> Larry Page told Steve Jobs in 2010 that "There will always be places we compete, and places where we cooperate."
> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
> That is a damning little piece of evidence.
Looks like it’s exactly the meritocracies Google and Apple claim to be, nothing monopoly-like to be found here... /s
I'm not sure that they invented the term but it was, and probably still is, prominent in the F.I.R.S.T. robotics competition.
At least in that context, as a mentor, I thought it was a decent message for the students. Work together to get the robots as good as possible so that you had an enjoyable competition.
We have here smoking gun evidence that both Google and Apple themselves see themselves as a monopoly, see them commenting about how they "essentially function as one company", yet I absolutely guarantee we will get a torrent of comments denying that in this thread, I am sure with a lot of smug pasting of dictionary entries.
As always when mega corps are involved we have to at least entertain the idea that their employees and agents come out in full force to defend the actions of the corp. Anything else would be dangerously naive.
At any rate, the idea that companies with people who would collude in such a major way don't have any employees willing to manipulating discourse on a site like HN... that doesn't even pass the smell test, there is no way that this is the case.
This site should have all votes and flags by all accounts made public. No more guessing, no more squirming.
Google has a secret initiative originally called "Project Hug" that offers app makers like Activision Blizzard special treatment in exchange for paying the 30% fee and being quiet about it.
That's what the lawsuit is about. "Epic’s complaint alleges that Google’s payment restrictions on the Play Store constitute a monopoly, and thus a violation of both the Sherman Act and California’s Cartwright Act."
That would be a much better situation than the current status quo.
If Google moved to exclusive deals, then that would mean that they would be paying game developers, 10s of millions of dollars, instead of the other way around.
The current situation is the reverse. Game devs are paying google 10s of millions of dollars. If the opposite happened, then that would be much better.
> Larry Page told Steve Jobs in 2010 that "There will always be places we compete, and places where we cooperate."
> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
if it will be proven in court it's a firm base for anti monopoly/cartel case
Honestly, I don't think that's going far enough. That "our vision is that we work as if we are one company" line couldn't be a better basis for an antitrust case if they were literally trying to incriminate themselves.
That line, bereft of context, is being used as if the two companies don’t compete in many many markets. Do you really think that the original context was as broad as the entire company’s operations? Or even the respective phone ecosystems? They clearly compete with each other heavily.
Maybe they aren't competing, but merely simulate competition in many markets. Why isn't the app-store-tax getting lower through heavy competition?
In many cases, it looks like there's some mutual competition-simulation going. Google launches Google+ to pretend Facebook isn't the only social network, Microsoft launches Bing so Google can say "we don't have a monopoly on search", Google finances Firefox to say the same about browsers, Apple creates Apple Maps to pretend Google Maps has competition etc, but they always seem to put in no more than the minimum effort required.
Of course, they could be honestly trying to compete and they just suck at doing those things their competitors do really well. It just looks suspicious, and quotes like that add weight to that impression.
Also, that line may be the only evidence... depending on who said it and in what context, it is very unlikely that a plaintiff would use a single instance like this as the basis for their entire case.
> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
...
> This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service.
I don't think she has that much power just yet, my only hope is that the powers that be behind US's industrial military's complex got scared into (re-)action by China's recent moves against the likes of Jack Ma and Tencent, they might just think that the Chinese are right and employing that much human capital into what's essential add- and attention-seeking business is not a good military defence strategy long-term.
With those powers behind her she can do some harm, otherwise I'm afraid she'll be just a sitting duck in front of FANG's lobbyists.
I can see the justification for this in Android's early life. Every Android phone having its own app store would have been a disaster for everyone: users, developers, Google, and even telcos in the long run.
Hard to believe, but Google Play (nee Android Market) was pretty damn shabby until about 2013 or so.
>> 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores
Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE. Despite Adwords' incredible profitability, Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits... Their Revenues @ were far lower than proportional to their market share, and costs are the opposite. Better to just take your share of monopoly profits than work hard competing, unless you expect to win their place.
This stuff is the norm. Maybe we should switch to being surprised (delighted?) when these guys compete at all.
> Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE.
It's actually between $8-12 billion now. [1]
> Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits.
This is an exaggeration though. MSFT made nearly $8 billion in revenue last year from search (mostly Bing), and the business has naturally high margins so it would be extremely surprising if it was unprofitable on an operating basis. [2] The reality is that search is so huge that it's worth competing in, even if the incumbent has 30X your market share.
$8bn in revenue might not mean profitable. Google certainly spend a lot more than this on search and advertising, and well... software scales.
In any case, whether they make $1bn in profit, losses or something in between... This is <1% of market profits. Apple is making $8bn-$12bn, all profit, just on defaults.
Perhaps, but I think it's marginal in practice. Whether MSFT makes an internally accounted 10% margin or 10% loss on their $8bn in revenue, Apple collect >$8bn which is entirely profit.
Cooperating and accepting a slice of Google's monopoly profits is far more profitable that competing would be, in all but the most bullish scenarios.
IE, MSFT would need to be outright challenging Google's 1st place position in search marketing to have a hope of earning more than Apple do by doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.
Also, what would it take for MSFT to compete with Google in earnest? For one thing, Microsoft would need to outbid Google for such deals. They'd need to pay Apple, Telcos, and such more than Google do now.
> by [Apple] doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.
Apple did none of those things with respect to launching a search engine. Apple did all of those things with respect to building an audience of daily engaged (often affluent) users. That’s the investment Apple made to earn the position to cash Google’s check.
Google Maps has a better data collection method (bugging their userbase to collect data for them, encouraging users to collect even more as Google Scouts) and also the dataset of Waze, while Apple has a much more laborious process where an Apple Contractor (initially in Austin or Cupertino) modifies points of interest, business hours, road alignments, etc manually.
Apple started to ship this operation over to India 5ish years ago, and their contractors over there produce much worse results as they are not hiring professional geographers with degrees like they did stateside.
I wish more people would realize they are literally working for Google without getting paid to do this work. If it's out of a greater sense of helping people and contributions, OpenStreetMap needs to be better known.
Russian tech giant Yandex (they mostly do everything that Google does: search, maps, email, etc) has a so-called "People's map", filled by volunteers who transfer rights for their edits to Yandex for free the use in their closed commercial project. I always wondered why these volunteers don't work on OpenStreetMap instead.
Perhaps they simply don't know about it. OSM is doing its own thing and doesn't market itself much to the general audience. But for things that Google/Yandex are grabbing for free (opening hours, whether shops still exist, etc.), StreetComplete should be known much better, IMHO.
It doesn't really help OSM that its home page is considered just an example of what can be done with the data and not positioning it as an alternative to Google/Bing Maps is somewhat intentional.
If the goal is just helping people, why would OpenStreetMaps be preferred over Google Maps?
I love answering questions on Maps and providing information for others (in my eyes: effectively working for them, not Google). Google Maps seems like it has a significantly larger user base, so my contributions help significantly more people.
It's very much a help-and-be-helped community, too. I can ask questions about businesses and have answers from other people in just a couple minutes. I don't imagine I'd have the same quality/speed asking questions on OSM (if they even have that feature?).
There have been reports and speculation that they’re doing just that. Of course it’s worth it for the negotiation threat alone, but Apple also really doesn’t seem to like depending on Google.
I personally can’t see them switching any time soon, as DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data.
>DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible
I would like someone to make some objective research on that.
My experience is the reverse, so I strongly suspect our reticence is just one of changing our habit more than an real thing.
I switched to DDG years ago and it took a few weeks to wean out the tendency to compare searches, usually brought on by the fear of missing out something.
I very rarely have to resort to a !g search and usually if I can't find it on DDG, I won't easily find it on google either.
I don't feel like missing out on anything and I always find what I need (and if I don't, I can't find it in other searches either).
Other platforms have some strength in some area, like Bing and Google have more tools for image searches, and it's possible that one of these is better than the others at some specific domain, like research papers or patent searches.
But after switching to DDG, all these options are still available and -at least in my case- 99%+ of my needs are met with it.
I've found it's very dependent on what I'm searching for. DDG results tend to match my search patterns better, but it often seems they are missing pages with all the correct keywords that google returns. I suspect it just comes down to Google having crawled more pages, and having had more resources to invest in optimizing result hierarchies.
I don’t use Facebook at all and I’ve never had any problem finding interesting stuff on the Internet (quite the opposite - there is too much stuff and not enough time). What interesting stuff is only available on Facebook?
You must be kidding. There are worlds of interesting stuff outside FB, in fact if FB ceased to exist this very moment, the amount of interesting stuff around would not diminish by even a thousandth of a percent. If you think interesting stuff is only on FB, maybe this is the time to try and broaden your horizons and actively look outside of it.
Having used DDG for almost a decade now, I indeed doubt any objective research would come up showing the results are never up to par or even better than Google's (or other search engines for that matter). Of course I'm also not going to compare DDG results with others when DDG immediately finds what I need so never really checked that myself actually..
Still, no matter how much I like and promote DDG, I'm definitely not in the 'I always find what I need' camp. I don't know why but DDG is simply bad in some aspects. Sometimes it can be circumvented by altering search terms, but other times I have the impression after all those years its crawling or database is still lacking. I encounter this almost daily, most recent example: searching for 'preamp for hypex' Google and Bing (in private search windows) immediately turn up posts from audio forums I expect to have these topics. DDG just doesn't have those probably, because instead it automatically "Includes results for amplifier hypex" (which I find extremely annoying in any case, and makes no sense in this case since the word 'preamp' is key) and after forcing it to quote each term instead then it still doesn't come up with the expected results.
As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what they want, and want the search engine to be smart and give them as broad field as possible, and if it doesn't, they call it "dumb". Some people need very precise thing in a sea of similarly looking things, and they need the engine to be strict, up to following the exact word order and keeping "filler" words in (looking for "to be or not to be" with common words filter on might be hard :) and so on. And if the engine is not strict enough, they call it "full of junk". It's very hard to find the right balance between the two, especially if you don't build per-user profiles. I'm not saying there aren't solutions but it's a very tricky business with a lot of failure modes.
I can't add research but perspective: I search in English, German, French and sometimes other languages. For EN DDG is hit and miss, I'd say 1/2 times it gives me the result that I'm looking for. For DE and FR the result quality is often much lower.
This means at least about half the time I end up with a !g I'm my DDG search.
I don't think bing will be a useful competitor in the long term, but a company that focuses on non-English national/linguistic markets, especially those with own character sets can compete in that area, innovate and hopefully also branch out on the EN market (see Yandex - RU; Yahoo - JP; various CN players).
I'm sure it is fine for English (American). I'll try it again, but as someone who is English (British) it was awful, and never could get UK localised searches correct.
my experience (sample size < 5) is that people that use Google with an adblocker have a very nice experience and don't have an adblocker have a miserable experience.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all devices for years. I’ve never had a problem finding what I’m looking for and have never felt the need to use a different search engine to get different results. YMMV.
Google results aren't much better, I feel that nowadays, if I want to find anything relevant, I need to use site:, and most often than not, it'll be either stackoverflow, reddit and some other french sites.
Anything else is either spam/sales or ebay "proxys".
I found it varies. When I don't find something with DDG, I use !g to switch to Google. Google often finds it.
But the reverse is true too. DDG is now my default, but before, when Google didn't find something, I'd switch to DDG.
There is an implicit learning curve switching search engines. The way one crafts searches differs in subtle ways I don't understand on a conscious level.
> DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data
Last I checked, DDG's search results are just Bing (aside from the infobox-type stuff which is from their own data sources), and Bing does collect data from Microsoft's browsers and toolbars https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
DDG search has been much better for me than google and has been for a few years. Google search has become a complete disaster. I'm curious about what you mean by DDG being so much worse.
I've been using DDG for years now and the results are entirely adequate. There are some niches where Google still delivers better results but I need them no more than once a month, sometimes even less than that. I guess it depends on which part of the data set you're hitting...
I think a lot of people overestimate how easy it is to make a search engine, and underestimate how hard it is to sell search to advertisers.
I think this is closer to a 50B problem than a 1B problem. Not impossible, but I don’t know anyone who has 50B that they would want to spend fighting uphill to kill google.
Say, you manage to recruit the top-30 engineers who know all the in-and-outs of the google search engine. Add to that, their recent replacement of trad AI methods with full NN I believe, and I can't realistically believe it's not more than a 1B problem.
One of the reasons Google is going horizontal because their search engine can't be "magical" forever, this applies to their ad platform too.
Remaking Google requires engineering talent and lots of clickstream data (ie. Hundreds of Billions of search queries and information about what search results were clicked by which users).
Nobody else has this, and until they do, they won't be able to recreate Google.
Is it not like statistical certainty: i.e. you need a million or so queries to cover the range of your possible outcomes, and the hundreds of billions just takes you from 0.999999 certainty to 0.9999999999999999999?
You do NOT get added benefit from big data by taking it from millions to hundreds of billions. It becomes just a lesson in scale, without bringing any added benefit of insight.
With ML methods, they do benefit from taking data from millions to billions.
You can see that yourself with Google by searching for something obscure (eg. "how to unblock a drain jammed with cat fur") and getting three friends to click the 2nd search result. Come back in a week, and suddenly the 2nd result is now the first result! (ignore the videos and answer box)
It turns out just three new data points is enough to influence ranking for that query. It even affected related queries if you change the word "jammed" for "gunked".
Here are just a few of the things you aren’t considering:
* how many people worldwide keep their google places information up-to-date and not their local government office or their website.
* how advertisers can get value for their search ad campaigns; how to convince them of this
* how much google ad/targeting intelligence comes from off-site (eg Adsense, partner programs, xml ads)
* how many websites and website owners focus obsessively on their google presence making sure that even where Google’s tech gets it wrong they can get it corrected.
* how valuable the feedback loop is: google ads literally tells google what pages and terms are useful, what people like, and what to do more of at scale
* giving away free email and chat to build a whitelist of “good shares”
And that doesn’t cover video or the inverted index you need to provide governments access to emails and search terms. And so on.
Apple has all that data, if not better, on a much more valuable audience at that, and can market themselves as "privacy friendly" because only they will leverage said data and won't let anyone in on their platform, and naturally you will trust Apple.
Hell they can even throw a spin on how it's about "privacy" and not about taking another way to bank on their walled garden monopoly and the Apple crowd here will gobble it up with "we are finally free from Google spying, praise Tim and his holy father Steve in heaven".
I've been arguing app stores are a monopoly for years now and the amount of cultist here that were like "Apple is doing it to protect me from bad software" and "I would not use my iPhone if there was an option to install a different store" was staggering.
They'll want to know where their 10bn (ish) USD went that Apple currently gets from Google.
Is Apple going to increase their device sales substantially because of an Apple search engine? I think everyone who is going to buy Apple has bought Apple, so I think not.
On the other hand, if Apple sells ads on Apple search, and they charge the same fees Google does, they'll still need 50bn in turnover to drop Google; Advertisers aren't going to double their marketing budget, they'll split it based on the ROI, and unless Apple ads convert as good or better than Google, this is a net loss.
If some company can sell something to people, even while perfectly fine analogues exist, and then charge double price and have people scream in delight about it - that's Apple.
Not really. It's a scale issue. Such an expenditure to Google is like a billionaire dropping ten thousand dollars on something, compared to a normal human asked to come up with ten thousand dollars.
Buying a default spot is the interesting aspect here. Google spending more than Bing's entire yearly revenue just means they want that thing, and tells you their relative wealth. I figure this applies just as well to corporations as it does to individuals: if you're going to look askance at Jeff Bezos etc. you may as well keep an eye on businesses with similar disparities of scale relative to their market sector. Not like we haven't seen all this before.
