbird yet?)
- Messages : the AOSP Messaging app (or maybe a fork of it if any) or QKSMS; Element, Telegram, Rocket Chat…. For Signal you'll need to download the APK from the Signal's website as they are against distribution of unofficial builds of it, or use Aurora.
- PDF : There are PDF viewers on F-Droid but can't remember their names.
and you still have Aurora for downloading things from the Play Store. I fortunately never had to use WhatsApp and Messenger but they can be downloaded from there if you need them.
You may miss some things, but it covers a lot already. Most things work.
No company cares if they lose the Linux nerd market segment for consumer tech, they have never been in play. The real market is for the “it just works” crowd.
Personally despite me being entirely competent to do what you describe I have a family and a small business. I don’t have time to screw around with my phone as my time is very valuable. To the point where if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.
I say this as a person who has several kits of tiny smartphone screw drivers, has run a million flavors of every OS, and has taken apart tons of phones, PC, laptop and the like. At some point either you have infinite cheap time or limited expensive time. Once you cross that barrier it’s economically irrational to be screwing around with k-9 mail.
You are pushing it. Once the phone is set up, everyday use is easy enough. Some things are less convenient and you are missing some bells and whistles, but the phone is still usable. it's still Android, with the same UI, for the most part.
But I know this "My time is limited and expensive, I have no time for X" argument too well. (X being "freedom" and "the environment" in your comment).
The world does not progress in the right direction if everybody considers their time too limited to spend time making it better. Of course, trying to improve things takes time but someone has to do it. Maybe you are improving the world in your way but if so, you are probably spending time on it.
At some point we need some people to slow down and take the time to think if we are doing / how we can do the right things. Being fast and efficient towards the wrong direction is useless or even harmful.
Yes, that's the idealistic person in me speaking.
> if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.
See, that's my point. It's rational until the world breaks apart because we kept burning resources building too much stuff instead of limiting the production and repairing things that can be repaired.
Throwing things away and getting new stuff because one thinks their time it too important to bother is rational only in some specific meaning of "rational".
I don't live to be economically efficient. The way the economy works today is absolutely not efficient with how we use our resources and produces a lot of waste. By focusing on being economically efficient, you are missing the bigger picture.
As an aside:
> As they say “Linux is only free if you don’t value your time”.
This sentence has to die. It assumes I'm less efficient with Linux than with its alternatives, but this can't be more wrong. For what I do with computers, Linux is far more efficient and has everything I need. I'll admit free software on mobile is still far from perfect (degoogled Android is far from being bad though), but Desktop Linux is solved for me, and has been for a long time. It's not perfect and it's ever improving, but any desktop OS has its quirks. And K-9 mail is quite fine too.
And I value my time. We might have different priorities.
It's like people that leave a grocery cart in the parking spot and then try to justify it.
Signal not being on F-Droid is a bummer, makes keeping the app updated a pain.
You are going to download APKs from Google servers, but you are not running the Google Play Services, which are the Google proprietary blobs that runs many Google stuff in the background. It already makes a huge difference.
So if your Google is to run a phone free of Google's proprietary stuff and you are willing to compromise on a few proprietary apps that you don't see yourself going without, or even open source apps not in F-Droid (that exists too), you are fine.
But when I ran Android, I wasn't making any of these compromises and still had a fulfilling life.
The situation for Signal in the free world is sadly not optimal indeed. I went to the extra mile of recompiling it myself without its dependencies on the Google libraries (GCM), which required a few code edits. It worked but it was a pain. The intermediary solution that still allows you to use a store is Aurora, and I guess it's convenient enough.
But if You want to hit the mass market, you can't rely on this 'tricks', and there is no easy way to make the process streamlined for average user. That's why the only big phone manufactured who isn't using google services anymore is Huawei, and it wasn't by choice.
(I guess amazon tried it as well but only kinda)
FYI - Amazon's Fire OS is based on Andriod:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OS#:~:text=Fire%20OS%20is....
There was a Fire phone, but I thought the issue was it didn't find commercial acceptance.
Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule though - it takes another megacorp to pull off a mass market Android device without Google's blessing.
Or one that couple of major OEMs drive. But they won't do that. That's just not gonna happen.
One, software is anything but Samsung's forte, they suck at it. They are much worse at Software than even Apple is.
Second, Samsung is not a very smart company, it's an extremely "hard working" company without the smarts (yes, I know). But they are smart enough to know their weakness. They also can't trust too many companies, or other OEMs. In the Google-Samsung relationship they know that Google needs a company like Samsung with its strengths to churn out millions of devices to millions of people where they can put their OS and track every breath these users take. So it works for both of them. A fee for a default search engine or so I think comes secondary. Samsung also knows that the service suit Google offers - Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Docs etc it is like "the mail", "the map"…. etc in most of the world and moving away from Google blessed Android is not going to sit well with "their target audience" (I had to put quotes for emphasis lest some noble HNer jumps saying they have been hosting their own email since before they could tie their shoe laces).
