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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

They only mention google which of the big tech companies is the one closest to losing their dominant position to AI. Even their own AI is gutting their own business.

Apple, the company that truly wants to control everything, isn't even mentioned

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I don’t get the Apple side of this. Yeah they are assholes but only hardware assholes. You can easily leave if you want without consequence.

Social media big tech is where everyone communicates which is a much bigger and much more damaging problem. Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.

> Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.

Doesn't iMessage fit this bill to a tee? (Where the vendor in question also locks you into the hardware, not just the software?)

iMessage isn't really popular in Europe. Whatsapp is.

No one uses iMessage in Europe.

iMessage is insignificant outside of the US

It isn't mentioned in the text but the image at the top includes the apple logo.

For all that Apple exerts an unreasonable level of control over their own hardware/software ecosystem, they've never really given a shit about users on other platforms?

What are you talking about, the internet basically is google at this point. Apple mostly just sells consumer hardware and the software to go with it, they're huge but they don't have half of all tech companies relying on them.

Apps are bigger than the internet (the web). Apple want to control who can and can't make them and they wamt to control the payment method that yor're allowed to use. if they don't like you you're out. Those are far stronger controls over the world than anything google is doing

Apps are not bigger than the internet, almost all apps rely on the internet! Put another way: if Apple went bust that would be bad for apple users, but if Google went bust the world would temporarily stop.

Google does not control "the internet". At best they control ads on the web. Apps are bigger than the web.

> if Apple went bust that would be bad for apple users

which happens to be 60% of the USA

> Google went bust the world would temporarily stop.

That's extreme hyperbole. Users would switch off gmail/gdocs/maps and be done.

The google outage last week affected Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Cloudflare, and that was only one set of APIs. Google additionally acts as a certificate authority for many of the worlds SSL certificates, so if those CA servers went down every website, service, and app relying on those certificates would also cease to work.

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