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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

>No, I don't trust Google neither other monopolies.

If it's any conciliation neither does the US government. We are in for a ma-bel shakeup of the market. You know, the one that let internet running to your house happen.

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I'm wondering if any of the antitrust cases will be pursued as vigorously in the next administration. Neither presidential candidate seems to be a fan of Lina Khan. She has done excellent work in bringing antitrust enforcement back into attention.

Corporations, however, hate antitrust law with a passion and unfortunately they now decide a lot of policy via their financial muscle thanks to Citizens United.

Genuine question from a non US citizen, did breaking up a telecom in the USA lead to personal internet connections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

>Prior to its breakup in 1984, Bell System's legal monopoly over telephony in the United States allowed the company to impose strict rules on how consumers could access their network. Customers were prohibited from connecting equipment not made or sold by Bell to the network. The same set-up was operative in nearly all countries, where the telephone companies were nationally owned. In many households, telephones were hard-wired to wall terminals before connectors like RJ11 and BS 6312 became standardized.

Ahh, those halcyon days before opaque consumer routers with zero-days, botnets, and gray-market residential proxy services.

At 1200 baud, yes.

You make it sound a little like this isn't timing and ma bell would have developed securer edge nodes, but everything on their network sophisticated enough to attack was powned by bored children.

Inband signaling for the win! Having the overhead of a separate control channel was more expensive than just doing the signaling in band.

Sure, phreakers could attack the central office equipment, and get free calls, disrupt the network some, but they couldn't make some other customer's phone explode, or melt into slag, or ring 1,000,000 numbers at once, from 5,000 miles away.

I would imagine the break up of AT&T and the monopoly that formed around phone connections certainly inspired Americans working on the early algorithms of the internet. We still use telephone numbers today, even though mobile internet has made them fully obsolete

You would imagine wrong. The internet had settled just about all the major protocol decision by 1984 it was all about the hardware you could connect to the network.

Breaking up Google but not breaking up Microsoft is a complete sham. If there's any company that needs to be broken up first, it's Microsoft.

That's cap. Google is so much more pervasive

Is this really still true? This isn’t meant to be a defence of Google by any means, but to me it seems Microsoft has adopted a lot of pervasive practices in recent years. To the point where they would actively add things like Minecraft installers in my personal windows machine with whatever tiny version of windows comes with a prebuilt PC used like a game console.

I guess it’s not privacy invasive to add a Minecraft commercial directly into my OS, but they seem to be doing more and more of that stuff as well through their “telemetry”. Though I suppose much of it is targeting enterprise rather than our personal privacy.

MS are doing shitty stuff but they are hardly the monopoly they were in the 90s. You can ignore and avoid Microsoft completely if you want these days. The same is harder for Google - most people at least will want to watch something on YouTube at some point.

This is going to depend on the market. If you consider enterprise I'd argue Microsoft are very much still a monopoly. A client of mine is in the process of removing their existing telephony solution, which has many more features than teams, for teams, because teams is bundled with the necessary Microsoft 365 to get all the Azure controls needed for regulatory compliance.

Most enterprise organisations killed off their different chat clients and phones and switched to teams in my area of the world. Not necessarily tech companies, but everyone else didn’t want the additional cost when Teams came “for free”.

Teams phone system is a significant additional licensing expense, it's definitely not free.

It's also not standards compliant, despite speaking a malformed version of SIP, so you can't just plug it into standard SIP Infrastructure and have it send and receive invites for calls, or send and receive SIP simple messages for texting.

Not being standards compliant does not surprise me at all.

I've never looked at the cost, but I was told switching to teams is being done to save money. So perhaps not as much money as hoped...

Crowdstrike outage has shown that isn't even remotely true in comparison - Microsofts failure took out a lot of critical infrastructure. Killing Google search wouldn't come close.

Google != Google search. I can imagine a scenario like Crowdstrike hitting Android which runs on significantly more devices.

And the effect of an Android outage would still be significantly smaller than outage of industrial machines powered by Windows.

Aren't there a lot of IoT/industrial applications of android?

Microsoft had extreme dominance in the some markets:

- LinkedIn

- GitHub

- O365 dominance is not extreme, but present.

Microsoft made contracts with its clients to automatically create M$ accts, for example, my .edu email acct was self hosted years ago, then magically I had a tightly integrated (oauth at first bla bla) M$ acct. Since I didnt ask for it, and I dont want it, I couldnt care less of I run afoul of them. Heck, please revoke it, atleast that would break their contract. AFICT my credentials for journals etc still rest with my .edu (its a problem that credentials are necessary at all). Skynet on the other hand is hell bent on using its monopoly to force me to make an acct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41773781

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