Considering Bing is their closest competitor and G are spending more B can make in revenue to exclude them from a market seems like a text book definition of monopoly abuse.
My phone has a hidden app store made by the manufacturer that automatically shows and whitelabels itself when it connects to a Brazilian cell network. The app is really just http://help.motorola.com/hc/apps/brapps/redirect.php (Redirects to https://moto.offerwall.com.br/appbox_moto) in a WebView with a carrier-specific header at the top and some way to install APKs which seems to be defunct as the page only links to the Play Store now.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
I knew the quote before hand, I wanted to make it clear for others that you were quoting something and not just coming up with an opinion. I phrased it as a question to sound more polite, which seems to have backfired a bit.
Yes, the question mark makes it sound like a question. An option is "by Adam Smith". Trying to "sound more polite" may be the problem - I prefer either brutal directness or genuine kindness to sounding polite.
It's a very well-known quote. IMHO the language and phrasing are too archaic to come across as an opinion, even to someone it isn't well-known to. The curious will google (though it doesn't hurt for you to add attribution).
I hope you'll appreciate that my reply was helpful and charitable - though it too seems to have missed the mark!
I think this is huge news if the practice is still en vogue? And also defeats the point of Epic’s separate app store right? The major carriers could simply demand the same cut from Epic if it ever gets any traction.
Possibly, but when Janet Reno "had the goods" on Microsoft, she suddenly settled. Mind you, that was a lengthy case with the explicit purpose of splitting up Microsoft. Then, when it was all but cinched, she suddenly reversed and settled for just about ... no concessions. All Microsoft had to do was share APIs.
Even the judge in the case said that Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." [1]
This new situation may be a slam-dunk, but no dunking may actually happen.
This was Judge Jackson, who had his decision overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Also "the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct." A lot of grandiose things were said by people during these trials, many looking to enrich their careers.
Yes, but none of the findings of fact were overturned. The judge had been interviewed, which was the issue, not that the facts were in dispute. In the settlement, Microsoft also allowed PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.
Absolutely they were, that's what it means that most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned, and a new judge was appointed to determine penalties. Jackson wanted to break Microsoft apart and slap them with operating restrictions.
> Absolutely they were, that's what it means that most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned
Where is it said that, "most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned"?
If you are referring to the link I posted, the actual words were, "The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft."
Then, just five sentences later it says, "However, the appeals court did not overturn the findings of fact."
That's a technical term, because it's incredibly difficult for an Appeals court to overturn findings of fact. It would require finding the Judge clearly erroneous, and they didn't need to go through the hassle.
"In a 125-page unanimous ruling brimming with palpable derision and frustration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nullified all three parts of Judge Jackson's ruling in the case and removed the restrictions he placed on the company's business practices, even as it made reference to many of his conclusions."
I thought this was public knowledge - they compete in some areas and cooperate in others?
For a long time Google was the Apple maps provider (exclusive) on Apple - they had near seamless integration there and in a variety of areas (search etc) - very much acting as one company.
They competed in other areas (google photos on iphone has always been very much second class), google music has struggled vs the apple music player etc.
All these monster players - they are so big that if they were fighting each other on every front it would be a huge mess.
Apple both bitterly competes against Samsung (who copies plenty from iphone) while simultaneously working as a big customer to them.
AWS has the same issues in many area - they will do things like cooperate in some areas with enemies (ie, they'll host Microsoft workloads and MS will facilitate) while competing in other areas (AWS vs Azure etc).
These materials make it sound like they have agreed to split the market such that any competition in areas that are vital to one of the companies involved is deliberately self-limiting. The examples they give is that Apple could potentially compete with Google for search, and that Google could push Android much more aggressively into market segments that Apple currently owns. So as consumers, we're not seeing the fruits of free market competition we're entitled to.
The value is in owning the customer relationship in most cases for the major players.
The capital scale of these solutions has gotten very to extremely high. That reduces incentives to compete in these spaces.
Apple doesn't particularly care to run a search platform because they can extract much of the value of search in allowing others to serve that market (ie, microsoft or google). Ie, these become high profit plays while letting someone else do hard lifting. I'd expect however they would fight like hell if you tried to take away their relationship with their customer.
Even in places they compete - not 100% sure it's worth it. They are fighting it out in maps at huge expense. You need to deliver a global map to your traveling customer base that is amazing (transit, traffic, local POI etc). This is not a small project. Then you have to monetize it. If you told me a smaller handset provider was going to launch a mapping solution - I'd tell you they are crazy!
That drives cooperation especially if a solution is a high capital requirement. Even intel is probably going to cooperate with TSMC (!!!). Some of these capital efforts are kind of insane - 30 billion per year capex type stuff. How many countries have CAPEX expenditures in this scale (ie, not just on operating costs / staff salaries?). These business are larger than countries in some cases.
Android / Samsung absolutely are competing (and copying) Apple in handset space. Ironically they will first denounce apple (not shipping chargers!). That's ALMOST always a guarantee that they will then copy them next cycle :)! I'm not kidding. I'd love to go back and look at everything from an all screen design (bad email machine), to dropping 3.5m jack (which I hated to see happen) to dropping chargers etc.
The Obama DOJ had plenty of quotes in the tech wage fixing scandal a few years ago. They didn't bother to enforce it in any meaningful way.
They even had quotes that showed intent and understanding of the illegality:
> "Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared 'verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?'", the Reuters news agency quoted the court filing as saying.
>> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
It's time to split the Famgopolies. Apple and Google shouldn't be in so many different businesses, killing everything in their wake.
Why the hell does Apple have a film studio? Why does Google have a game studio and cloud? If they keep going, they'll be the MGM and Whole Foods too. (Oh, wait!)
Famgopolies also shouldn't be allowed to dictate their payments stacks, software distribution systems, app approval processes, browsers, or monitoring. Especially not if they're going after every single possible market, snuffing out all of the oxygen in the ecosystem.
If a famgopoly does over 100 things, it shouldn't be allowed to keep growing like the blob.
I really don't want my startup to be a gazelle at the savannah, waiting for the lions to bite at the jugular because they like my idea and market. If I put so much on the line to innovate, only to have these titans duplicate and crush me, what's the point?
I never thought I'd ever cheer for patent suits given all of the trolls, but I was genuinely happy that Sonos won over Google recently. We need more of that.
You don't need to be a monopoly to be a cartel or take part in anticompetitive behavior that would draw the ire of Congress or the DOJ. I think we've seen sufficient evidence in this to call for having both Google and Apple split up.
Famgopoly is just a play on words to describe these never before seen emergent phenomena. You're right - they're not monopolies. They're something new the world has never seen before.
Sure, but the examples you gave were not examples of this. Just because they are in different markets doesn't mean monopoly; only when they have overwhelming influence on a certain market would they qualify as such. Of which you rightly point out they most likely do in certain cases.
There are many huge corporations involved in hundreds of different markets that no one is concerned about because they don’t dominate (and skew) those markets. Corporations spread over many markets is not a problem, a corporation (or a cartel) dominating a single market is.
To be fair, the breadth of FAAMG markets pales in comparison to companies like GE, Samsung, Mitsubishi and similar. The major difference is that those companies don't have a complete choke-hols on any one market, and definitely not on something as important as the modern public square, or something as insidious as PR.
Personally, and I know that this is a very controversial opinion, I believe that the biggest problem is the concept of advertising itself - an attempt to distort consumer behavior, whose natural endpoint was always what we're seeing today: massive data collection, use in politics, manipulation on all available channels.
Do you remember the no poaching agreement started personally by Steve Jobs? They have been a cartel for decades. They share board members, they compete only as much as not to threaten the status quo.
Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google starting between 2001 (so 2 decades ago) until 2011 and Apple board member between 2006 and 2009. He wouldn't have gotten the position in 2006 of Google and Apple weren't cooperating.
I've been saying it for years, but I never thought I'd see either company say anything like that as boldly as they did. It's like something out of a cartoon.
> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.
> Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
A few years in federal prison for the CEOs of Apple and Google might change the situation.
> Jail sentences have also traditionally been lenient. For example, from 1890 to 1970, only nineteen individuals actually went to jail for pure antitrust violations for a total of 28 months. Thus, during the first 80 years of the Sherman Act, the average jail sentence was approximately 1.5 months.
As a CEO, I would love to see the enforcement of these laws. Increasing competition will greatly help our free market. People have lost faith in capitalism because of crony capitalism.
Google and apple shills / workers are working hard on this thread downvoting everything. Literally every comment downvoted. Are Google and apple workers that much common in hacker news? Are they that loyal to their disgusting monopolistic company they feel obliged to defend it with downvotes on some internet forum?
I'm downvoting your comment because it's irrelevant, probably wrong, and downright boring to complain about downvotes in the first place, even more so about shilling.
Cartelization is nothing unexpected. Just like governments cut all sorts of deals to form geopolitical blocks, so do leading companies in any industry. It's win-win for them. As for "regulators", they tend to drag their feet for a long time, take even longer to build a case, and after all that time, their action tends to be more show than substance. I wonder why that is.
True decentralization is impossible without drastic change in human nature. We can only replace global powers with smaller, regional powers, or a single power with multiple ones. Despite cartelization it is better than absolute control wielded by one entity.
Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.
> Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.
I have also wondered the same, especially seeing not just the massive spying, but also the shoddy quality and extortionate prices that characterize government software auctions all over the world. Especially as multiple regional and local entities often pay for exactly the same management software. It would seem a no-brainer that a national/regional software institute would produce huge savings, better quality, and strategic advantages if it created a national/regional software stack that could be used everywhere.
Alas, I believe that cronyism, market veneration, lack of understanding of software, and the high initial costs are acting to prevent any such effort from even seeming a thinkable idea.
Every time European countries so much as hint that they may look at US tech corporations the wrong way, the whole US administration threatens a trade war.
Back when I was a young software engineer, I worked for a large consulting company which frequently outsourced people to my country's government(s). As a consequence, I gained some insights into government software projects. And it's as bad as you'd expect it to be, or worse.
$gov pays 600eur/day for software developers (which they could hire for less than a third of the price). The pimps renting out these developers have zero incentive to ensure quality in any way. The longer a project takes, the bigger their cut. The developers don't care, they're being grossly underpaid by their pimps, so they ride it out until something better comes along. $gov has zero IT competence, and doesn't realize (or doesn't care) it's being ripped off. Government IT project failures are commonplace, with hundreds of thousands wasted per project, sometimes even millions. $gov can't hire software engineers directly, because governments have ridiculous rules about employment and wages and degree requirements. They can't pay developers as much as they could make elsewhere.
I think it would be a great idea for any government (local, regional, national) to start insourcing their own software developers. Starting small. There would be great value to having a few dedicated teams, in the true sense of the word, instead of a ragtag bunch of consultants. This will require changes to government employment laws. But in my book, it would be worth it.
Long story short: governments can't even get their own software in order. I don't see them promoting "home grown" software any time soon.
Aint it interesting, how often governments are crippled by inability to hire talent because that talent is improperly credentialed / whatever; but those problems never prevent the mayor's cousin Cletus from being hired to run the Highway Dept.
Governments currently have a critical lack of ambition, they have been captured by global corporations and made to believe only privately owned entities can solve complex problems. This is why software engineering looks like an impossibly hard problem.
It doesn't help that the way to win elections now is to start a culture war, not to make the country they govern a better place (see the UK).
The law sees it as they have been paid and blackmailed to see it.
There was a report yesterday that showed Apple's lawyers threatening to pull out funding of a minority education school if the state considered any sort of App store laws.
Wouldn't that be Apple's prerogative? There's no reason to do business in a state that's hostile to your interests or pursuits. That's not blackmail anymore than the attempted Hollywood boycott over Georgia's abortion laws a few years ago. There are plenty of well-documented violations of integrity to accuse Apple of, but using its philanthropic investments as a leverage isn't one of them.
Ironically this is the only thing preventing a chromium monopoly with probably >90% of marketshare (Although this restriction is still not that great for the user)
The tying claim eventually got dropped from the case, though, since the govt couldn't prove that the harm to competition outweighed the benefits of having a browser built in to the OS.
I was really excited about the "browser ballot" when that judgement came through. In the end though it appeared on tragically few installs. I never even saw it in the wild.
It was a mess for other reasons too, but it felt at the time like it represented a turning tide against anti-competitive behaviour in software.
You can only explain this by corruption. I think three letter agencies slept on that one...
Edit:
Not sure why accusation of corruption is downvoted? It's a very difficult crime to prove and requires resources to pursue, so there is no appetite to prosecute. Big companies and civil service know that. If these companies pay off developers, they would have no reason to pay anyone else in their way and that would unlikely result in any consequences.
They both offer a highly integrated platform for mobile computing. One offers devices as well, the other relegates that part to other companies, but anyone in the market for a mobile phone today effectively will pick between those two options that do pretty much the same things with similar UX. That totally looks like competition to me.
> have been caught colluding before on trying to keep software engineer salaries low.
Wow they are really bad at this then. 200-400k without even requiring a college degree is pretty wild. It’s about what my brother made as a doctor and he had an undergraduate degree, medical school, an internship, a residency program…
Every former co-worker who I've talked to when they left Google did so for at least a 20% bump in total comp. The few Googlers I've talked to who left for Apple got equal or even a little less total comp.
Anecdotal, but once you get some years of Big Tech experience under your belt, I do think you become comparatively more valuable to smaller companies.
Without the price collusion engineers might make 600-800K. Not sure why you are defending a Trillion dollar company illegally working with another Trillion dollar company to lower worker wages. The reason software engineer salaries remain high despite big tech collusion is that startups not in on the deal were willing to pay higher, which forces big tech to continue paying for talent.
not sure why doctor wages are brought up, supply and demand determines prices. Google and Apple tried to artificially distort the labor market
I judge compensation based on what value people bring to society. I look around at the world created by software engineers and I'm not impressed. For every dystopian nightmare being foisted upon us, you have an "engineer" saying "Yes sir and what else would you like us to do to them?" to their higher ups at these trillion dollar companies. I'm sure hitman pays well also but I don't have to root for them to get higher wages.
The people that are archetechting the dystopian nightmare are capturing the excess value here, not sure why you think that's somehow a better situation.
That's actually quite exactly the behavior you expect from a competitive duopoly. In a duopoly, I know that if I lower prices, you'll match. Operating at the Nash Equilibrium isn't anticompetitive.
I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion -- I agree that they are colluding -- but the logic isn't right.
I'll tell you a secret. Game theory and economics is mostly voodoo wrapped up in statistical mumbo-jumbo. In other words, if economists could explain what is happening, why are they poor and have to go to work to make living?
I'll tell you another secret: Basic economics works pretty well and isn't very hard.
Economists are poor because there isn't any competitive advantage. Any competently-run business of any significant size should have plenty of people able to apply basic economics. Engineers who don't learn basic econ are at a disadvantage, on the other hand.
What is basic economics for you? The supply and demand model which only works if you assume 2 to 10 things (depending on the author), where atleast 1 of them is completely irrational or doesn't reflect reality?
They do indeed compete but doesn't Apple have a monopoly on IOS with it's app store and Google on Android with PlayStore?
At least on Android you can install you own market if you're so inclined. I have yet to find an alternative app store for ios though(might be just me not knowing where to look though).
Edit: Forgot to add that when you're talking about Apple vs G I don't see it as 1 big "smartphone" market. It's 2 different ones. Apple hardware running iOS vs generic hardware running Android.
The law is interpreted according to different standards over time. NPR has a really interesting 3 part podcast series that explains how antitrust laws have been applied over time. Marketshare was the significant metric at one time but more recent judges have used impact/harm to consumers based on price. Under recent case law, if the consumer is still able to get the good cheaply, you can basically own the entire market.
