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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

All of this is a direct consequence of allowing a gatekeeper in the first place. Every app developer is fractionally guilty of enabling Apple to position themselves as such. I've built a neat little bit of software and I'm sure I could monetize it by wrapping it up as an app. But there is no way that I'm going to give either Apple or Google more power than they already have so the development of the app is a bit slower than it otherwise would have been. But that's fine, releases still happen regularly and I'm having fun building it. If I needed the money to be able to work on it I would have possibly been forced out of this luxury position and I'd absolutely hate it.

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It’s all about trade-offs. Sure, they can do that. But what’s the likelihood of it happening really? Do we have good numbers?

If you want to be creative and earn money apps are a decent way. Apple/Google take care of a lot of things and you get their reach.

Is it without risks? No, nothing is in life. Is the risk high? Probably not for 99.99% of developers.

It's not about the likelihood of it happening, it is about the principle of it being possible and it happening to anybody in the first place. On the plus side: those complaining were actually supporting the system until it bit them so that's about a powerful a wake-up call as there probably will be. Unfortunately it doesn't generalize well because everybody else thinks: 'oh, that fortunately wasn't me that got bitten'.

> It's not about the likelihood of it happening, it is about the principle of it being possible

But honestly, that's just life. Every business takes risks. You take a risk every time you step out the door.

It's silly to say every app developer is enabling the situation. I mean, you might as well say anybody who allows payment in USD is enabling American foreign policy. But it's not helpful.

The risk/reward ratio for genuinely useful, non-scammy apps is quite excellent.

In real life, nothing is about whether something is a binary possible yes/no, because mistakes always happen in everything. We're only human. Everything is just a question of probabilities -- risk and reward.

The internet was specifically designed to limit the number of such gatekeeping options and commercial entities were never supposed to be able to maneuver themselves into a position like that.

The internet was designed specifically for IP traffic to be able to route around failed communication nodes. And for TCP to handle things like throttling and retries and packet order. That's pretty much all.

App stores are an economic matter we can choose to regulate or not via existing mechanisms of representative democracy. For now, the US population hasn't shown much interest in it.

All of these self-proclaimed “platforms” need to be regulated: no participation in your own platform (Amazon Basics), or at least no self-preferential treatment, caps on platform usage fees closer to 3-5%, neutral and open source search algorithms, limits on advertising.

I’m a capitalist at heart but this is anti-competitive, it’s closer to feudalism than capitalism.

We're perilously close to an internet that is entirely siloed, so instead of AOL we end up with two or maybe three more or less incompatible versions of AOL, and with far more control over the lives of their customers than AOL ever had.

There is some chance that it will end up with only two of these players depending on who reaches the point where they have enough free cash that they can further consolidate, assuming regulators don't step in.

Google on the one side, Apple on the other, with AWS owning retail and Microsoft absorbed by either Apple or Google (unless their OpenAI bet pays off further). FB up for grabs and Twitter will die.

It could easily happen. So, which side of the web do you want to be on? I want to be on the open web, not in some walled garden, no matter who owns it.

Unless those companies are stopping someone from visiting different domains, I would not describe that as the internet being siloed.

The most popular destinations on the internet may be “siloed”, or most business will occur in the silos, but the internet itself is as accessible as it ever was.

This makes no sense. These companies dictate what you see, when you see it and how you see it. They are just not throwing their weight around as much as they could yet. But if Google decides that your website no longer exists it effectively doesn't exist any more.

I recall visiting websites before Google was even made. In any case, the internet does not only exist within Google’s search index.

For example, I can post a URL in this comment, and you would be able to visit it, even if Google did not keep it in its search index.

The only question is how much work do people want to do to spread knowledge of theirs or others’ website, and how much work do people want to do to find them.

And it is much easier these days than even pre Google, since there are very capable alternatives to Google (and ubiquitous broadband).

Good luck with that. If Chrome won't display it that's that for 45% of your possible visitors. If the domain-without-a-tld doesn't come up as the first link in your average browser that's another 40% or so, if your ISP doesn't like you or if your certificate is the wrong color (or your bits for that matter) then that's the remainder. To compare the web as it is today with what went before is a bit silly because we have moved on from there and the party that controls your browser, your search, your income, your document store, your email and your phone may well be one and the same.

I completely disagree with that. If the people can't access whatever they want to access or what they need isn't available at price/condition they can agree to they will just switch to something else. Just like when a shop starts charging too much or that it hasn't taken care of maintenance.

For now, it looks like they have no competition, but the foundation is here, it's just that the potential competitors are starved for ressource. Just a bit of redirection will get the ball rolling and a lot of choices will suddenly appear.

The only thing is that most people do not care and have very basic needs. We mostly shouldn't care about those people. They cannot for the life of them being interested in anything technical and will not make any effort to learn and use worthwhile tools. They also have very low interest in knowledge. So, they will follow without much questioning, I know this for a fact from all the servicing I do around me. They will do what you tell them, if you tell them Google or Chrome is bad, they will accept.

The problem is getting something as good as Google or Chrome. So far nothing really match...

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