Samsung "own mobile OS" shenanigans? Nope, no one at Google or at Samsung believed even for a moment it was going anywhere.
??
> But they are smart enough to know their weakness
If they were they wouldn't have insisted on building their UI layer on top of stock android
Plus their Android flavor (One UI) is extremely underperforming, even when compared to the Chinese OEMs. If we compared it against the cleanliness of Pixel software, you'd inmediately see Google is simply much, much better than Samsung at software even with the same foundations.
Have you used a recent Samsung device, especially foldables? Google, the OS provider is playing a total catch-up there, for example, and the implementation is pretty good and all first-party from Samsung. They have their own implementation of iCloud/Continuity features across their tablets/phones and their Windows laptops that works decently (not Apple level, but Apple has been sucking lately too).
I used to believe they suck at software and can never catch up. You'd be surprised how much they have improved in first party ecosystem building. In many ways they would be superior to Google's first party experience, if they pulled back on bloating the device with a bunch of useless Samsung apps and kept it to a non-zero minimum. The window management, search, etc experience on the recent 2022/3 devices were all ahead of Google. Hardware wise they are a pioneer.
And it's not like Google, the smart company, is great at shipping new OSes either. Look at that Fucshia vapor crap. It's a hard problem to build an OS and a successful ecosystem around it; galaxies need to align, and is not easily attributable to just lack of smartness.
> was apparently the only way that phone manufacturers like Samsung could implement Branch without violating their revenue share agreements (RSAs) with Google, which he understood to require that Google be the only “web-connected” search function pre-loaded onto a device.
I would assume that Google pays back some of the ad revenue it collects through search to Samsung.
I don't think Google will demand special permission to make them the default search provider, but they certainly won't pay you for it unless you sign a contract.
The game is structured. If Google lose, they face an affordable fine or mandated adjustment to a single business practice. In this case, the business practice is "OEM Search Deals" which has been litigated before. The practices is profitable and strategic enough to take the heat.
IMO, antitrust was entirely declawed by the "US vs MSFT" settlement in 2001. It's a similar case. An operating system with 90% market share using their position to dominate key parts of the application market. We now know this as the "platform strategy." Something that investors demand from CEOs, as opposed to a legal risk to avoid.
For the young.... "US vs MSFT" was the high profile case(s) of the 90s. Software was known to be monopoly prone and the case was expected to reveal what was and wasn't allowed.
MSFT litigated similar antitrust cases in the early 90s, and settled. The key term of this era was "bundling." MSFT concluded that antitrust was a cost of doing business. MSFT continued bundling to reserve key application markets for itself. Gates rubbed it in. DOJ took offence and went on a warpath.
DOJ pursued real antitrust. MSFT was found guilty of monopolism and the court actually ordered a "breakup." Seems far fetched today. The model for monopoly "breakups" was the 80s breakup of Bell (telcom). Shock! Insanely aggressive by today's standards. We can't even conceptualise how a breakup of a big tech today would work.
Anyway... doj flinched. They settled the appeal. OEMs were freed from MSFT exclusivity. Real antimonopolism was off the table, and never returned.
I don't really blame them. Breaking the monopoly of a tech giant could, and likely would, decimate their value. Bell was a telcom. Physical and concrete. WTF does "breaking up Google" actually mean? How can a judge do this task.
Well for one, the ad business could be separated into the auction system and the use of the auction system on their different services.
Android could be spun off.
The whole pixel phone business as well.
GSuite could be its own thing.
I think google is still an ISP in some parts.
They’re research sections too.
Google's money comes from adwords. Adwords has two key assets. One is Google search. The other is Google's systemic ability to gather ad-useful data using android, maps, etc.
Everything else is stuff that exists to support the search/ads/data money maker or it is ways of spending the enormous profits generated by this monopoly. EG Waymo.
The first group can't be separated and retain value, unless the post break up shards contract to operate like they did before. That is basically a trust. The second group just aren't viable businesses, or aren't big.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just saying it gets real squishy and there aren't many guiding principles.
Google is able to prop up otherwise-nonviable businesses with the revenue from their cash cows. This means they are able to undercut any possible competitors in those spaces by operating those businesses at a loss.
That's the very definition of using monopoly power to push into and dominate another market.
It's not a reason to say, "Welp, we can't break that up! Then those businesses would just flounder and die!" It's one of the primary reasons to say, "We must break that up."
If the otherwise-unprofitable businesses that get spun off want to continue to exist, they'll need to find ways to raise prices and/or cut costs. In other words, they'll need to compete on a level playing field.
I'm not even sure if that would work. Does Google search now have to use adwords? Will the court mandate the revenue split? Most of both entities' revenue will come from this revenue split. It's almost like spinning off the cash register in a convenience store.