> Google and Apple compete against each other, so there is no monopoly.
They effectively have a monopoly over their customers from other customers and can leverage that monopoly to control their vendors.
And Google and Apple secretly working together as "one company" literally defines trust behavior:
'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'
You should read the actual page before you comment!
From the article: After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
"The Law" is pretty patchy, inconsistent and self contradictory. A lot of them are old. A lot of definitions are sketchy. There aren't many precedents, and the normative precedent of what doesn't get prosecuted is vast and confusing.
>> You don't need a monopoly for antitrust, but it sure makes for a stronger case.
The realities of being a primary OS, App Store, or browser vendor today are both more significant, and more well known than in the 90s. They have financial consequences many times greater.
I don't see how you can come to an intelligible concept of monopoly, market power and such with a general, legal-friendly theory of monopoly. The logic needs to be reversed.
NEW UNDERPANTS PLAN:
0. Forget about proving a monopoly exists to strengthen your case that X is acting as a trust.
1. Use evidence that X is acting as a trust, as to make the case that monopoly exists instead.
2. ???
3. Profit.
The problem is that we don't have a step 2. What happens when markets mature into an monopoly dynamic? We need an answer, because some have.
I've once worked for a large corporation that got hit hard by antitrust. Think a few tens of billions of dollars. Why? A seller was caught giving freebies if they bought their products. That's it. That's all it took.
I know because due to that incident we had to follow online formation every god damn month about antitrust. You don't have to have a "monopoly" to trigger antitrust legislation. The mere mention of "deals" or "cooperation" or "understanding" in the same conversation that involves competitor can be enough evidence to cause huge trouble.
What? Antitrust isn't solely about marketshare and having a monopoly. You can behave in anticompetitive ways that break antitrust laws without having a monopoly.
>In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.
That reductive summary is repeated but isn't accurate.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble for adding its own IE web browser to Windows. (Software companies always add new features and enhancements.)
The key nuance that triggered the government lawsuit was anti-competitive actions such as using obscure/undocumented Windows API functions to cripple Netscape and forcing computer manufacturers to avoid other software when licensing DOS/Windows. All of that is in the long document: https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
His point still stands, especially on iOS where other browsers isn't even allowed and every browser has to be basically a reskin of safari. That way others can't add features or stability, forcing developers to use the app store and give Apple a large cut.
This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.
The problem with that line of accusation is that Apple having a monopoly on the production and maintenance of Apple products isn't a very compelling threat.
In a more reasonable market, like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly. There are alternatives.
Often the measure used for market share is not a linear one but a squared one.
By that measure, there is very little competition in the smartphone segment—it is highly concentrated and so the major players (both Apple and Google) should face greater antitrust scrutiny.
Keep in mind that the words "reasonable market" and "alternatives" are doing a lot of work here.
From the linked documents:
> If Android competed with iOS on app transactions, the market competition would make Android apps cheaper for users and attract developers to launch their apps first (or even only) on Android. [...] After a meeting involving senior executives of Google and Apple, notes of the meeting were exchanged between the two companies. The notes reflect: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
Epic's lawsuits are alleging that both Apple and Google have engaged in anti-competitive behavior here, albeit sometimes in different ways. Even bolder, they're claiming that Google and Apple engaged cooperative anti-competitive behavior that benefited both companies. What consumer-ready alternatives exist for users outside of Apple and Android? If a developer announces that they're building a smartphone game, and that it won't work on Android or iOS, do you think it's reasonably possible for that developer to make money with that game?
Apple has massive amounts of competitive leverage over the smartphone ecosystem; they control the most profitable app store. And the vast majority of non-iOS phones are running the Google Play Store. In that context, locking down the hardware has much bigger implications than it would in a truly competitive market. I think the question is, do we actually have a competitive smartphone market when it comes to smartphone app stores and OSes?
Non-sequitor: I hate that it's going to be Epic that really gets this to take hold. If it were anybody else. This is like watching a sports game where you want both teams to loose. There's a lot of Apple iOS policy I don't like, but I also don't like Epic (personal reasons). This would put Epic on a pedestal that I'd rather not see.
I do shudder at the day of seeing websites that only work on Chrome for iOS, an app that I will never use.
In the entertainment industry not having an iPhone literally hurts your career. If you can't use iMessage people look at you weird and you are literally excluded from social circles. I know someone that was in tech and went into music and even though she prefers Android she ended up caving and getting an iPhone.
The problem is what you consider 'talent' to be. 18-25 valley girls are not representative of the actual entertainment industry. Nor are they relevant.
> like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly.
A monopoly is not needed for anti-competitive behavior to be illegal. All that is needed is significant market power.
Apple has 50% of the smartphone market. Which is around where courts have stated that anti-trust laws start to apply.
50% of a highly concentrated market is not a slam dunk anti-trust case, by any means, but it is within the realm where courts might rule against it, depending on numerous factors.
> A monopoly is not needed for anti-competitive behavior to be illegal. All that is needed is significant market power.
Have any references where someone was sued for antitrust while having <50% marketshare (of course, using the market determined by the court at the time)? If what you say is true, is the cutoff for antitrust action just "when media outlets report on it long enough to actually be put in sight of regulators/congress"?
The cutoff is as follows "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors"
If you want statements from a judge, regarding the 50 percent specifically, you can look up the following court cases and read from the primary source.
"See Hayden Publ'g Co., Inc. v. Cox Broad. Corp., 730 F.2d 64, 69 n.7 (2d Cir. 1984) ("[A] party may have monopoly power in a particular market, even though its market share is less than 50%."); Broadway Delivery Corp. v. UPS, 651 F.2d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 1981) ("[W]hen the evidence presents a fair jury issue of monopoly power, the jury should not be told that it must find monopoly power lacking below a specified share."); Yoder Bros., Inc. v. Cal.-Fla. Plant Corp., 537 F.2d, 1347, 1367 n.19 (5th Cir. 1976) (rejecting "a rigid rule requiring 50% of the market for a monopolization offense without regard to any other factors")."
But yes, typically, if a company has less than 50% of a market, anti-trust law does not apply. But the word "typically" does not mean "always". (And Apple has 54% of the US market)
And whether it applies, would defend on "other factors", as according to the quote I linked, and there is a good argument, IMO, that a duopoly would be a reasonable "other factor".
There were cases like that in the pre-Bork era (i.e. when the courts interpreted the law as people who originally wrote it actually intended). Here's one example:
"In 1955, the date of this merger, Brown was the fourth largest manufacturer in the shoe industry, with sales of approximately 26 million pairs of shoes and assets of over $72,000,000 while Kinney had sales of about 8 million pairs of shoes and assets of about $18,000,000."
And even more relevant:
"Another important factor to consider is the trend toward concentration in the industry. It is true, of course, that the statute prohibits a given merger only if the effect of that merger may be substantially to lessen competition. But the very wording of § 7 requires a prognosis of the probable future effect of the merger.
The existence of a trend toward vertical integration, which the District Court found, is well substantiated by the record. Moreover, the court found a tendency of the acquiring manufacturers to become increasingly important sources of supply for their acquired outlets. The necessary corollary of these trends is the foreclosure of independent manufacturers from markets otherwise open to them. And because these trends are not the product of accident, but are rather the result of deliberate policies of Brown and other leading shoe manufacturers, account must be taken of these facts in order to predict the probable future consequences of this merger. It is against this background of continuing concentration that the present merger must be viewed."
But the contrarian opinion would amount to forcing companies to interoperate, which is a massive endeavour of standards and committees - usually only undertaken for natural monopolies to avoid tragedy of the commons.
Are smartphones a natural monopoly? And at what levels? Hardware (including plugs and jacks, physical button locations and functions?), software, data federation? Like where do you draw the line?
If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles? It's a similarily integrated device. Would Microsoft be forced to allow unlicenced 3rd party software on the Xbox?
> If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles?
One may argue that people rarely need a gaming console to pursue job opportunities, for instance. A smartphone, on the other hand, has become practically mandatory in many industries.
It feels like I could find a line, to rationalize what happened or not to MS or Apple.
But in reality, in the wake of 9/11, USA thought it was more important to have extremely large companies, and it let them grow.
(And MS’ EU fine was related to not giving the API doc, and perhaps using fines as a political weapon).
Clearly, if US applied the anti-monopoly laws, it would shoot its own companies. In my opinion however, no single entity should dominate, govt or enterprise, and we must parcel large ones to keep competition fair, replacements rolling, class mobility high, the american dream possible for new entrants and more importantly, so that governance of our daily life is regularly given to the next generation.
"In the wake of 9/11" is lazy writing. Kinda like businesses saying "we have crappy service, because of COVID."
Antitrust enforcement has more to do with the party in power than anything else. The Bush Administration wasn't interested in suing businesses, and now the Biden Administration is again.
If apple prevented its licensees for the iPhone to bundle Safari rather than another browser... then this would be more applicable.
However, Apple isn't extending its dominance in the smart phone area (Apple has 53% market share of mobile devices, Microsoft had above 90% market share for intel compatible PCs https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... ) to its licensees for iOS.
Apple not forcing Samsung to bundle Safari on the Samsung branded iPhones to the exclusion of Chrome.
Yes, Apple isn't licensing iOS to others and that's a key difference. Furthermore, Apple has half of the market dominance that Microsoft had in its day.
They can be anticompetitive on their platform as long as their platform doesn’t have a lock on the market. So say, if you didn’t need to buy an iPhone and could buy an android instead, and if that actually happened in practice, Apple could reasonably argue they didn’t have a monopoly on the market even if they had a monopoly in their own platform.
Why am I getting downvoted. Are people surprised its hard to compete with apple and android size organizations. You arent entitled to as many sophisticated phone OS's as you want
Libel? It's directly from the material referenced by the tweets that we're talking about:
> 'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'
Different times. Today we have more alternatives. iOS users have windows and hundreds of linux distros from which to choose. Back in 2001 there weren't any real alternatives to windows and so it was under greater scrutiny. The walled garden of iOS is a choice rather than a prison. Apple can get away today with things that Microsoft could not in the past. Times change.
Except when they are. There were windows phones briefly. And linux will run on phones. And Android laptops. Such choices were not around in 2001. PC users in 2001 would have killed for the number of options available to phone users today.
The 2001 decision was comparing desktop options at a time when they weren't any. Today's mobile users have plenty of options, plenty of brands and OSs to choose from.
Windows Mobile may have had the same kernel as the desktop counterpart (but I believe it was heavily stripped down), but the userspace was entirely different because the usage paradigm is entirely different.
Android is Linux under the hood. It just doesn't use any of the cruft that desktop Linux usually has, like Xorg.
Linux wasn’t a viable alternative to windows in 2001 and I don’t think a Linux phone would be considered a viable alternative to google or iOS. There are 2 mobile OS’s, which admittedly is twice as many as desktop OS’s in 2001. As for hardware, there were a ton of options on 2001, probably more major brands than what phones have today, that’s not even including mom and pop custom built PCs.
Did you ever use Linspire? It had a posh, user friendly app store with a ton of useful apps, Firefox, Flash Java and most other things worked without issue. Not a bad experience in the early 2000s on a Pentium 3!
None of those had the broad software options of windows. Everyday users who wanted to complete office tasks, use the internet, and play games were locked into windows. (The 2001 ruling also took a while and was based on pre-2001 behavior by MS and likely future behavior.)
You FAANG apologists are funny. There is a dude responding to someother person with "Nobody made people buy phones with Android or iOS, so why should those companies be punished for that by not allowing them to do whatever they want with their platforms".
Well guess what, none of the alternatives to Android and iOS phones have the "broad software options" or offer anything that could compete with these two systems. So what now?
In 2001 Linspire had a huge software library you could install from with a single click right from Click N Run (a pretty app store with the app icon, name, description, storage required and user reviews.).
Firefox worked, as did Flash (hello NewGrounds!), Java (RuneScape), you could do a ton and be nigh invulnerable to all the malware on the internet of the early 2000s.
We should still call for breaking up bad busoness practices regardles of whether something is a monopoly or not. We forget that even considering a monopoly to require gov intervention is a somewhat novel concept. Right to repair comes to mind, especially for things like tractors. Im tired of paying for products and not truly owning them in the way I want to. Be it in the literal sense or being locked into iOS' walled garden or otherwise.
Anti-trust cases aren't decided on binary terms. It's the overall act that's illegal. In other words just because the situation with Apple is different from Microsoft's anti-trust case doesn't mean Apple could not be violating the law. Paying or accepting money for the purposes of a company receiving an unfair competitive advantage is also covered under anti-trust laws such as the Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp case.
> This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.
Even more so when you consider how much larger these companies are set to get yet (Google will double in size again within ~5-7 years). It's the Microsoft case if Microsoft had been allowed to continue to build its power out for another 10-15 years unchecked. In the 1990s a parade of magazines ran stories about how Microsoft wanted to set up a toll road on the Internet, to position itself to take a bite out of all ecommerce. They were of course meant to be scare stories to garner attention as Microsoft wasn't close to accomplishing something like that at that point.
And yet, here we are two decades later, Apple and Google control two big Internet toll roads and are drastically larger and more powerful than Microsoft was in the 1990s. IBM was seven times larger than Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft of the 1990s looks downright quaint by comparison, an emerging big tech company playing at being giant (back then there were still far larger and more powerful corporations); today, Apple and Google - big tech broadly - are the most powerful and largest companies. Caterpillar, GE, 3M, General Dynamics, GM, Ford, Honeywell, etc look like sad jokes standing next to Apple or Google.
Google for its part has three monopolies which have amazingly been left entirely alone: search, YouTube, Android. They must have signed one helluva protection deal with the intelligence apparatus back when PRISM was getting set up, they got a ten year get out of jail free card (it's in the interests of the intelligence community to have these giant intel-hoovering companies that sprawl and span the globe).
How much does this really matter to the typical user? I’m not using Firefox because it’s JS and rendering engine are significantly better than webkit. Can’t really tell the difference honestly. I’m still getting all the other features of Firefox that actually distinguish it from it’s competitors. The so-called skin is more like the guts from a user value perspective.
The technical reason is that a very powerful system call is blocked on iOS that’s required to build a custom language runtime needed for a browser. This is done to increase security of the device. The trade-off is that the JavaScript engine and renderer must be shared by all browsers on iOS.
But if you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?
If Apple allowed other browsers beyond Safari, Google (and others) would stop supporting Safari and force people to download Chrome (or FF, their supported also-ran). We'd be back where a giant company 100% sets web standards.
Apple standing against that is important for the open web.
which is basically nothing compared to google/apple of today.They are basically forcing you to use them as a middle-man for any app you want. While getting a cut from all transactions.
Non-google app stores cannot automatically update aps, side-loading is hidden in menus behind scary warnings.
IOS forcing you to use safari no matter what, and there is no way to side-load apps, nor any non-apple app stores.
chrome de facto sets web standards, giving them slight edge over other browsers - and they do use chrome specific APIs to cripple other browsers - like YouTube working worse on Firefox due that reason.
And that's even without taking into the consideration all the tracking in form of telemetry on the devices, coupled with their own ads markets.
Once you do this for the first time, the process reduces down to 4 steps each time after: Open Chrome, Download APK, Open APK, Click Install. Done.
The ZOMG SKERRRY WARNINGS only show up once when you toggle the permission for that app and if you look at the screenshot, it's a reasonable disclaimer.
We have plenty of things to bash on Google here for... the sideloading process, however, is not one of them.
> chrome de facto sets web standards,
Chrome became the most popular browser simply because it is better.
