Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

it doesnt need to be a utility. they just need to crack down on every attempt google uses to kill the competition.

There should be an agency you can complain to for monopolies which has the power to dictate new rules to the monopolist with far reaching power to crack down on anything that smells like anti competitive behavior.

e.g.

- force banking apps that try to secure themselves with google play services to make that dependency optional.

- force google to stop blocking newpipe, aurora, etc.

- force google pay to make itself available on any platform that wants to integrate it (apple, graphene)

- force google to allow alternative app stores to become first class citizens.

View on HN

That's the legal paradigm that we used to stop the railroads from choking America. But the real killer of their power was the Interstate Highway System - i.e. government funded infrastructure. Prior to the IHS there wasn't really ANY nationally funded infra[0] of that scale, we'd outsourced building it to private industry instead. After that it's basically assumed that infrastructure was the government's job, to the point where even the most conservative among us would point to "roads" as a thing governments do well and should be empowered in doing.

So anyway, the US government should run an open-access, quad-track railroad and fiber backbone along every highway. Maximize the ROI on that ROW. Also they should nationalize Android and iOS.

[0] Because slavery. The South really, REALLY hated any government roads because it diminished the economic power of literally owning a lot of people. Hell, one of the stipulations of the Confederate Constitution was to strip the General Welfare clause out of the constitution.

I still think nationalizing is a bad idea. There is no legitimate competition between railroads whereas mobile ecosystems can compete.

Mobile app stores are more like banks - a big problem when there are not a lot but a problem that can be remedied by having the government compete (e.g. with a post office bank).

The government could set up a competing app store, that might not be a bad idea, actually. They could hardly do a worse job than google and apple at vetting app developers and it would put a firecracker up google and apples ass.

That never works in the US, the monopolist will just wait it out 4-8 years until there is a friendly administration. You have to break them up any time you have the chance, it’s the only effective remedy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com