Google agrees to pay $700M in antitrust settlement reached with states

That being said, that's also a shitty situation for consumers, as having many or different app stores is confusing and just leads to the very fragmentation people have complain about on Android for a decade.

This is the real duality of the situation. On the one hand, people criticize Android for not being as cohesive an experience as iOS, but on the other hand, anything Google does to make it more cohesive will be seen as anti-competitive. Same with security.

It’s neat that you make this a Google vs apple thing somehow, but the walled garden had very little to do with the lawsuit.

Google was found to be engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. This behaviour is used by at least some consumers to make decisions (being an “open platform”), but which Google was forcibly manipulating behind to scenes to not actually be as open as they were pretending to be.

You can call it just “apple keeping a walled garden” all you like, it doesn’t change that Google was attempting to shift market behaviours based on what was demonstrably a lie. For all intents and purposes, Google *was a walled garden*, and comments like yours show that their manipulation worked.

1: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-play-apk-replacement-p...

I got a $0.13 cent check from some iTunes class action settlement.

edit: Think it was this one. https://www.nola.com/louisiana_inspired/we-received-a-16-cen...

Not just grandma. We need to move away from the idea that just a handful of digital illiterate seniors will get screwed.

Android has been the main target for malware for a while now.

Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report in 2021[0] reported that Android makes up more than half of all the infected systems, in the recent 2023 report this had dipped to 49%[1]. But as they’ve done in prior reports, this year they again highlight that most Android malware is a trojanized version of legitimate apps distributed via alternative means:

> Android based devices are not inherently insecure. However, most smartphone malware is distributed as trojanized applications and since Android users can load application from just about anywhere, it’s much easier to trick them into installing applications that are infected with malware. Android users can protect themselves by only installing applications from secure app stores like Google Play and installing a mobile anti-virus product on their device.

0: https://pages.nokia.com/T006US-Threat-Intelligence-Report-20...

1: https://www.nokia.com/networks/security-portfolio/threat-int...

Industry experts still state, ad nauseam, that side loading and 3rd party app stores are the overwhelming source of Android malware. (Source: Nokia Threat Intelligence report: literally every single year it is issued.)

There are better solutions available, such as directly addressing developer's complaints, rather than hoping a competitor will materialise:

- Requiring google spin off the approval process into an independent, audited entity.

- Legislate a maximum price for transaction fees (like how some markets do with bank fees)

- Legislate a maximum price for listing/admin fees (like how some markets do with staple goods)

What isn't the solution is removing all guard rails from the number 1 source of malware.

Also I don't care much for deemphasising the role of a trusted app store. This is mainly harmful to startups and small developers, since the likes of Spotify can fly solo and undercut smaller developers which rely on Google’s store for visibility and user trust in transactions. Few will hand over their banking details to these smaller developers, especially if they’re overseas or using a different currency.

An entire generation of people were scared of, or did not meaningfully use computers because of malware. Yet this same generation is not scared of smartphones and tablet computers and contributes significant spend to the app ecosystem. I fear that once legislators and court rooms bring back the risks of computing in the '90s, it will take us back to square 1.

It’s rentseeking monopolies all the way down.

1. Corporations have been determined to be people.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/10/31/some-a...

The courts take existing laws and regulations and try to make them fit, and different courts come up with different answers because the laws they're using never imagined this precise scenario.

Ideally we'd have a functioning Congress that would debate these issues and write carefully thought-out laws to regulate app stores. Until then, we just get messes of seemingly contradictory rulings that seem to be decided more by chance than by any clear cohesive principle.

In other words -- blame the legislature, not the courts.

That hasn't been established yet. This wasn't a court decision, it was a settlement. Epic separately sued both Google and Apple and won against Google but lost against Apple, but both of the cases are being appealed and you don't have a national precedent until you have a Supreme Court decision.

There's no "iOS app distribution" market for Apple to act anti-competitively in.

(Although in this case the legality hasn’t been adjudicated because a settlement was reached).

If you create a platform and app market with strict rules, that’s not illegal. The logic here is that you’re new in the market and if the terms aren’t commensurate with market conditions, you will never grow. If you do grow, then the market has decided that the gains outweigh the limitations you imposed.