If Mozilla could get their shit together, they could potentially reclaim their number one spot... but Firefox lost that spot multiple times. Not because of subterfuge, but because they continually drop the ball.
Chrome didn't exist in a vacuum and it didn't have the advantage of having a host operating system that had it installed from the start. There's a reason it's the primary engine now. It actually works better.
If that bothers you, use Firefox or De-Googled Chromium. Or if you really hate yourself... Safari.
Chrome had the advantage of having the #1 search engine with 90+% market share show warning modals saying "Works best in Chrome" while they actively gated features or degraded features for other browser users. Swapping user agents would cause G Suite to perform much better in non-Chrome browsers.
> If Mozilla could get their shit together, they could potentially reclaim their number one spot... but Firefox lost that spot multiple times.
Mozilla never had #1.
And I don't know what world you live in, but Google has pushed Chrome with the equivalent of billions in advertising. There's simply no way Mozilla can compete with that considering the kind of budget they're on.
If you want a fair estimate, look the time it took for Firefox to slowly grind market share from IE6, despite an abyssal difference between the two browsers.
Netscape was the dominant browser from at least 1995 to the end of 1998. It overtook Mosaic to become #1 with Mosaic being a very, very distant #2.
At its peak it had 90+% of the market share.
Firefox nearly overtook IE until Chrome was released. If Firefox had not been consistently a dumpster fire, I think it could have maintained at least 50/50 with Chrome.
I switched to Chrome not because Google had good advertising but simply because it was _better._ Firefox has always had issues and Mozilla can't seem to make a browser that doesn't shit itself every now and then.
> If Firefox had not been consistently a dumpster fire, I think it could have maintained at least 50/50 with Chrome.
It took 6 years for Chrome to gain 50% market share. In 6 years, firefox had barely taken 25% from IE.
If you're arguing that this difference in success is explained by the technological gap between chrome and firefox being much larger than the technological gap between firefox and IE, you need a reality check.
Otherwise, you need to acknowledge the fact that Chrome had something firefox didn't have, and it was not a technological advantage.
Chrome took more away from IE initially than it did from Firefox.
And yes, I'm arguing a technical difference. I've used every version of every browser when it was still new, all the way back to Mosaic.
Chrome introduced per-tab instancing which was a HUGE leap ahead of everything else and Firefox took years to catch up to that one feature alone. Firefox was bloated, slow and unstable.
On a perhaps related note, I have noticed that a Google Meet that consumes just over 1Mbps on Google Chrome consistently consumes close to 4Mbps on Firefox. Same settings, same window size, same participants. I cannot help but wonder whether Chrome has implemented some standard browser feature more efficiently, or whether it has special native features just for Meets.
> I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.
In these cases, generally, the law acts when other parties push it. Mainly big actors. The app stores are generally build by those major actors. May be regulations will happen in several years.
Fair enough. Merely bundling some software was not a violation by itself, but that bundling was also additionally reinforced with "concerted series of actions designed to protect the applications barrier to entry", which caused "consumer harm by distorting competition" [1].
>>I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.
Let's make a point of starting here. There's room for the legalistic standpoint, especially if we're trying to understand legal processes... but this isn't a law forum. It's near impossible to discuss antitrust usefully from a mostly-legalistic perspective. The laws, precedents, legal doctrines and economic doctrines they relate to are extremely patchy, flimsy and often barely exist.
I think a core part of the problem is a weak, badly grounded antitrust framework in the first place. Key definitions like "monopoly" use contradictory conceptual frameworks, from different eras. Generalizing from one instance to another is difficult. A lot of key concepts don't have definitions at all, or really wishy washy ones.
I think the nature of monopolies has a lot to do with this. One possible definition of monopoly is an singular market entity... IE not generalizable, by definition. Are courts supposed to be punishing violations, or structuring markets and doing industrial policy? Are they supposed to be regulating monopolies, preventing them, or declaring their existence so that a different set of regulations kick in? Is monopoly a normal occurrence in market maturity, or market failure?
At some point, Peter Thiel gave away the game when he said that "monopoly is the goal." If you read microeconomics basics, but conceptualize it as software companies instead of a auto manufacturing... you tend to think of monopoly, rather than commoditization as the equilibrium point that's never quite reached. Successful tech companies don't try to make money by competing in a level field with lots of competitors. That's for appstore app developers, salesforce plugin consultants, spotify artists and such.
The whole premise of the tech miracle is that monopolies are the bull case. How else to expect/justify/realize tech company valuations.
Imagine pitching an investor like Thiel on your idea to spend a billion dollars making youtube content for ad revenue? That's all wrong. Your bull case is that you'll temporarily profitable, if successful. Even if you're very profitable, its temporary. There are zillions of youtubers and squillions who could be. They'll copy you, or maybe your content will just get stale over time. A youtube policy change could wipe you out. In the turbulence of youtube's free market for online videos, profits don't last at scale. To get Thiel's attention, you need to go for your own monopoly.
"Commoditize your compliments" has long been a tech motto. Well... what's the corrolorary? Monopolize your market segment.
Yes, exactly. The law needs to be updated to account for this new world of "platforms".
By platform, I mean an ecosystem a private entity creates which they monetize through content created/uploaded/deployed by external parties.
AWS and others fall under this definition too. The truth is, cloud computing should be a low margin industry in the long run. Yes, software has close to 0 marginal cost of production, but the same is true of your competitors. Basic economic principle implies that in a competitive market, the price to customers should be close to the cost of production.
In the old days, the economy was largely physical goods based, so it was very easy to simply buy a competing product if you don't like the one you have now. That by and large didn't entail becoming entrenched in a whole ecosystem.
Laws need to be updated to tackle the inherent monopolistic elements of platforms, social and so on. China is taking this path, so it will be interesting to see how that develops.
It's important to recognize too, that leveraging a monopolistic position to produce excess profit is effectively a direct transfer of wealth from the littler guys to the bigger guys.
e.g. Apple taking a 30% cut on the app store directly takes from app creators, who may raise prices 30%, which ultimately hits customers.
>> The truth is, cloud computing should be a low margin industry in the long run.
The free market ethos, IIRC, suggests that all industries should be low margin in the long run, no? Innovators and shuch are supposed to be compensated with high margins, but not perpetual high margins. The whole idea is that 25%> margin do not exist in perpetuity.
Yes, exactly. If the market is perfectly competitive, and cost to switching is low, margins trend towards 0.
The same should be true in software, regardless of how cheap it is to produce an additional unit. Of course, because it's cheap for anybody else to produce that additional unit too.
The reason we see such high margins in software is a combination of "first mover advantage", pseudo-monopolistic like elements to the business, and the fact that industry is so new, VC money does not tend to go towards creating direct competitors as there is ample opportunity elsewhere.
In the short run, first movers and innovators will be able to generate high margins of course. And sometimes business X really does produce a better product than the rest, as some would say Apple does. But given that software is cheap to maintain once built, you would expect many viable and roughly equivalent competitors to be built in the long run.
At the end of the day, legislation should be written to foster "competitive capitalism", as that produces the best result for the public at large.
For example, it should be as easy to switch between SaaS providers as the flick of a button. Apple should have to allow competing app stores and not give preferential treatment to their own... And so on.
If you think about the App store example in isolation, the fee they charge is a direct transfer of wealth from app creators and app buyers to Apple. Would they be able to charge 30% if there were competing app stores? Maybe, but I doubt it over the long run. Certainly at least they wouldn't be able to charge Epic that amount, as Fortnite is big enough to entice people through side channels for loading the app.
Looking at it as choice of Apple or Android is not an appropriate level of granularity for anti-trust IMO.
We must recognize that markets created within a platform also must be competitive, not just the gateway into that ecosystem. Cost of switching becomes high, which leads to de facto Monopoly power by the platform owner.
The different is crystal clear. Microsoft was considered a monopoly. You really had no good choice but Windows.
Apple and Google aren't. You have a choice between iOS and Android, both vibrant and thriving.
It really is that simple. And it's not just the legal but common sense definition of monopoly too -- do you control the market or not?
Now you might have other criticisms of app stores, but basing them on the Microsoft-monopoly-argument isn't going to be helpful or useful. You're going to need a different legal foundation for that.
The monopoly criterion is so outmoded. Anti-trust laws were enacted to counter organizations that cornered basic things like steel, railroads, power, communications, etc. 100 years ago, almost everything they could imagine was a commodity that was easily replaceable.
But app platforms are not commodities. There is considerable vendor lock-in, by design. It's not like one just takes an iOS app and instantly ports it over to Android when Apple's terms no longer suit; there is considerable sunk cost. Platforms cleave the market into captive audiences that can and are abused.
And what to do if you are little guy who invested everything in one of those two platforms and didn't have the foresight to write your app in a way that it was easily ported? Well, screw you.
So these platforms actually compete with each other to offer "value adds" which are really just like traps for vendor lock-in.
Anti-trust laws are full of flawed and antiquated reasoning that is unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century marketplace. And there is precious little understanding of these technological issues in courts and legislatures.
An oligopoly (i.e. a business cartel) it's just as bad as a monopoly. Even worse, I would say, because on the outside it gives you the illusion of business competition, while with a monopoly you kind of know loud and clear what you're dealing with.
> In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.
Microsoft got out of that, though. They barely paid a fine. I don't disagree that there are antitrust concerns with all sorts of big company behavior. But this is the world we live in. If you want the government to regulate this stuff for you you need to elect a government willing to do that (or rather, willing to appoint judges willing to do that).
> In 2001, Microsoft "constituted unlawful monopolization" under Antitrust Act for bundling a web browser with their operating system.
You're forgetting how that ended. Remember, the DOJ threw the book at Microsoft. It was an intensely publicized trial, with pretty much all the country hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Waffling over the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby" email, the Halloween documents and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. That all came out as part of the DOJ antitrust suit. It's hard to remember how visceral the hate for this was. During the height of that, The Simpsons decided to portray Bill Gates on the show, not positively [0]. A game developer released a title called "Microshaft Winblows 98" to positive reviews and very good sales [1].
The judge makes their final verdict. Microsoft clearly stepped over the line, there were no easy answers. They were too big a company, the only possible remedy is to break them up. Into at least two companies, but probably more; at the very least, the apps and OS needed to be split up into the "Baby Bills", they were going to be called.
Then George W. Bush comes in, guts the DOJ to a fifth of their size, and basically all but tells them "never do that again, please". The case quickly and silently went to appeal, where it was reduced from "Microsoft needs to be broken up" into a small fine [2]. And after other tragedies in the early 2000s, the nation quickly forgot.
So, no, despite the fanfare, despite the judgement and ruling, the DOJ antitrust case had very limited effect on reality. And the message from above seems to be "try that again, and get your budget demolished even more". That's, uh, why antitrust isn't a thing anymore.
Except, well, it did have one effect. In the midst of everything, Bill Gates was basically forced to resign and go into philanthropy to clear their image, resulting in Ballmer taking over. Some believe that was the true punishment for Microsoft.
People both inside and outside the company have also asserted that Microsoft was quite gunshy, both during and after the trial. It seems to have had a pretty dramatic impact on their behavior.
This kind of glosses over the fact that they were found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in the EU.
They got a massive fine and were and forced to do things like open up the client server protocol used between Windows Domain Controllers and Windows Clients.
They came pretty close to being forced to open up the Office document formats, but the EU backed down from that one.
I cannot find any references online to the DOJ budget being slashed by George W. Bush let alone by 80%. That sounds quite outlandish to me. Do you have any more information on what you're referring to?
A sibling comment pointed out that you're wrong about the Microsoft case. You're also seemingly under informed about monopolies. One of the core issues in the Microsoft case was that they're a horizontal monopoly. Microsoft's monopoly affects all players in the market because a majority of the players use Microsoft's OS. They used that leverage against Netscape and many other companies.
Apple on the other hand has a vertical monopoly, they control the whole stack from hardware to software. While their influence on iPhones is absolute, they don't have outsize influence on other phone vendors. Also while popular iPhones don't have a majority of really any phone market.
Antitrust considerations are different for different monopoly types. Unless a company with a vertical monopoly also had a market monopoly position and used that position to actively influence/harm other companies it's really hard to legally pursue them. You can't fault a company for building their own products and trying to make money from selling them. If a Samsung washing machine has some cool feature when paired with a Samsung dryer, just because Samsung has a monopoly on Samsung appliances doesn't mean they're violating some antitrust laws.
If anything Google is in bigger danger of antitrust suits since they have a more horizontal position in the phone market. While they have token entries in the hardware market they're an OS and service provider. Which is likely why they're supportive is sideloading and alternate app stores, if they behaved like Apple but with a horizontal monopoly the DoJ would be all over them.
Yes, HN has had to constantly remind itself that a monopoly doesn't mean literally 100% control of the market and is legally defined in terms of market power.
> While their influence on iPhones is absolute, they don't have outsize influence on other phone vendors
Apple isn't exclusively a hardware/OS company. They compete horizontally with digital media services like Amazon (books), Spotify (music), Netflix (video), etc. They use their OS and APIs to squeeze out weak competitors and suck up to stronger competitors. They make more money from apps than hardware.
Keep in mind, it's not just current competitors. It's also the potential competitors that don't even bother to start due to Apple's predatory practices.
You can definitely replace Google's app store, see Chinese phone providers, Samsung App store, sideloading, etc... You can also make any browser the default.
Maybe intent matters. Until now, maybe, there's been nothing demonstrating intent like the "cut off Netscape's air supply" quote the DOJ used in the Microsoft antitrust case.
Look I'm fine punishing Google too, but it has to happen either after Apple or at the same time.
Apple literally has banned competitors. Google at least allows them, even if they make every effort to keep them out, it's still possible to install them without hacking your phone (which hasn't really been possible on iPhone for years).
I just hate that they're grouped together as if it's equivalent.
It's a lot more damning than the MS case because internet impact and integration in ones life was minimal. Today society is hybrid and appstore/googleplay are the digital interface to a boatload of public and private services.
I've grown pretty pessimistic about the prospects of the Internet as a motor for entrepreneurship. Today it is theoretically still "free" but wherever you go you'll find gatekeepers like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft that keep a tight grip on who is visible on the net and who can offer a service or software product on a given platform.
In my view, the market dominance of the big players has led to a new type of hidden taxation and a "winner takes all" Internet economy. Almost all digital markets require you to pass through large companies to get visibility or offer your services, and they get increasingly good at extracting every bit of profit you make. This really needs to stop.
I think this is just the natural evolution of any market. Unfortunately it leads to this. There's not much competition in the railroad market, or the telco market anymore, which used to be massive spaces for innovation.
There are two options:
- We have to wait for the next technological revolution.
- It is simply just more costly to be an entrepreneur. It's not about throwing together a website or app, it's much more costly to break through the existing monopolies. While you can still make a website or app yourself, I think you do need more and more capital to market it.
There's competition in the railroad market in the EU,because they want there to be a market. In particular they mandate separation of infrastructure and operation, and force rail infrastructure owners to give open access to all (for a toll, which has to be the same for all operators). Once you can't use infrastructure as a moat, competition is much more possible.
The US which only regulates rail safety but not the market, has a bunch of local monopolies and calls that a market, being in total denial that markets need to be regulated to actually allow competition.
It's not! One of the end results is taking trains across national borders is way more annoying than it should be. That in turn I believe has lead to warped statistics on the viability of rail for long distances!
International passenger rail is a bit of a niche of the overall rail market, but if you compare north America to Europe here, Europe is doing much better.
Maybe not yet, but as someone who lived through the annoying breakup of the telecom monopoly in Norway I'd never ever go back.
I guess this will be the same.
