There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
Have you built any iOS apps?
DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching. Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple for maps.
YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google for, but those have alternatives too.
When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product traffic did not come internal search, it came from Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was beholden to Google as the starting point for most customer’s browsing experience.
"iPhone Families" is a very real thing that Apple has gone out of it's way to solidify. Or try being an (American) 15 year old kid and get included in group chats with an android phone.
It's pretty gross when a mega-corp is so powerful that it can leverage your friends and family against you, forcing you into their walled prison err.. garden.
I think at a time a phone could be considered an appliance. But that's changed, and for many people their smartphone is their only general personal computer.
IMO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with regulation or they can keep full control of their platform. One or the other. Same goes for Android.
It’s not the web. It’s not a PC. It’s a sandboxed console.
> MO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with regulation or they can keep full control of their platform.
Then they’ll keep they’re platform and not be regulated ;-) (I know what you meant).
Yes. If a product becomes essential for participation in the economy and lacks substantial competition, regulation is the only mechanism we have to protect the people. Why should it matter how it got there?
The secure solution is to treat every app as malicious and put it in a sandbox where it can not cause harm. See also Android and ChromeOS.
So, no, sandboxing everything in sight isn't a useful solution. Your sandbox will just imprison us all.
Why do you believe there is no free market on mobile phones? I mean, what exactly forces you to pick an iPhone over anything?
Don't want to sign up to one multinational behemoth? Well, your choice is to sign up to one other multinational behemoth.
I don't think that the manufacturer assertion is true at all. You can go to any random online store and get dozens of brands and manufacturers. It just so happens that popular demand focuses only on a hand full of manufacturers who are outcompeting everyone in the free market.
Take a look even to Android's market share. You have four manufacturers with double digit market shares, and a couple of dozen entriee. Is that what you call a monopoly?
https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers
The OS comment is even more badfling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating...
A good way to think about it is this: if Windows was as closed down as iOS, and took a 30% cut on every application purchase, would regulators have intervened?
OP was whining over Google's role in Android. Pointing out Apple's control of iOS, and the fact that iPhone is by far the dominant platform for handhelds, does refute OP's personal assertion.
We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%.
I worry that the government will not do sensible regulations and instead play investment banker and try to create spin off companies.
I don't think the vast majority of the internet understands how the business model of the internet works.
The actual computational resources required to provide search would be a fraction of Google’s operating costs
Added benefit would be pitting private providers against each other so they’re incentivised to provide better outcomes, as opposed to the current decoupling of utility and market position
The current situation is immensely wasteful of everyone’s time and resources (Alphabet shareholders aside)
It really is a Standard Oil situation, but as it’s just inflaming - but not halting -the global economy, it’s been flying under regulators’ radar until a few years ago
No moat is too wide for the flick of sufficiently powerful pens, business models be damned
Let's allow anyone to do in-app purchases, and app stores, then the market would tell us. Currently, we need to trust these quasi-monopolies that there is no way they can make it cheaper (and for some strange reason still, they don't want to open things up).
Whats stopping that now on Android? I have a second app store on my phone.
If they must charge 20% why don't they also let apps take credit cards? 20% is for the payment, its a tax. Why should Spotify have to pay 20% and Apple music effectively doesn't.
There are also a range of topics google will not return the best ranked information. There are a ton of political issues (due to advertiser pressure) where the different results are huge when you search in duckduckgo vs google. This is monopoly power to decide what gets seen and what doesn't get seen.
Defining a market as a specific search engine's search results is wild. Wouldn't every search engine have a monopoly over it's results? A grocery store monopoly over its shelves?
Etc.
I am a DDG user and even I recognize they are barely a blip.
Your 500 mile analogy simply does not apply.
The product is not search, it’s ad placements.
YOU are the product, being sold to advertisers, and Google search is the channel through which you are sold.
And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and most of these devices give Google's search engine preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they have more data on their users than probably any other company and can provide more personalized search results than anyone else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g. Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often finds twice as many results as Bing).
It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue that they aren't a monopoly in practice.
If you were in a position where you could just put things online and they may or may not be useful to people, you wouldn't be having this problem. But you're not; you're working for a taskmaster that demands attention or they can't justify their existence.
If Google evaporates tomorrow, there's no guarantee that your product gets customers. Indeed, in the absence of Google, most content on the internet is harder to find, not easier. The knob your overseer wants you to turn happens to be attached to Google, but when Google goes away there's going to be a different knob.
Yes, capitalism is a problem, but it's also true that Google is a problem because Google's scale makes a poor combination with capitalism. Which is worse, the match or the gasoline? Both, if they are used to cause a devastating fire.