There comes a point where you have gained enough dominance where your actions can be scrutinized. But in general as long as you don’t actively tighten the reigns, you’re in the clear. So if you had strict rules when you started and despite those strict rules you grew and since then you haven’t made the rules stricter, then you’re in the clear because you haven’t abused your market dominance.

The flip side of this coin is that if you created a platform and app market that didn’t have strict rules and was very open, but once you’ve gained market dominance you put up hurdles or you impose stricter rules, then there could be a problem because now it can be explained as you abusing your market dominance after everyone got in.

Personally I don’t think the so called “scare screens” fall under dominance abuse because they serve a legitimate purpose. If anything I think they’re not enough.

Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report in 2021[0] reported that Android makes up more than half of all the infected systems in the recent 2023 report this had dipped to 49%[1]. But as they’ve done in prior reports, this year they again highlight that most Android malware is a trojanized version of legitimate apps distributed via alternative means:

> Android based devices are not inherently insecure. However, most smartphone malware is distributed as trojanized applications and since Android users can load application from just about anywhere, it’s much easier to trick them into installing applications that are infected with malware. Android users can protect themselves by only installing applications from secure app stores like Google Play and installing a mobile anti-virus product on their device.

In any case, whether something is legal or illegal in this case depends on whether it was or wasn’t done while having market dominance.

0: https://pages.nokia.com/T006US-Threat-Intelligence-Report-20...

1: https://www.nokia.com/networks/security-portfolio/threat-int...

https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/18/third-party-app-stores-apple-...

I don't know if it really makes sense, but that's my understanding of these two verdict when held in contrast.

For example, they'd make a deal with Samsung that if they want Google services on Samsung phones, Samsung had to agree to not let anyone else put competing app stores or payment processing other than Samsung's own and Google's own.

Where-as Apple it's more seen that they simply are not letting competitors put their alternatives on their own Phones, which isn't seen as anti-competitive, but more as how Apple itself competes.

And probably Google also internally used bad language that talked more about how to prevent competitors, etc. that might have been more incriminating.

So I think they see it more like if CocaCola told Walgreens they won't sell Coke products at Walgreens if Walgreens caries Pepsi products. Where Coke is seen as such a big player, that their leading market position forces Walgreens to agree, because not selling Coke would harm them financially so much due to the market leading position of Coke, but also it's seen as a anti-competitive agreement from Coke.

This is a huge win for them, because you can rest assured Google will get a ton of concessions out of the states in exchange of paying the fine. It's not even high enough to make Google feel "let's never do this again" – it wouldn't be for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, any of these guys.

It should be in the order tens of billions or a hefty amount of their revenue, whichever is greater. Google must be celebrating such a low fine.

The tl;dr is that the jury determined that "android app distribution" is the relevent market, and google has lots of dodgy emails where they stifled competition in it. There is no "ios app distribution" market.

If you have strict rules form the get go while you’re a nobody in the relevant market, then you’re free to maintain those strict rules even if you all of a sudden became a big player (although you can’t become more strict). This is in part because the assumption is that if your rules would’ve been too strict, then you would’ve never been able to become a dominant market player, because nobody would’ve wanted to deal with you.

If on the other hand you were open and didn’t have strict rules in place but you start changing your tune once you’re big and powerful then it could be explained as you abusing your power (i.e. luring people in with relaxed rules, only to turn up the thumbscrews once everyone depends on you).

Apple has always had a walled garden with strict rules and a 30% commission, and despite that many were happy to join. Since then they’ve not turned up the thumbscrews, in fact they’ve done the opposite by lowering the commission for the vast majority of developers. The flip side is that they can’t go stricter and to a higher commission from here because they are too dominant now.

That’s also in part why Apple has all these hills they’re willing to die on, anything they concede now, they can never undo or return to.

They don’t have the flexibility of testing a 5% commission for example and see if that works better, because the moment they decide it didn’t work out for them and they increase it back to 15% or 30%, it can be explained as an abuse of dominance because of the people that joined in, and became dependent on them, during that test.

Smaller companies can try new pricing strategies, new monetisation strategies, etc. Sure when they announce that from now on their “free plan” is discontinued some customers might moan and complain, but they never have to worry about government intervention on the basis of antitrust.

Google claimed to be open and weren’t

Note that they're not agreeing to stop actively sabotaging third party android variants and app stores by encouraging app developers to take on bogus Play Service dependencies.