In 1998 I remember having to dial 1521 or something before the number I was planning to dial to use the cheaper minutes with the competitor. I also remember having to learn to use 8 digit numbers for everyone instead of using 5 digit numbers locally.
Annoying, but forgotten 4 years later when you didn't have to prefix numbers anymore and we got cell phones with contact lists.
Same will happen with rail I guess. Annoying today, but I guess 4 years from now no one on their right mind will ever want to go back.
Oh, BTW, the same with the mail monopoly. A lot of complaints, but the result is I can now get my packages shipped overnight. I literally contacted my broadband provider on chat a Sunday afternoon during the last 30 days and had a new modem in my mail as I woke up the next morning.
No way that could have happened with the old telecom and mail monopolies in place.
That's why the web is so important. When the proprietary platforms get the upper hand you get eg. Apple taking a 50% cut off revenue in their news app.
It's simultaneously true that big tech is too big (and set to get far bigger yet) and there is no scenario where you can escape being under the influence/impact of platform owners.
Want to advertise? You had to go through radio stations with license monopolies. Or maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper in a given city (2-3 times larger than its smaller competitor). Or maybe you had to go through one of the few big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). Just a few behemoths dominanted television.
Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now.
Maybe you needed a lot of vehicles for your business, circa the 1950-1970s. Say hello to the GM and Ford oligopoly, your dependency.
Maybe you wanted to buy airplanes, it's 1971 and you're starting a version of Fedex. How many choices do you have? How many suppliers are there in terms of dependency?
You want to get something on a store shelf across the country? Let me introduce you to Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, McCrory's, May. That's 50 years ago, they owned retail.
The new boss, same as the old boss (today some of them are even bigger, that much is true). You can't escape it. Unless you own all the platforms, you will always have to go through other platforms, other gate keepers. The best you can hope for is to intelligently diversify your risk exposure, so it takes more than one of them to cripple you.
> maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper
what you 're describing is NOT a monopoly, because the winners were local, physical separation prevented monopolization, and crucially there was more than one dominant player. There is a whole new world on the internet where for every verb there is one, single monopoly for the entire world. In the end , one can look at the money flow: How many people were employed in newspapers vs how many people are in googleplex
The endgame of entrepreneurship is monopoly, if possible. The (western) internet has no physical barriers so is infinitely scalable so it got monopolized very very quickly. Whether those monopolies are forming a cartel to prevent new entrants is another matter; it might well be the case that it is now closed for new entrants. There is some innovation in things like decentralized finance which are inherently orthogonal to the current state. There is also the old internet which could never be centralized, it's still out there but it's unmonetizeable now.
If there is going to be competition for the big players, it will come when closed markets like Russia or China develop enough to threaten them. It is possible that Europe at some point will also follow their example.
Thankfully I think Web3 (dapps made from composable protocols collaboratively developed by everyone) will form strong competition and maybe even replace Google in the next 5-10 years. Services like social media, finance, gaming, productivity, etc will all be interoperable by default providing a seamless user experience and be built by millions of developers around the world. Each company coding only what they specialize in and being built on top of existing protocols leads to massive efficiency and what looks like exponential growth.
Tech monopolies will likely fade away over time like the early industrial revolution monopolies did just at an accelerated pace due to things working at internet speed. Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.
An example I find interesting and easy to explain is Pool Together which is a no-loss lottery where you can buy $10 in lottery tickets for a chance at a $3,000 weekly prize but if you don't win your tickets still work for the next round and even 10 rounds from now you can withdraw your full $10. It works by putting everyone's money in the same account which earns ~6% interest savings account and the winner actually gets the accrued interest as prize money.
This project was built by a team of maybe a dozen people but is rather complex and needs a stablecoin (DAI from MakerDAO), an interest bearing account (Compound), an account system (Ethereum public/private key), and the running of the protocol (the smart contacts are run free for devs by Ethereum and users pay to perform actions) to make the system work. All of these dependencies took other teams years to build and the small Pool Together team leveraged that to make a cool little product by just adding a small amount on top. The ability for small teams to make functional products which can then be used by others to quickly spin up their own experiments and products is incredibly exciting to me and it's a much better method of development then the traditional closed vertically integrated tech giant where innovation is limited by bureaucracy.
Is there an example that is not related to gambling or moving around money? As it doesn’t seem to be very productive in countries where online gambling is restricted or regulated…
Compound is a lending protocol so people take out collateralized loans out and pay an interest rate on that loan which is paid to the lending pool the money is deposited into.
I'm pretty pessimistic about decentralized (blockchain-based) apps as well, almost all projects have been overtaken by speculators and fraud seems to be rampant, so I would not go near any of those. There really is no need to use blockchain technology to build decentralized infrastructure, most Internet 1.0 protocols are decentralized & federated and none of them relies on cryptocurrencies or a blockchain to function. So, sorry, but for me this whole movement is BS and seems more like a pyramid scheme than a real effort to build something useful.
Why would my mother or yours, as internet users, care about anything that you just said, in a way that justifies a prediction that Google, Facebook or others will lose their monopolies in 5-10 years?
The UX will be much easier for normal people as they don't need to create a new account, find their friends, etc each time they go to a new website or use a new app which by itself is a pretty big driver of acceptance. Users tend to care about what we call "network effect" which is what gives websites like Facebook such lock-in. Web3 apps that use your existing social graph let you simply use new features and use cases without needing to build the entire social graph from scratch.
With an open ecosystem where anyone can add features and create new apps that complement the existing use cases the amount of utility and innovation will likely outstrip organizations like Facebook which is already becoming bogged down in bureaucracy and losing ground to networks such as TikTok. In the Web3 world the equivalent of Facebook and TikTok wouldn't be directly competing as they are part of the same network and function as networks of two different user groups while allowing further experimentation of use cases that might compose different aspects of both systems into something new without users needing to re-create everything from scratch.
The lower barrier to entry for developers to innovate and UX improvements for end users stemming from a seamless unified ecosystem seems like a better experience for everyone. It'll be interesting to see how everything plays out.
People don't care about brands, they care about functionality. There's a reasonable problem in the market that every company is now trying to take over the gatekeeper role, which kills the value proposition - Netflix made a heck of an inroad on piracy, then everyone else launched their streaming services and suddenly it's almost back to the bad old days - and certainly it's very hard to discover where to watch things now.
This is also why Steam has mindshare: I just plain don't really want multiple "I am your games platform" apps - to the point I ignore new releases till they're on Steam.
So if someone creates a decentralized platform that can provide those things more easily, that'll win - but, I'm pretty skeptical it'll happen: decentralized platforms have been atrocious at providing the type of services companies actually need, like a payment system that is just "I enter my credit card number and you give me services I requested" or "being easier to use".
But one place to get everything? That's a killer app.
Who redacted this in the first place, and how would it have been sealed? Much of it is clearly redacted for PR reasons, and I don't really understand how there could be any excuse for keeping it hidden.
I think the lawyers from Google got to redact what parts of the filing should be available to the public. And yeah, there's no trade secrets here, just clear evidence of horrible abuses. Glad the judge ordered it unredacted.
It's not just about the public knowing: Legislators and regulators aren't privy to non-public judicial information, and this is key evidence that Congress needs to pass strong laws that break the backs of Apple and Google.
As a person from a country that's not US... Everything being centralized around the US and other countries basically having no sovereignty is also a huge problem.
When two companies collude, it's illegal. When countries do the same, it's perfectly legal and is called a "trade agreement" because it's them who write laws.
Large companies have massive governance issues. When you get that large, you end up with an endless stream of people nattering on to compromise values for profits. Eventually, leadership gets sick of fighting or misses the impact of a big change. It's all downwards from there (the next piece of garbage in the room appears more quickly).
I think the only way out of this for companies - and governments - is to build AGIs and put them in charge.
I realize this will sound radical today, but we are getting closer and closer.
If we can carve a path where the AGIs see us as similar to parents, and we "teach" them similar to our kids, I can see how this could all work out (writing about this elsewhere).
I wish we did a better job facing this fact as adults. This is the Achilles heel of Capitalism and ignoring it or making excuses only hurts us all. I love Apple hardware, I love Android, but I also love Capitalism and having choice. Living under this economic system requires responsibility to regulate these things.
This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc. It's an industrial structure. The competition is competition for monopoly, a superior & highly profitable market position of some sort. Those are what make Google, FB & so profitable.
Google competed with Yahoo & Microsoft for years in search marketing. I don't believe either ever made significant profits. Their "market share" in terms of users may have been 10%-20%. But, their share of market revenues was a fraction of that. Their share of profits was negative.
OTOH Google pays (for example) Apple $7bn per year to make Google Search default. That's better than best case scenario profits MSFT or Yahoo could have hoped to make, unless they managed to replace Google in the no. 1 position.
Competing is just a lot less profitable than cooperating in a lot of cases. What is Apple supposed to do, say "keep it, we're good?"
I think parent’s point is that a one time slap (as big as it might be) as we do with other crimes wouldn’t solve the issue. The punishment has to be more structural, legislating for instance as you suggest, or dramatically changing the entity’s structure as we did with past monopolies.
Depends on what you think the goal of the free market/society is, e.g. is this even in our interest to solve - better to redistribute these ill gotten gains to the benefit of society and let the free market solve its own problem - if they do it again, another fine.
just like parking /speeding tickets arent considered structural problems
Your point seems to be that we would have good metrics to evaluate the actual impact of these anti-competitive practices, including everything that didn’t happen because of them, and can apply proportionate punishment that would repair the damage done.
I don’t see any of these two assumptions to be true today, and if the point is to apply heavy enough fines that Google’s behavior radically changes, we’re not that far from for instance just breaking them up or applying specific restrictions on them.
I disagree: Shatter monopoly platforms with extreme prejudice, jail the CEOs of Google and Apple, and the market with self-correct. Investors will be wary of harmful business models and CEOs will hesitate to make monopolizing decisions.
Right now, tech companies are massively overvalued because the risk of government regulation is viewed to be nonexistent. A market correction is overdue.
I really don't think it's likely, but I suppose what "break up" means in practice is a crapshoot.
Many of our current, data & user centric monopolies are more complex. Price setting, monopoly rents and economies of scale exist, but they're often not the main point.
"Economies of scale," for example, tends to work backwards these days. Google & FB have access to a ton of advertiser-relevant data, and a ton of users. That makes one unit of Google output better, not just cheaper. The dollar value of a Google of FB ad is much higher than MSFT's or a 2nd tier social network.
It might also be cheaper to run, because of economies of scale. Often though, that's very "in theory." IRL, FB probably spends more per user than most of their competitors. They have it to spend. Reddit is a competitor to FB, for example. The defining aspect of "scale" in their rivalry is not that FB can spread their costs across more users. FB makes many times more revenue per user, because they are bigger.
Does any of this surprise anyone? I thought the custom deals with large companies was common knowledge. So were the pack in deals with Gapps and Play store. What is the new info here?
We shifted from “common knowledge” to “on the record evidence”, which is a pretty big step in my opinion.
The new info is that it is now available for legal action. The optimistic view would be that Epic is enough into it to bring more changes than Microsoft’s default browser ballot.
Not that there was any question about whether these companies are monopolies but will this finally be the evidence that causes regulatory action? Haha, of course not.
Great, but let me know when you can install thousands of other everyday apps, like slack?
Can update apps seamlessly. And Fdroid is actually used by masses.
Last I checked (week ago) unless you root, you have to go and click on every app to update it. Too bad if you had 25 apps.
Infact Fdroid community itself complains, its limited in its functionality because there is no store API, inbuilt into android.
Google is another shitty company that employees shitty people. they waited till the payout day to suspend ad-sense accounts so they can keep the advertisers money. also, one of their employees who is very popular here is a creeper.
Yeah sure, let two mega corps which control mobile OSs, to become as powerful as they can.
While their app store reject apps with AI and no recourse. Force devs to use their payment APIs. What could go wrong, its not like they’re American telecom companies, only they can be evil and lobby. Devs are saints, am I right?
Facebook started forcing companies to use Facebook Credits and then forced a 30% cut. Zynga balked. Zynga and Facebook came to secret arrangement. If you were smaller, you were SOL.
494 comments
[ 1542 ms ] story [ 1519 ms ] thread> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
> That is a damning little piece of evidence.
Looks like it’s exactly the meritocracies Google and Apple claim to be, nothing monopoly-like to be found here... /s
At least in that context, as a mentor, I thought it was a decent message for the students. Work together to get the robots as good as possible so that you had an enjoyable competition.
https://www.firstinspires.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
At any rate, the idea that companies with people who would collude in such a major way don't have any employees willing to manipulating discourse on a site like HN... that doesn't even pass the smell test, there is no way that this is the case.
This site should have all votes and flags by all accounts made public. No more guessing, no more squirming.
https://t.co/gq0m2tIVry
Google has a secret initiative originally called "Project Hug" that offers app makers like Activision Blizzard special treatment in exchange for paying the 30% fee and being quiet about it.
Read Twitter without a Javascript or browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071491
HN then changed the thread not to point to Twitter but to the Verge.
If Google moved to exclusive deals, then that would mean that they would be paying game developers, 10s of millions of dollars, instead of the other way around.
The current situation is the reverse. Game devs are paying google 10s of millions of dollars. If the opposite happened, then that would be much better.
> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
if it will be proven in court it's a firm base for anti monopoly/cartel case
In many cases, it looks like there's some mutual competition-simulation going. Google launches Google+ to pretend Facebook isn't the only social network, Microsoft launches Bing so Google can say "we don't have a monopoly on search", Google finances Firefox to say the same about browsers, Apple creates Apple Maps to pretend Google Maps has competition etc, but they always seem to put in no more than the minimum effort required.
Of course, they could be honestly trying to compete and they just suck at doing those things their competitors do really well. It just looks suspicious, and quotes like that add weight to that impression.
And apparently there are a whole bunch of lawsuits against google, in multiple countries.
My money is on them losing at least one of them, in some way.
All that needs to happen is for them to lose a single lawsuit, somewhere, for the statement of "its in their right to do that" to be wrong.
...
> This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service.
Insane reading.
With those powers behind her she can do some harm, otherwise I'm afraid she'll be just a sitting duck in front of FANG's lobbyists.
Hard to believe, but Google Play (nee Android Market) was pretty damn shabby until about 2013 or so.
Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE. Despite Adwords' incredible profitability, Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits... Their Revenues @ were far lower than proportional to their market share, and costs are the opposite. Better to just take your share of monopoly profits than work hard competing, unless you expect to win their place.
This stuff is the norm. Maybe we should switch to being surprised (delighted?) when these guys compete at all.
^https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/08/apple-c...
It's actually between $8-12 billion now. [1]
> Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits.
This is an exaggeration though. MSFT made nearly $8 billion in revenue last year from search (mostly Bing), and the business has naturally high margins so it would be extremely surprising if it was unprofitable on an operating basis. [2] The reality is that search is so huge that it's worth competing in, even if the incumbent has 30X your market share.
[1] https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428416856038072321
[2] https://backlinko.com/bing-users
$8bn in revenue might not mean profitable. Google certainly spend a lot more than this on search and advertising, and well... software scales.
In any case, whether they make $1bn in profit, losses or something in between... This is <1% of market profits. Apple is making $8bn-$12bn, all profit, just on defaults.
We don’t know if Bing’s profitable but GP is merely saying that with the circumstances above it is an interesting market for Microsoft to pursue.
Cooperating and accepting a slice of Google's monopoly profits is far more profitable that competing would be, in all but the most bullish scenarios.
IE, MSFT would need to be outright challenging Google's 1st place position in search marketing to have a hope of earning more than Apple do by doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.