It's just a lot for a court to actually do.
Meanwhile, there's a tension between eliminating monopolism and eliminating market value. A judge's decision could blast $1trn off of Google's value, and cause a general market shock.
Meanwhile, what are consumers getting out of this? Advertisers are not going to have more choice. There will be no competition induced price reductions. What's the goal here? Justice?
This stuff is basically industrial policy. To have industrial policy, we need to do industrial policy. Can't just let courts handle the whole thing.
And to that end… so? Why is the government so afraid to slap down excessively profiteering, monopolizing conglomerates? Because primarily rich people would lose a small amount of their vast wealth? Because some poorer investors who foolishly hoped to capitalize by investing heavily in a single company might lose a lot of money, having knowingly taken such a risk? It certainly isn’t because of the significant taxes they pay, or that a 190k jobs, which wouldn’t necessarily be lost, would be such a significant addition to the 6.4 million people already unemployed.
As for how? Google has quite a number of differing product lines and “businesses”, so, rather easily I’d say? Search, apps, hosting, ads… it really wouldn’t be that difficult to define those lines.
Surely that's what the web and web search is for? I don't need to install your app I just need a web browser.
The point is that you can't have this software, because the monopolies in this space have formed a trust to prevent it from being an option.
A big part of Branch's product, IIRC, was their "deep linking through install" functionality. That is, if I search for Miami vacation rentals, and I don't have the app installed, it would just open, say, the realtor.com website for Miami. But there would be a prominent "install app" suggestion, so I could then download the app from the App or Playstore. Importantly (and, again, I may be getting the timing wrong), at that time there was no way to "pass through" a desired landing page after the app was installed. Branch's links allowed that information to be passed through, so when I opened the newly installed Realtor.com it would open right to Miami. I can't remember all the tech details of how they did this but I believe it was some form of device fingerprinting.
Ironically, I ended up installing the app to "fix" my broken search experience.
When a link in Orion takes you into another app, there is a popup available when you return to Orion, allowing you to disable opening in the external app. Additionally, long-pressing always provides an “Open in…” option to purposefully choose the GitHub app.
Terrible UX, but it works.
Thank you anyhow, as I wouldn't discover this in a billion years.
>The DOJ filed its complaint against Google in this case on October 20, 2020. A couple days later, another Samsung employee suggested to Chang that the lawsuit might cause Google to loosen its interpretations of its contracts with Samsung.
>Chang responded: “Actually the COMPLETE opposite. Google just did a f*ck you to Samsung. After the doj filings, they submitted a new redline that went backwards om all negotiations with Samsung and was even more aggressive in being restrictive….They basically don’t feel the doj has a real case.”
The US Government might actually need to pass legislation if it wants effective anti-trust enforcement.
Has it?
Definitely captured by conservatives, not the same
This is the actual text of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act:
Sec. 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or other- wise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, at the discretion of the court.
Sec. 2. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof; shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Sec. 3. Every contract, combination in form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce in any Territory of the United States or of the District of Columbia, or in restraint of trade or commerce between any such Territory and another, or between any such Territory or Territories and any State or States or the District of Columbia, or with foreign nations, or between the District of Columbia and any State or States or foreign nations, is hereby declared illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Passed the House and Senate almost unanimously, by the way. One dissenting vote in the Senate.
Yes, jail.
> Last summer, I noted that it takes time for agencies to act, but that they had put a bunch of torpedos in the water, and they would be exploding over the next year and a half. That’s exactly what’s happened. And the consequences are real. The most significant one is that the merger boom that started in the 2010s is now over.
> You wouldn’t realize this success if you listen to the conventional wisdom in politics, because Wall Street is pushing a public narrative that antitrust agencies are losing in courts, and therefore they are losing their ability to stop deals. But this isn’t true, because if it were, you wouldn’t see regular reports from business publications lamenting the decline in deals, and writing things like “The average size of mergers completed is now at the lowest level in 20 years.” And you wouldn’t have deal-makers on CNBC calmly describing how hard it is to get mergers done.
_________
Progress is slow because the judiciary is stacked with ex corporate lawyers and lobbyists who will not interpret the law the way its written but have their own imaginary version based on the Chicago School of Economics' made up models on how the economy works.
Either they'll keep doing nothing, and so an additional lawsuit won't change that, either they've got changes on the way but will milk it up as long as they can before finally moving on.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273888/google-eu-browse...
The fines are the minor cost associated with monopolistic business practices. In this case, the practice is Google's profitable and strategic SE-OEM deals in this case. Those have been litigated before, and win or lose, it is trivially better to continue the practices and just deal with the heat when it comes.
But small companies get bought. Then entangled with foreign adversaries. And we are in an information skirmish with Russia and others. To deny it is to have accepted your part. So what are the security consequences of trust busting without serious reform on ownership in American companies.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I do not see how it can be anything but on topic and pertinent to this industry.