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Comment by vlozko | Hacker News Reader

It’s because Google did a lot of things that Apple didn’t that was found to be anti-competitive.

https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...

Yes, but in a weird way: Apple doesn't allow competition for phone manufacturing for their ecosystem, so the equivalent of "deals with manufacturers" are entirely internal. Fostering a phone ecosystem that overall has more competition has hurt Google here.

No, paying off phone manufacturers and companies to not create or preinstall third party app stores on to devices is what hurt Google here

Right, which is not something Apple "needed" to do because they didn't allow competition in the iOS phone manufacturing business.

Google didn’t need to pay these companies either. They chose to do it so they could keep their play store monopoly. And they may have just burning billions in profits because of it

Right, which is why I put the term in quotes. But Apple got that for free, since they didn't open up manufacturing.

I think you mean "and", not "no". The semi-open ecosystem is a prerequisite to the payoffs.

Which is similar to what Microsoft did with PC manufacturers to kill off alternative operating systems.

So the moral of these decisions are "Go vertical, or go home?"

I'm sure they did their own stuff, but Apple got away with a very nasty one. So I don't think competition law works. Results look completely random, like tossing a coin.

Being sued for different things - yeah you tend to get different results.

And what is the definition of nasty here? It's very subjective. Apple doesn't own the mobile market and are below 50% control of it so they are not really a monopoly. I'm also not sure how you can use anti-trust or anti-monopoly against them when they have been found again and again to not be a monopoly.

Banning competing browsers is illegal and Apple should have never gotten away with it. Not only an abstract absolute monopoly is a problem. Apple has a lot of leverage on the industry and is causing harm to the market with anti-competitive behavior.

For a second I thought you just posted the same link but that was very informative. It's just me but I think Google deleting all the chats automatically about the topics involved would have had me planted deep suspicion about motive in my mind.

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