Also, what would it take for MSFT to compete with Google in earnest? For one thing, Microsoft would need to outbid Google for such deals. They'd need to pay Apple, Telcos, and such more than Google do now.
Apple did none of those things with respect to launching a search engine. Apple did all of those things with respect to building an audience of daily engaged (often affluent) users. That’s the investment Apple made to earn the position to cash Google’s check.
Apple started to ship this operation over to India 5ish years ago, and their contractors over there produce much worse results as they are not hiring professional geographers with degrees like they did stateside.
It doesn't really help OSM that its home page is considered just an example of what can be done with the data and not positioning it as an alternative to Google/Bing Maps is somewhat intentional.
I love answering questions on Maps and providing information for others (in my eyes: effectively working for them, not Google). Google Maps seems like it has a significantly larger user base, so my contributions help significantly more people.
It's very much a help-and-be-helped community, too. I can ask questions about businesses and have answers from other people in just a couple minutes. I don't imagine I'd have the same quality/speed asking questions on OSM (if they even have that feature?).
I personally can’t see them switching any time soon, as DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data.
I would like someone to make some objective research on that.
My experience is the reverse, so I strongly suspect our reticence is just one of changing our habit more than an real thing.
I switched to DDG years ago and it took a few weeks to wean out the tendency to compare searches, usually brought on by the fear of missing out something.
I very rarely have to resort to a !g search and usually if I can't find it on DDG, I won't easily find it on google either.
I don't feel like missing out on anything and I always find what I need (and if I don't, I can't find it in other searches either).
Other platforms have some strength in some area, like Bing and Google have more tools for image searches, and it's possible that one of these is better than the others at some specific domain, like research papers or patent searches.
But after switching to DDG, all these options are still available and -at least in my case- 99%+ of my needs are met with it.
Still, no matter how much I like and promote DDG, I'm definitely not in the 'I always find what I need' camp. I don't know why but DDG is simply bad in some aspects. Sometimes it can be circumvented by altering search terms, but other times I have the impression after all those years its crawling or database is still lacking. I encounter this almost daily, most recent example: searching for 'preamp for hypex' Google and Bing (in private search windows) immediately turn up posts from audio forums I expect to have these topics. DDG just doesn't have those probably, because instead it automatically "Includes results for amplifier hypex" (which I find extremely annoying in any case, and makes no sense in this case since the word 'preamp' is key) and after forcing it to quote each term instead then it still doesn't come up with the expected results.
This means at least about half the time I end up with a !g I'm my DDG search.
I don't think bing will be a useful competitor in the long term, but a company that focuses on non-English national/linguistic markets, especially those with own character sets can compete in that area, innovate and hopefully also branch out on the EN market (see Yandex - RU; Yahoo - JP; various CN players).
It's scary how the web feels much more narrower.
BTW I wish any stackexchange sites are under single domain.
But the reverse is true too. DDG is now my default, but before, when Google didn't find something, I'd switch to DDG.
There is an implicit learning curve switching search engines. The way one crafts searches differs in subtle ways I don't understand on a conscious level.
Last I checked, DDG's search results are just Bing (aside from the infobox-type stuff which is from their own data sources), and Bing does collect data from Microsoft's browsers and toolbars https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
I think this is closer to a 50B problem than a 1B problem. Not impossible, but I don’t know anyone who has 50B that they would want to spend fighting uphill to kill google.
Say, you manage to recruit the top-30 engineers who know all the in-and-outs of the google search engine. Add to that, their recent replacement of trad AI methods with full NN I believe, and I can't realistically believe it's not more than a 1B problem.
One of the reasons Google is going horizontal because their search engine can't be "magical" forever, this applies to their ad platform too.
Nobody else has this, and until they do, they won't be able to recreate Google.
You do NOT get added benefit from big data by taking it from millions to hundreds of billions. It becomes just a lesson in scale, without bringing any added benefit of insight.
You can see that yourself with Google by searching for something obscure (eg. "how to unblock a drain jammed with cat fur") and getting three friends to click the 2nd search result. Come back in a week, and suddenly the 2nd result is now the first result! (ignore the videos and answer box)
It turns out just three new data points is enough to influence ranking for that query. It even affected related queries if you change the word "jammed" for "gunked".
* how many people worldwide keep their google places information up-to-date and not their local government office or their website.
* how advertisers can get value for their search ad campaigns; how to convince them of this
* how much google ad/targeting intelligence comes from off-site (eg Adsense, partner programs, xml ads)
* how many websites and website owners focus obsessively on their google presence making sure that even where Google’s tech gets it wrong they can get it corrected.
* how valuable the feedback loop is: google ads literally tells google what pages and terms are useful, what people like, and what to do more of at scale
* giving away free email and chat to build a whitelist of “good shares”
And that doesn’t cover video or the inverted index you need to provide governments access to emails and search terms. And so on.
These are largely not-software problems.
Hell they can even throw a spin on how it's about "privacy" and not about taking another way to bank on their walled garden monopoly and the Apple crowd here will gobble it up with "we are finally free from Google spying, praise Tim and his holy father Steve in heaven".
I've been arguing app stores are a monopoly for years now and the amount of cultist here that were like "Apple is doing it to protect me from bad software" and "I would not use my iPhone if there was an option to install a different store" was staggering.
Apple's shareholders won't.
They'll want to know where their 10bn (ish) USD went that Apple currently gets from Google.
Is Apple going to increase their device sales substantially because of an Apple search engine? I think everyone who is going to buy Apple has bought Apple, so I think not.
On the other hand, if Apple sells ads on Apple search, and they charge the same fees Google does, they'll still need 50bn in turnover to drop Google; Advertisers aren't going to double their marketing budget, they'll split it based on the ROI, and unless Apple ads convert as good or better than Google, this is a net loss.
Google is valued like "real estate", it's the best address. And then you need the advertising network for it be worthwhile.
Apple, like Microsoft, can replace google as the default search, but that alone is not a big chunk of the market. It might not be worthwhile.
Otherwise, of course it can be done, and for even less than that.
Buying a default spot is the interesting aspect here. Google spending more than Bing's entire yearly revenue just means they want that thing, and tells you their relative wealth. I figure this applies just as well to corporations as it does to individuals: if you're going to look askance at Jeff Bezos etc. you may as well keep an eye on businesses with similar disparities of scale relative to their market sector. Not like we haven't seen all this before.
https://www.google.com/search?q=People+of+the+same+trade+sel...
It's a very well-known quote. IMHO the language and phrasing are too archaic to come across as an opinion, even to someone it isn't well-known to. The curious will google (though it doesn't hurt for you to add attribution).
I hope you'll appreciate that my reply was helpful and charitable - though it too seems to have missed the mark!
I don't think this analyst is aware that DDG already has a lot of Google influence and isn't for sale right now...
This is why Epic is suing them, to have a judge prohibit Google from illegally anticompetitive behavior.
Even the judge in the case said that Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." [1]
This new situation may be a slam-dunk, but no dunking may actually happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
This was Judge Jackson, who had his decision overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Also "the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct." A lot of grandiose things were said by people during these trials, many looking to enrich their careers.
Absolutely they were, that's what it means that most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned, and a new judge was appointed to determine penalties. Jackson wanted to break Microsoft apart and slap them with operating restrictions.
Where is it said that, "most of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned"?
If you are referring to the link I posted, the actual words were, "The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft."
Then, just five sentences later it says, "However, the appeals court did not overturn the findings of fact."
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/business/us-appeals-court...
"In a 125-page unanimous ruling brimming with palpable derision and frustration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nullified all three parts of Judge Jackson's ruling in the case and removed the restrictions he placed on the company's business practices, even as it made reference to many of his conclusions."
For a long time Google was the Apple maps provider (exclusive) on Apple - they had near seamless integration there and in a variety of areas (search etc) - very much acting as one company.
They competed in other areas (google photos on iphone has always been very much second class), google music has struggled vs the apple music player etc.
All these monster players - they are so big that if they were fighting each other on every front it would be a huge mess.
Apple both bitterly competes against Samsung (who copies plenty from iphone) while simultaneously working as a big customer to them.
AWS has the same issues in many area - they will do things like cooperate in some areas with enemies (ie, they'll host Microsoft workloads and MS will facilitate) while competing in other areas (AWS vs Azure etc).
The capital scale of these solutions has gotten very to extremely high. That reduces incentives to compete in these spaces.
Apple doesn't particularly care to run a search platform because they can extract much of the value of search in allowing others to serve that market (ie, microsoft or google). Ie, these become high profit plays while letting someone else do hard lifting. I'd expect however they would fight like hell if you tried to take away their relationship with their customer.
Even in places they compete - not 100% sure it's worth it. They are fighting it out in maps at huge expense. You need to deliver a global map to your traveling customer base that is amazing (transit, traffic, local POI etc). This is not a small project. Then you have to monetize it. If you told me a smaller handset provider was going to launch a mapping solution - I'd tell you they are crazy!
That drives cooperation especially if a solution is a high capital requirement. Even intel is probably going to cooperate with TSMC (!!!). Some of these capital efforts are kind of insane - 30 billion per year capex type stuff. How many countries have CAPEX expenditures in this scale (ie, not just on operating costs / staff salaries?). These business are larger than countries in some cases.
Android / Samsung absolutely are competing (and copying) Apple in handset space. Ironically they will first denounce apple (not shipping chargers!). That's ALMOST always a guarantee that they will then copy them next cycle :)! I'm not kidding. I'd love to go back and look at everything from an all screen design (bad email machine), to dropping 3.5m jack (which I hated to see happen) to dropping chargers etc.
They even had quotes that showed intent and understanding of the illegality:
> "Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared 'verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?'", the Reuters news agency quoted the court filing as saying.
https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-google-settlement-idIN...
They're literally a cartel.
Why the hell does Apple have a film studio? Why does Google have a game studio and cloud? If they keep going, they'll be the MGM and Whole Foods too. (Oh, wait!)
Famgopolies also shouldn't be allowed to dictate their payments stacks, software distribution systems, app approval processes, browsers, or monitoring. Especially not if they're going after every single possible market, snuffing out all of the oxygen in the ecosystem.
If a famgopoly does over 100 things, it shouldn't be allowed to keep growing like the blob.
I really don't want my startup to be a gazelle at the savannah, waiting for the lions to bite at the jugular because they like my idea and market. If I put so much on the line to innovate, only to have these titans duplicate and crush me, what's the point?
I never thought I'd ever cheer for patent suits given all of the trolls, but I was genuinely happy that Sonos won over Google recently. We need more of that.
Edit: incoming famgopoly downvote brigade.
Famgopoly is just a play on words to describe these never before seen emergent phenomena. You're right - they're not monopolies. They're something new the world has never seen before.
Famgopolies.
Most anti-trust actions have nothing to do with monopolies.
ok that's fine
Personally, and I know that this is a very controversial opinion, I believe that the biggest problem is the concept of advertising itself - an attempt to distort consumer behavior, whose natural endpoint was always what we're seeing today: massive data collection, use in politics, manipulation on all available channels.
Cancer is completely natural, too.
At some point you have to examine whose interests you wish to serve, and why. Nothing new about that.
Doesn't absolve them of terrible business practices, just shows that they caught up with them pretty fast.
We're verging or even past 2 decades.
If someone can trace that directly to pricing ... well price collusion is definitely illegal.
> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.
> Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
A few years in federal prison for the CEOs of Apple and Google might change the situation.
> Jail sentences have also traditionally been lenient. For example, from 1890 to 1970, only nineteen individuals actually went to jail for pure antitrust violations for a total of 28 months. Thus, during the first 80 years of the Sherman Act, the average jail sentence was approximately 1.5 months.
https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2020...
Here’s an FTC commissioner explaining the history of it and why we should probably change it. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
I am not affiliated with either company.
True decentralization is impossible without drastic change in human nature. We can only replace global powers with smaller, regional powers, or a single power with multiple ones. Despite cartelization it is better than absolute control wielded by one entity.
Specifically w.r.t software, I can't for the life of me not figure out why major nation states are not heavily investing in home grown software (easier than home grown hardware), and instead of placing all their eggs into a few megacorps established under foreign laws and subject to control by foreign govts, like Iran's software situation illustrates well.
I have also wondered the same, especially seeing not just the massive spying, but also the shoddy quality and extortionate prices that characterize government software auctions all over the world. Especially as multiple regional and local entities often pay for exactly the same management software. It would seem a no-brainer that a national/regional software institute would produce huge savings, better quality, and strategic advantages if it created a national/regional software stack that could be used everywhere.
Alas, I believe that cronyism, market veneration, lack of understanding of software, and the high initial costs are acting to prevent any such effort from even seeming a thinkable idea.
So yeah, that's the reason.
$gov pays 600eur/day for software developers (which they could hire for less than a third of the price). The pimps renting out these developers have zero incentive to ensure quality in any way. The longer a project takes, the bigger their cut. The developers don't care, they're being grossly underpaid by their pimps, so they ride it out until something better comes along. $gov has zero IT competence, and doesn't realize (or doesn't care) it's being ripped off. Government IT project failures are commonplace, with hundreds of thousands wasted per project, sometimes even millions. $gov can't hire software engineers directly, because governments have ridiculous rules about employment and wages and degree requirements. They can't pay developers as much as they could make elsewhere.
I think it would be a great idea for any government (local, regional, national) to start insourcing their own software developers. Starting small. There would be great value to having a few dedicated teams, in the true sense of the word, instead of a ragtag bunch of consultants. This will require changes to government employment laws. But in my book, it would be worth it.
Long story short: governments can't even get their own software in order. I don't see them promoting "home grown" software any time soon.
„Why anyone would expect better decisions to be made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong is one of the mysteries of our time.“
It doesn't help that the way to win elections now is to start a culture war, not to make the country they govern a better place (see the UK).
20 years later, Apple and Google bundle not only their browsers, but whole irreplaceable app stores with no legal consequences.
I don't know how the law sees it, but it's simply illogical from the common sense standpoint.
There was a report yesterday that showed Apple's lawyers threatening to pull out funding of a minority education school if the state considered any sort of App store laws.
Regulatory capture.
sounds like a win-win to me.
It was a mess for other reasons too, but it felt at the time like it represented a turning tide against anti-competitive behaviour in software.
Edit: Not sure why accusation of corruption is downvoted? It's a very difficult crime to prove and requires resources to pursue, so there is no appetite to prosecute. Big companies and civil service know that. If these companies pay off developers, they would have no reason to pay anyone else in their way and that would unlikely result in any consequences.
* Google and Apple compete against each other, so there is no monopoly.
* Microsoft had no effective competitors.
You don't need a monopoly for antitrust, but it sure makes for a stronger case.
[source needed]. The only tariff change Apple ever made was ... due to a real threat of an anti-trust lawsuit. And Google followed straight away.
I can't recall any competition between both companies, they just have their own distinct market.
As I understand it, the law sees detrimental effects on consumers.
They also conveniently had the exact same app store fee for years. Doesn't make much sense if they were actually competing with each other
Wow they are really bad at this then. 200-400k without even requiring a college degree is pretty wild. It’s about what my brother made as a doctor and he had an undergraduate degree, medical school, an internship, a residency program…
Anecdotal, but once you get some years of Big Tech experience under your belt, I do think you become comparatively more valuable to smaller companies.
not sure why doctor wages are brought up, supply and demand determines prices. Google and Apple tried to artificially distort the labor market
I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion -- I agree that they are colluding -- but the logic isn't right.
Economists are poor because there isn't any competitive advantage. Any competently-run business of any significant size should have plenty of people able to apply basic economics. Engineers who don't learn basic econ are at a disadvantage, on the other hand.
