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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> phone-driven CarPlay experience they prefer.

Oh god, no.

Not only is this awful, it gives the big tech companies huge leverage over the automakers. It's another industry where they'll embrace-extend-extinguish.

These companies will use smartphones as leverage to crush the automotive giants. It's another reason why we need antitrust enforcement to catch up with 30 years of being asleep at the wheel.

The automotive companies should be in charge of their industry and their destinies. Tech companies shouldn't be ensnaring them.

The phone giants already control how software is made and distributed (and they tax it 15-30%), insert themselves into digital payments and communications, place ads on your maps and navigation, etc. Soon they'll be taxing the car companies for integration, forcing the car companies to do what they want, and those car companies will pass that pain onto you, the consumer.

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I thought it might be satire, but you’re worried about the poor car companies?

You’re right that phone giants have too much power, but car companies are already selling our data and injecting ads or preferred partners into the infotainment. It’s CarPlay that currently lets you avoid the abysmal and often subscription-based experiences they’re pushing.

I would love to see more open systems that would allow third-parties or users to provide software for vehicles.

> the poor car companies?

Google and Apple are the monopolies, here. Mega monopolies the world has never seen the likes of before. It's unreal how big and how much power they have. Apple and Google are practically God and more powerful than Christianity.

> car companies are already selling our data

It's wild that this is being thrown out as being even within the same order of magnitude as bad. Google and Apple are doing this 1000x worse. And for those that think Apple is a "privacy play", just look what they do to bend over to authoritarian regimes. They're still leveraging your data for advertising, and that play is bringing Apple more and more money year over year.

The phone giants have way too much power. They control people trying to write software, people trying to run software. They control every payment, all the payment rails. They control the communication. The defaults. The search. 98% of your life flows through them.

Your car is a pittance to that.

We need to break up the phone companies or limit what they can do with the devices after they've sold them to you.

Imagine if your car could tell you where you could drive. Or if businesses had to pay a tax to be visible from looking out your windshield. Or if they collected a percentage of everything you bought while you were out driving and shopping. Because that's phones. Google and Apple are our -- and everybody else's -- pimps and masters. You're nothing, I'm nothing. They're gods.

Imagine if your car ejected you out the sunroof because you had green bubbles! Imagine if the tyres automatically deflated every time you pass a tyre shop! Imagine a million other made up things!

So much fear.

It’s not that I think Google or Apple are altruistic, or that we wouldn’t be better off if they were broken up, but as far as I can tell, the only space where it’s hard to avoid both of them is the mobile phone OS. And I think that’s mainly a function of the fact that generally people are happy with those two options. In every other category there’s other solid options and Google and Apple are easily avoided.

There’s a million things that I’m more worried about than the mobile OS duopoly. It’s going to be OK.

> generally people are happy with those two options.

There isn't enough market surface area left to compete for. Anyone trying will spend tens of billions of dollars and still lose.

This has cemented Apple and Google as the eternal victors of mobile. There is no hope in competing. If Facebook and Microsoft gave up, all hope is lost.

Unfortunately, since there hasn't been any regulation against this anti-competitive duopolization, Apple and Google are complete assholes to everyone on "their" platform. It's one of the least free, most extractive markets in the world. And it touches everything and everyone. You cannot avoid it.

The only hope is regulation. Governments telling Apple and Google "no more app store, no more payment rails, no more defaults". That'll bring balance back to the universe.

Meh, it’s not that I totally disagree with you, I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal. And I say that as both a consumer and a mobile engineer.

Lots of market categories are duopolies. Even monopolies sometimes. Somehow the world keeps turning. Apple and Google won’t be the largest and most powerful companies forever, just like the companies that came before them.

It’s going to be OK.

I knew who had posted the parent comment without even looking. It's almost identical to many of their other comments, which I've also mistaken for satire in the past too.

These two companies are putting a ceiling on you and everyone else. You can choose to accept that, perhaps even benefit from their stock or employment, but the fact is that they are invasive species that are trophically malinvesting and snuffing out the most salient gradients of innovation and competition because we haven't policed them.

If you're pro-consumer, you want an end to this. If you're pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, pro-innovation capital seeing upside of labor and invention, then you also want an end to this.

These two companies would be worth more as separate entities than the sum of their parts. Their value is being squandered as gigantic conglomerate platform plays. They piss away so many resources and grow fat on the areas they've lodged themselves into and peerlessly destroyed any competition.

I've consistently echoed this sentiment for years. Now lots of people are saying the same thing.

Break them up, and competition will become relentlessly breakneck to fill out the new, healthier ecosystem. It would be a forest fire yielding to new growth.

Is your argument that automakers should not support Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and should instead each individually create their own software and digital interfaces?

A dream world would define a standard for video/audio/controls interface with a vehicle/device and it would just "work" - like how connecting your TV over HDMI to your laptop just works (usually).

Of course, that will never happen, because standards take centuries to develop and the cars need to be sold now NOW NOW.

A next best thing would be antitrust action from the DOJ and every other country telling these companies that they can't play in this sandbox too and continue bullying all the kids.

As punishment for what they've been up to over the past few decades of running amok, the DOJ might tell these companies they have to open up app distribution, loosen up on the default payments/messaging/platform services, and allow third party vendors first class software and hardware access that is capable of car automation without needing Apple and Google to "help" (read: dictate and control).

Honestly who else would use it but Apple and Google (Android)?

There is no one else with enough market share for any automaker to even begin to think about. They already have what’s needed for those two so implementing a hypothetical standard only wastes time.

The other stuff that could use that interface (video game consoles, etc) don’t need to work while driving or be integrated in any special way. So the existing USB-C or HDMI video standards would be fine since they’d just use the car as a pseudo-TV screen and maybe Internet connection.

Some future competitor to either?

The point is that open standards make it possible for one to appear.

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