At least on Android you can install you own market if you're so inclined. I have yet to find an alternative app store for ios though(might be just me not knowing where to look though).
Edit: Forgot to add that when you're talking about Apple vs G I don't see it as 1 big "smartphone" market. It's 2 different ones. Apple hardware running iOS vs generic hardware running Android.
"Our vision is that we [Apple and Google] work as if we are one company."
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...
They effectively have a monopoly over their customers from other customers and can leverage that monopoly to control their vendors.
And Google and Apple secretly working together as "one company" literally defines trust behavior:
'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'
From the article: After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
>> You don't need a monopoly for antitrust, but it sure makes for a stronger case.
The realities of being a primary OS, App Store, or browser vendor today are both more significant, and more well known than in the 90s. They have financial consequences many times greater.
I don't see how you can come to an intelligible concept of monopoly, market power and such with a general, legal-friendly theory of monopoly. The logic needs to be reversed.
NEW UNDERPANTS PLAN:
0. Forget about proving a monopoly exists to strengthen your case that X is acting as a trust.
1. Use evidence that X is acting as a trust, as to make the case that monopoly exists instead.
2. ???
3. Profit.
The problem is that we don't have a step 2. What happens when markets mature into an monopoly dynamic? We need an answer, because some have.
I know because due to that incident we had to follow online formation every god damn month about antitrust. You don't have to have a "monopoly" to trigger antitrust legislation. The mere mention of "deals" or "cooperation" or "understanding" in the same conversation that involves competitor can be enough evidence to cause huge trouble.
Why aren't they getting hit hard by antitrust?
I guess the reason that megacorps can get away with even worse behavior is that the system is corrupt.
That reductive summary is repeated but isn't accurate.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble for adding its own IE web browser to Windows. (Software companies always add new features and enhancements.)
The key nuance that triggered the government lawsuit was anti-competitive actions such as using obscure/undocumented Windows API functions to cripple Netscape and forcing computer manufacturers to avoid other software when licensing DOS/Windows. All of that is in the long document: https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.
In a more reasonable market, like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly. There are alternatives.
By that measure, there is very little competition in the smartphone segment—it is highly concentrated and so the major players (both Apple and Google) should face greater antitrust scrutiny.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman...
From the linked documents:
> If Android competed with iOS on app transactions, the market competition would make Android apps cheaper for users and attract developers to launch their apps first (or even only) on Android. [...] After a meeting involving senior executives of Google and Apple, notes of the meeting were exchanged between the two companies. The notes reflect: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
Epic's lawsuits are alleging that both Apple and Google have engaged in anti-competitive behavior here, albeit sometimes in different ways. Even bolder, they're claiming that Google and Apple engaged cooperative anti-competitive behavior that benefited both companies. What consumer-ready alternatives exist for users outside of Apple and Android? If a developer announces that they're building a smartphone game, and that it won't work on Android or iOS, do you think it's reasonably possible for that developer to make money with that game?
Apple has massive amounts of competitive leverage over the smartphone ecosystem; they control the most profitable app store. And the vast majority of non-iOS phones are running the Google Play Store. In that context, locking down the hardware has much bigger implications than it would in a truly competitive market. I think the question is, do we actually have a competitive smartphone market when it comes to smartphone app stores and OSes?
I do shudder at the day of seeing websites that only work on Chrome for iOS, an app that I will never use.
A monopoly is not needed for anti-competitive behavior to be illegal. All that is needed is significant market power.
Apple has 50% of the smartphone market. Which is around where courts have stated that anti-trust laws start to apply.
50% of a highly concentrated market is not a slam dunk anti-trust case, by any means, but it is within the realm where courts might rule against it, depending on numerous factors.
Have any references where someone was sued for antitrust while having <50% marketshare (of course, using the market determined by the court at the time)? If what you say is true, is the cutoff for antitrust action just "when media outlets report on it long enough to actually be put in sight of regulators/congress"?
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
The cutoff is as follows "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors"
If you want statements from a judge, regarding the 50 percent specifically, you can look up the following court cases and read from the primary source.
"See Hayden Publ'g Co., Inc. v. Cox Broad. Corp., 730 F.2d 64, 69 n.7 (2d Cir. 1984) ("[A] party may have monopoly power in a particular market, even though its market share is less than 50%."); Broadway Delivery Corp. v. UPS, 651 F.2d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 1981) ("[W]hen the evidence presents a fair jury issue of monopoly power, the jury should not be told that it must find monopoly power lacking below a specified share."); Yoder Bros., Inc. v. Cal.-Fla. Plant Corp., 537 F.2d, 1347, 1367 n.19 (5th Cir. 1976) (rejecting "a rigid rule requiring 50% of the market for a monopolization offense without regard to any other factors")."
But yes, typically, if a company has less than 50% of a market, anti-trust law does not apply. But the word "typically" does not mean "always". (And Apple has 54% of the US market)
And whether it applies, would defend on "other factors", as according to the quote I linked, and there is a good argument, IMO, that a duopoly would be a reasonable "other factor".
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
"In 1955, the date of this merger, Brown was the fourth largest manufacturer in the shoe industry, with sales of approximately 26 million pairs of shoes and assets of over $72,000,000 while Kinney had sales of about 8 million pairs of shoes and assets of about $18,000,000."
And even more relevant:
"Another important factor to consider is the trend toward concentration in the industry. It is true, of course, that the statute prohibits a given merger only if the effect of that merger may be substantially to lessen competition. But the very wording of § 7 requires a prognosis of the probable future effect of the merger.
The existence of a trend toward vertical integration, which the District Court found, is well substantiated by the record. Moreover, the court found a tendency of the acquiring manufacturers to become increasingly important sources of supply for their acquired outlets. The necessary corollary of these trends is the foreclosure of independent manufacturers from markets otherwise open to them. And because these trends are not the product of accident, but are rather the result of deliberate policies of Brown and other leading shoe manufacturers, account must be taken of these facts in order to predict the probable future consequences of this merger. It is against this background of continuing concentration that the present merger must be viewed."
Are smartphones a natural monopoly? And at what levels? Hardware (including plugs and jacks, physical button locations and functions?), software, data federation? Like where do you draw the line?
If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles? It's a similarily integrated device. Would Microsoft be forced to allow unlicenced 3rd party software on the Xbox?
One may argue that people rarely need a gaming console to pursue job opportunities, for instance. A smartphone, on the other hand, has become practically mandatory in many industries.
But in reality, in the wake of 9/11, USA thought it was more important to have extremely large companies, and it let them grow.
(And MS’ EU fine was related to not giving the API doc, and perhaps using fines as a political weapon).
Clearly, if US applied the anti-monopoly laws, it would shoot its own companies. In my opinion however, no single entity should dominate, govt or enterprise, and we must parcel large ones to keep competition fair, replacements rolling, class mobility high, the american dream possible for new entrants and more importantly, so that governance of our daily life is regularly given to the next generation.
Can you give any evidence of what changed after 9/11 in terms of pro-corporate policy?
Antitrust enforcement has more to do with the party in power than anything else. The Bush Administration wasn't interested in suing businesses, and now the Biden Administration is again.
However, Apple isn't extending its dominance in the smart phone area (Apple has 53% market share of mobile devices, Microsoft had above 90% market share for intel compatible PCs https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... ) to its licensees for iOS.
Apple not forcing Samsung to bundle Safari on the Samsung branded iPhones to the exclusion of Chrome.
Yes, Apple isn't licensing iOS to others and that's a key difference. Furthermore, Apple has half of the market dominance that Microsoft had in its day.
> and when they're colluding with the "competition".
Unless you have evidence for that, that's just libel.
> 'After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."'
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman...
With 53% market share, Apple alone contributes over 0.25 to the HHI. 0.25 for the entire market is regarded as highly concentrated.
The 2001 decision was comparing desktop options at a time when they weren't any. Today's mobile users have plenty of options, plenty of brands and OSs to choose from.
Android is Linux under the hood. It just doesn't use any of the cruft that desktop Linux usually has, like Xorg.
- Mac OS X Public Beta (2000)
- SUSE Linux 7.0 (2000)
- Debian 2.2 (2000)
- OpenBSD 2.7 (2000)
- Solaris 8 (2000)
- AmigaOS 3.9 (2000)
- and so on... [0]
Hardly “no alternatives” in my humble opinion.
And in office space, MS-DOS was still a thing for quite some time.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_operating_systems#...
Well guess what, none of the alternatives to Android and iOS phones have the "broad software options" or offer anything that could compete with these two systems. So what now?
Firefox worked, as did Flash (hello NewGrounds!), Java (RuneScape), you could do a ton and be nigh invulnerable to all the malware on the internet of the early 2000s.
It's interesting to think that the project has survived for so long, even if nowadays the Libre office variety is more widely used.
It was a choice, but most decided to cave in and only sell PCs.
Here that isn't the case, most shops selling iPhones also have other brands available. Customers aren't forced into buying iPhones.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
Even more so when you consider how much larger these companies are set to get yet (Google will double in size again within ~5-7 years). It's the Microsoft case if Microsoft had been allowed to continue to build its power out for another 10-15 years unchecked. In the 1990s a parade of magazines ran stories about how Microsoft wanted to set up a toll road on the Internet, to position itself to take a bite out of all ecommerce. They were of course meant to be scare stories to garner attention as Microsoft wasn't close to accomplishing something like that at that point.
And yet, here we are two decades later, Apple and Google control two big Internet toll roads and are drastically larger and more powerful than Microsoft was in the 1990s. IBM was seven times larger than Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft of the 1990s looks downright quaint by comparison, an emerging big tech company playing at being giant (back then there were still far larger and more powerful corporations); today, Apple and Google - big tech broadly - are the most powerful and largest companies. Caterpillar, GE, 3M, General Dynamics, GM, Ford, Honeywell, etc look like sad jokes standing next to Apple or Google.
Google for its part has three monopolies which have amazingly been left entirely alone: search, YouTube, Android. They must have signed one helluva protection deal with the intelligence apparatus back when PRISM was getting set up, they got a ten year get out of jail free card (it's in the interests of the intelligence community to have these giant intel-hoovering companies that sprawl and span the globe).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5...
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
I’ve seen people saying in these comments often that you have to use safari. I am using ff on my iOS device right now, what am I missing?
But if you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?
Firefox on Android supports add-ons, in particular uBlock origin. Firefox on iOS does not. That's a huge difference.
Apple standing against that is important for the open web.
Non-google app stores cannot automatically update aps, side-loading is hidden in menus behind scary warnings.
IOS forcing you to use safari no matter what, and there is no way to side-load apps, nor any non-apple app stores.
chrome de facto sets web standards, giving them slight edge over other browsers - and they do use chrome specific APIs to cripple other browsers - like YouTube working worse on Firefox due that reason.
And that's even without taking into the consideration all the tracking in form of telemetry on the devices, coupled with their own ads markets.
They can in Android 12.
> side-loading is hidden in menus behind scary warnings.
The warnings are minimal.
-- 1) Open Chrome.
-- 2) Find and Download APK. https://i.imgur.com/ZFZb1uE.png
-- 3) Accept warning and Open APK.
-- 4) Go to settings. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/R8FzTzP.png
-- 5) Toggle Install Unknown Apps for Chrome. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/K0ADO2q.png
-- 6) Click back (This only has to be done once)
-- 7) Click install. https://i.imgur.com/xVSndex.png
-- Done. https://i.imgur.com/fyasTK9.png
Once you do this for the first time, the process reduces down to 4 steps each time after: Open Chrome, Download APK, Open APK, Click Install. Done.
The ZOMG SKERRRY WARNINGS only show up once when you toggle the permission for that app and if you look at the screenshot, it's a reasonable disclaimer.
We have plenty of things to bash on Google here for... the sideloading process, however, is not one of them.
> chrome de facto sets web standards,
Chrome became the most popular browser simply because it is better.
If Mozilla could get their shit together, they could potentially reclaim their number one spot... but Firefox lost that spot multiple times. Not because of subterfuge, but because they continually drop the ball.
Chrome didn't exist in a vacuum and it didn't have the advantage of having a host operating system that had it installed from the start. There's a reason it's the primary engine now. It actually works better.
If that bothers you, use Firefox or De-Googled Chromium. Or if you really hate yourself... Safari.
Mozilla never had #1.
And I don't know what world you live in, but Google has pushed Chrome with the equivalent of billions in advertising. There's simply no way Mozilla can compete with that considering the kind of budget they're on.
If you want a fair estimate, look the time it took for Firefox to slowly grind market share from IE6, despite an abyssal difference between the two browsers.
At its peak it had 90+% of the market share.
Firefox nearly overtook IE until Chrome was released. If Firefox had not been consistently a dumpster fire, I think it could have maintained at least 50/50 with Chrome.
I switched to Chrome not because Google had good advertising but simply because it was _better._ Firefox has always had issues and Mozilla can't seem to make a browser that doesn't shit itself every now and then.
It took 6 years for Chrome to gain 50% market share. In 6 years, firefox had barely taken 25% from IE.
If you're arguing that this difference in success is explained by the technological gap between chrome and firefox being much larger than the technological gap between firefox and IE, you need a reality check.
Otherwise, you need to acknowledge the fact that Chrome had something firefox didn't have, and it was not a technological advantage.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/internet-browser-market-sha...
Chrome took more away from IE initially than it did from Firefox.
And yes, I'm arguing a technical difference. I've used every version of every browser when it was still new, all the way back to Mosaic.
Chrome introduced per-tab instancing which was a HUGE leap ahead of everything else and Firefox took years to catch up to that one feature alone. Firefox was bloated, slow and unstable.
It still is.
In these cases, generally, the law acts when other parties push it. Mainly big actors. The app stores are generally build by those major actors. May be regulations will happen in several years.
Also, there's nothing antitrust about bundling web DLLs in an OS, or using the web shell for applications. That's what a Chromebook did.
What MSFT did was abuse its monopoly position to take advantage of other companies and customers.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
Let's make a point of starting here. There's room for the legalistic standpoint, especially if we're trying to understand legal processes... but this isn't a law forum. It's near impossible to discuss antitrust usefully from a mostly-legalistic perspective. The laws, precedents, legal doctrines and economic doctrines they relate to are extremely patchy, flimsy and often barely exist.
I think a core part of the problem is a weak, badly grounded antitrust framework in the first place. Key definitions like "monopoly" use contradictory conceptual frameworks, from different eras. Generalizing from one instance to another is difficult. A lot of key concepts don't have definitions at all, or really wishy washy ones.
I think the nature of monopolies has a lot to do with this. One possible definition of monopoly is an singular market entity... IE not generalizable, by definition. Are courts supposed to be punishing violations, or structuring markets and doing industrial policy? Are they supposed to be regulating monopolies, preventing them, or declaring their existence so that a different set of regulations kick in? Is monopoly a normal occurrence in market maturity, or market failure?
At some point, Peter Thiel gave away the game when he said that "monopoly is the goal." If you read microeconomics basics, but conceptualize it as software companies instead of a auto manufacturing... you tend to think of monopoly, rather than commoditization as the equilibrium point that's never quite reached. Successful tech companies don't try to make money by competing in a level field with lots of competitors. That's for appstore app developers, salesforce plugin consultants, spotify artists and such.
The whole premise of the tech miracle is that monopolies are the bull case. How else to expect/justify/realize tech company valuations.
Imagine pitching an investor like Thiel on your idea to spend a billion dollars making youtube content for ad revenue? That's all wrong. Your bull case is that you'll temporarily profitable, if successful. Even if you're very profitable, its temporary. There are zillions of youtubers and squillions who could be. They'll copy you, or maybe your content will just get stale over time. A youtube policy change could wipe you out. In the turbulence of youtube's free market for online videos, profits don't last at scale. To get Thiel's attention, you need to go for your own monopoly.
"Commoditize your compliments" has long been a tech motto. Well... what's the corrolorary? Monopolize your market segment.
Commoditize PCs. Monopolize the OS.
Commoditize smartphones. Monopolize the OS.
Monopolize consoles, Commoditize games. Platform/Content. Market/Vending. Users/Advertising. Data/Advertising.
By platform, I mean an ecosystem a private entity creates which they monetize through content created/uploaded/deployed by external parties.
AWS and others fall under this definition too. The truth is, cloud computing should be a low margin industry in the long run. Yes, software has close to 0 marginal cost of production, but the same is true of your competitors. Basic economic principle implies that in a competitive market, the price to customers should be close to the cost of production.
In the old days, the economy was largely physical goods based, so it was very easy to simply buy a competing product if you don't like the one you have now. That by and large didn't entail becoming entrenched in a whole ecosystem.
Laws need to be updated to tackle the inherent monopolistic elements of platforms, social and so on. China is taking this path, so it will be interesting to see how that develops.
It's important to recognize too, that leveraging a monopolistic position to produce excess profit is effectively a direct transfer of wealth from the littler guys to the bigger guys.
e.g. Apple taking a 30% cut on the app store directly takes from app creators, who may raise prices 30%, which ultimately hits customers.
The free market ethos, IIRC, suggests that all industries should be low margin in the long run, no? Innovators and shuch are supposed to be compensated with high margins, but not perpetual high margins. The whole idea is that 25%> margin do not exist in perpetuity.
The same should be true in software, regardless of how cheap it is to produce an additional unit. Of course, because it's cheap for anybody else to produce that additional unit too.
The reason we see such high margins in software is a combination of "first mover advantage", pseudo-monopolistic like elements to the business, and the fact that industry is so new, VC money does not tend to go towards creating direct competitors as there is ample opportunity elsewhere.
In the short run, first movers and innovators will be able to generate high margins of course. And sometimes business X really does produce a better product than the rest, as some would say Apple does. But given that software is cheap to maintain once built, you would expect many viable and roughly equivalent competitors to be built in the long run.
At the end of the day, legislation should be written to foster "competitive capitalism", as that produces the best result for the public at large.
For example, it should be as easy to switch between SaaS providers as the flick of a button. Apple should have to allow competing app stores and not give preferential treatment to their own... And so on.
If you think about the App store example in isolation, the fee they charge is a direct transfer of wealth from app creators and app buyers to Apple. Would they be able to charge 30% if there were competing app stores? Maybe, but I doubt it over the long run. Certainly at least they wouldn't be able to charge Epic that amount, as Fortnite is big enough to entice people through side channels for loading the app.
Looking at it as choice of Apple or Android is not an appropriate level of granularity for anti-trust IMO.
We must recognize that markets created within a platform also must be competitive, not just the gateway into that ecosystem. Cost of switching becomes high, which leads to de facto Monopoly power by the platform owner.
Apple and Google aren't. You have a choice between iOS and Android, both vibrant and thriving.
It really is that simple. And it's not just the legal but common sense definition of monopoly too -- do you control the market or not?
Now you might have other criticisms of app stores, but basing them on the Microsoft-monopoly-argument isn't going to be helpful or useful. You're going to need a different legal foundation for that.
But app platforms are not commodities. There is considerable vendor lock-in, by design. It's not like one just takes an iOS app and instantly ports it over to Android when Apple's terms no longer suit; there is considerable sunk cost. Platforms cleave the market into captive audiences that can and are abused.
And what to do if you are little guy who invested everything in one of those two platforms and didn't have the foresight to write your app in a way that it was easily ported? Well, screw you.
So these platforms actually compete with each other to offer "value adds" which are really just like traps for vendor lock-in.
Anti-trust laws are full of flawed and antiquated reasoning that is unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century marketplace. And there is precious little understanding of these technological issues in courts and legislatures.
Microsoft got out of that, though. They barely paid a fine. I don't disagree that there are antitrust concerns with all sorts of big company behavior. But this is the world we live in. If you want the government to regulate this stuff for you you need to elect a government willing to do that (or rather, willing to appoint judges willing to do that).
You're forgetting how that ended. Remember, the DOJ threw the book at Microsoft. It was an intensely publicized trial, with pretty much all the country hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Waffling over the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby" email, the Halloween documents and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. That all came out as part of the DOJ antitrust suit. It's hard to remember how visceral the hate for this was. During the height of that, The Simpsons decided to portray Bill Gates on the show, not positively [0]. A game developer released a title called "Microshaft Winblows 98" to positive reviews and very good sales [1].
The judge makes their final verdict. Microsoft clearly stepped over the line, there were no easy answers. They were too big a company, the only possible remedy is to break them up. Into at least two companies, but probably more; at the very least, the apps and OS needed to be split up into the "Baby Bills", they were going to be called.
Then George W. Bush comes in, guts the DOJ to a fifth of their size, and basically all but tells them "never do that again, please". The case quickly and silently went to appeal, where it was reduced from "Microsoft needs to be broken up" into a small fine [2]. And after other tragedies in the early 2000s, the nation quickly forgot.
So, no, despite the fanfare, despite the judgement and ruling, the DOJ antitrust case had very limited effect on reality. And the message from above seems to be "try that again, and get your budget demolished even more". That's, uh, why antitrust isn't a thing anymore.
Except, well, it did have one effect. In the midst of everything, Bill Gates was basically forced to resign and go into philanthropy to clear their image, resulting in Ballmer taking over. Some believe that was the true punishment for Microsoft.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_SZRhWr1s [2] https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/bush-administration-a...
They got a massive fine and were and forced to do things like open up the client server protocol used between Windows Domain Controllers and Windows Clients.
They came pretty close to being forced to open up the Office document formats, but the EU backed down from that one.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_forma...
Apple on the other hand has a vertical monopoly, they control the whole stack from hardware to software. While their influence on iPhones is absolute, they don't have outsize influence on other phone vendors. Also while popular iPhones don't have a majority of really any phone market.
Antitrust considerations are different for different monopoly types. Unless a company with a vertical monopoly also had a market monopoly position and used that position to actively influence/harm other companies it's really hard to legally pursue them. You can't fault a company for building their own products and trying to make money from selling them. If a Samsung washing machine has some cool feature when paired with a Samsung dryer, just because Samsung has a monopoly on Samsung appliances doesn't mean they're violating some antitrust laws.
If anything Google is in bigger danger of antitrust suits since they have a more horizontal position in the phone market. While they have token entries in the hardware market they're an OS and service provider. Which is likely why they're supportive is sideloading and alternate app stores, if they behaved like Apple but with a horizontal monopoly the DoJ would be all over them.
Apple isn't exclusively a hardware/OS company. They compete horizontally with digital media services like Amazon (books), Spotify (music), Netflix (video), etc. They use their OS and APIs to squeeze out weak competitors and suck up to stronger competitors. They make more money from apps than hardware.
Keep in mind, it's not just current competitors. It's also the potential competitors that don't even bother to start due to Apple's predatory practices.
Apple I agree with.
Apple literally has banned competitors. Google at least allows them, even if they make every effort to keep them out, it's still possible to install them without hacking your phone (which hasn't really been possible on iPhone for years).
I just hate that they're grouped together as if it's equivalent.
In my view, the market dominance of the big players has led to a new type of hidden taxation and a "winner takes all" Internet economy. Almost all digital markets require you to pass through large companies to get visibility or offer your services, and they get increasingly good at extracting every bit of profit you make. This really needs to stop.
There are two options:
- We have to wait for the next technological revolution.
- It is simply just more costly to be an entrepreneur. It's not about throwing together a website or app, it's much more costly to break through the existing monopolies. While you can still make a website or app yourself, I think you do need more and more capital to market it.
The US which only regulates rail safety but not the market, has a bunch of local monopolies and calls that a market, being in total denial that markets need to be regulated to actually allow competition.
I guess this will be the same.
In 1998 I remember having to dial 1521 or something before the number I was planning to dial to use the cheaper minutes with the competitor. I also remember having to learn to use 8 digit numbers for everyone instead of using 5 digit numbers locally.
Annoying, but forgotten 4 years later when you didn't have to prefix numbers anymore and we got cell phones with contact lists.
Same will happen with rail I guess. Annoying today, but I guess 4 years from now no one on their right mind will ever want to go back.
Oh, BTW, the same with the mail monopoly. A lot of complaints, but the result is I can now get my packages shipped overnight. I literally contacted my broadband provider on chat a Sunday afternoon during the last 30 days and had a new modem in my mail as I woke up the next morning.
No way that could have happened with the old telecom and mail monopolies in place.
Want to advertise? You had to go through radio stations with license monopolies. Or maybe you had to go through a newspaper, historically there were usually one or two that thrived per city, and usually one dominant super paper in a given city (2-3 times larger than its smaller competitor). Or maybe you had to go through one of the few big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). Just a few behemoths dominanted television.
Want to transport goods? Say hello to the railroad oligopoly, going back more than a century now.
Maybe you needed a lot of vehicles for your business, circa the 1950-1970s. Say hello to the GM and Ford oligopoly, your dependency.
Maybe you wanted to buy airplanes, it's 1971 and you're starting a version of Fedex. How many choices do you have? How many suppliers are there in terms of dependency?
You want to get something on a store shelf across the country? Let me introduce you to Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, McCrory's, May. That's 50 years ago, they owned retail.
The new boss, same as the old boss (today some of them are even bigger, that much is true). You can't escape it. Unless you own all the platforms, you will always have to go through other platforms, other gate keepers. The best you can hope for is to intelligently diversify your risk exposure, so it takes more than one of them to cripple you.
what you 're describing is NOT a monopoly, because the winners were local, physical separation prevented monopolization, and crucially there was more than one dominant player. There is a whole new world on the internet where for every verb there is one, single monopoly for the entire world. In the end , one can look at the money flow: How many people were employed in newspapers vs how many people are in googleplex
And regulated as a common carrier[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
If there is going to be competition for the big players, it will come when closed markets like Russia or China develop enough to threaten them. It is possible that Europe at some point will also follow their example.
Tech monopolies will likely fade away over time like the early industrial revolution monopolies did just at an accelerated pace due to things working at internet speed. Even Google can't compete with a decentralized worldwide developer network.
This project was built by a team of maybe a dozen people but is rather complex and needs a stablecoin (DAI from MakerDAO), an interest bearing account (Compound), an account system (Ethereum public/private key), and the running of the protocol (the smart contacts are run free for devs by Ethereum and users pay to perform actions) to make the system work. All of these dependencies took other teams years to build and the small Pool Together team leveraged that to make a cool little product by just adding a small amount on top. The ability for small teams to make functional products which can then be used by others to quickly spin up their own experiments and products is incredibly exciting to me and it's a much better method of development then the traditional closed vertically integrated tech giant where innovation is limited by bureaucracy.
Google literally built their business on a decentralized worldwide developer network.
With an open ecosystem where anyone can add features and create new apps that complement the existing use cases the amount of utility and innovation will likely outstrip organizations like Facebook which is already becoming bogged down in bureaucracy and losing ground to networks such as TikTok. In the Web3 world the equivalent of Facebook and TikTok wouldn't be directly competing as they are part of the same network and function as networks of two different user groups while allowing further experimentation of use cases that might compose different aspects of both systems into something new without users needing to re-create everything from scratch.
The lower barrier to entry for developers to innovate and UX improvements for end users stemming from a seamless unified ecosystem seems like a better experience for everyone. It'll be interesting to see how everything plays out.
This is also why Steam has mindshare: I just plain don't really want multiple "I am your games platform" apps - to the point I ignore new releases till they're on Steam.
So if someone creates a decentralized platform that can provide those things more easily, that'll win - but, I'm pretty skeptical it'll happen: decentralized platforms have been atrocious at providing the type of services companies actually need, like a payment system that is just "I enter my credit card number and you give me services I requested" or "being easier to use".
But one place to get everything? That's a killer app.
It's not just about the public knowing: Legislators and regulators aren't privy to non-public judicial information, and this is key evidence that Congress needs to pass strong laws that break the backs of Apple and Google.
- it should be illegal to lock down a device against its end user
- governments should stop protecting companies and helping prevent adversarial interoperability
Do you realize that given our current laws in the US, that this is pretty much impossible?
When two companies collude, it's illegal. When countries do the same, it's perfectly legal and is called a "trade agreement" because it's them who write laws.
I think the only way out of this for companies - and governments - is to build AGIs and put them in charge.
I realize this will sound radical today, but we are getting closer and closer.
If we can carve a path where the AGIs see us as similar to parents, and we "teach" them similar to our kids, I can see how this could all work out (writing about this elsewhere).
My two cents.
This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc. It's an industrial structure. The competition is competition for monopoly, a superior & highly profitable market position of some sort. Those are what make Google, FB & so profitable.
Google competed with Yahoo & Microsoft for years in search marketing. I don't believe either ever made significant profits. Their "market share" in terms of users may have been 10%-20%. But, their share of market revenues was a fraction of that. Their share of profits was negative.
OTOH Google pays (for example) Apple $7bn per year to make Google Search default. That's better than best case scenario profits MSFT or Yahoo could have hoped to make, unless they managed to replace Google in the no. 1 position.
Competing is just a lot less profitable than cooperating in a lot of cases. What is Apple supposed to do, say "keep it, we're good?"
I disagree - governments legislate their markets so it is absolutely punishable if defined as such.
just like parking /speeding tickets arent considered structural problems
I don’t see any of these two assumptions to be true today, and if the point is to apply heavy enough fines that Google’s behavior radically changes, we’re not that far from for instance just breaking them up or applying specific restrictions on them.
Right now, tech companies are massively overvalued because the risk of government regulation is viewed to be nonexistent. A market correction is overdue.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-ups-and-stock-price...
The same could happen with big tech. The market correction could be upwards, just spread across lots of new stocks.
Many of our current, data & user centric monopolies are more complex. Price setting, monopoly rents and economies of scale exist, but they're often not the main point.
"Economies of scale," for example, tends to work backwards these days. Google & FB have access to a ton of advertiser-relevant data, and a ton of users. That makes one unit of Google output better, not just cheaper. The dollar value of a Google of FB ad is much higher than MSFT's or a 2nd tier social network.
It might also be cheaper to run, because of economies of scale. Often though, that's very "in theory." IRL, FB probably spends more per user than most of their competitors. They have it to spend. Reddit is a competitor to FB, for example. The defining aspect of "scale" in their rivalry is not that FB can spread their costs across more users. FB makes many times more revenue per user, because they are bigger.
Project Hug.
Your antennae should go up whenever you hear phrasing like this.
The new info is that it is now available for legal action. The optimistic view would be that Epic is enough into it to bring more changes than Microsoft’s default browser ballot.
Case closed, no?
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255798, which we've merged hither)
Now if Google has a program to make happy its customers so that they don't leave... I wish all companies strategies were like that!
Facebook started forcing companies to use Facebook Credits and then forced a 30% cut. Zynga balked. Zynga and Facebook came to secret arrangement. If you were smaller, you were SOL.
EDIT: https://venturebeat.com/2011/12/12/zynga-history/11/
Netflix didn't want to pay Apple the 30% cut. Apple tried to keep Netflix. Eventually, Netflix got rid of new app store subscriptions.
EDIT: Apple offered Netflix concessions. https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/05/netflix-apple-in-app-purchase...
Look at Amazon's bookstore which forces sellers to not offer their books at a lower price elsewhere.
EDIT: https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/bookstore-files-antitrust-cl...