It's come up on HN a bunch, including recently. I'm not sure how to find the threads.
It is weird and confusing, and has to do with the fact, if i remember right, that the Archive.today maintainer is mad that Cloudflare won't forward end-user IP addresses with DNS queries.
This seems mysterious, but one other comment pointed out the maintainer saying that this prevents the maintainer from assigning traffic to servers the way they want, which is an odd way having to do with legal systems and national boundaries and maybe trying to send the user to a CDN endpoint _not_ in their own nation for some reason?
If I'm remembering right.
The whole thing is weird and I can't explain it, and is very under-documented, the archive.today maintainer apparently doesn't really like talking about it or explaining it?
But basically archive.today intentionally deny-lists anyone using cloudflare DNS in a way that results in very mysterious behaivor where you don't know you are denylisted, including infinite captchas.
I have had the same issue with Google 8.8.8.8 DNS and archive.today btw.
I've also found they do very suspicious things in those captcha pages as well, such as sending random requests to unrelated websites (feels like a DDoS at that point). I've been avoiding archive.today links ever since.
The operator of archive.is got fed up with dealing with legal notices, so he set up his CDN so that accessing the site from any given country would get served by a server in a neighboring country (meaning that a takedown would involve international cooperation, so it would almost never be worth the effort). DNS requests have an optional field (EDNS client subnet) that provides part of the user's IP address so the CDN can respond with the closest possible server to the user, which is how archive.is does its country mitigation thing. Cloudflare's DNS does not provide this field. They say it's an anti-tracking move, others have speculated it's a competitive move since it means that Cloudflare will know where a user is located but competing CDNs won't. Because not knowing where a user is located before serving them would cause archive.is trouble, they respond to any DNS queries without the EDNS client subnet information with bad data.
> he set up his CDN so that accessing the site from any given country would get served by a server in a neighboring country (meaning that a takedown would involve international cooperation, so it would almost never be worth the effort)
I don't really see how this prevents that issue. They still have a server in that country. Just because the DNS name doesn't always point there doesn't seem like it should shield them from legal trouble.
Having not used Android in basically forever, how tightly is search integrated with the OS/interface? If spotlight can be designated a search engine can Android be as well? Google can’t talk out of both sides of its mouth here and be taken seriously: “we can’t allow someone else to have a monopoly in search because that’s our shtick”.
In some system apps it's deeply embedded, others not at all.
e.g. The Google phone dialler which is pre-installed on a lot of phones can bring up the phone number for nearby places without them being in your contacts.
It changed over time, and now the answer is not much.
The early idea was very much like spotlight where each app would be able to respond to search queries itself without needing any remote connection. (The Android infra for this inter app functionality like this is criminally wasted).
Google suffered from what now afflicts Microsoft where you alter the product away from what is good for the user towards strategic interests of the company, so the Android search bar widget becomes a Google search bar widget.
Android is a truly lost opportunity - things like it should be possible to launch an Activity on another device, access content providers from another device and so on, all mediated by the OS.
> things like it should be possible to launch an Activity on another device, access content providers from another device and so on, all mediated by the OS
Actually, that does exist, at least for smartwatches. I fail to see the use case for other devices beyond sending links between Chrome on the device and on a laptop.
Sounds like something similar to what Samsung has where certain apps like Samsung Notes can 'move' between devices, such that if you were working on a note on phone and immediately switched to a Galaxy book or tablet, a notification shows to continue editing on that device.
Besides, links and notes, a seamless transfer like that would be a pretty convenient feature for video/audio apps like YouTube.
Google Search is an app like any other. It might be tightly coupled with your launcher app, and also other apps like Google Translate and voice input might require it. But the EU has forced Android to provide a search engine selection option when you first setup your device. The EU also wants to both break up Google and force Apple to open up and allow other app stores and browsers. If the EU succeeds in all these endeavors, Google will both be in a great and a bad place.
Now this doesn't match my experience at all. The most extreme thing you can do to trigger Play Protect (besides installing an app with a known virus) is to install a self signed apk. Even then it is 2 clicks to bypass. Common APKs like F-Droid won't trigger Play Protect. It's almost exactly like SmartScreen on Windows.
Not only do I have an Android phone, I have a Google Pixel phone and Google Fi is my provider. I don't see Google search integrated at all. Maybe it's there, but if it is, it's not obvious to me. I launch Chrome, which defaults to searching Google, and I use it a lot that way. Other than that, I don't know if it's present. I never search my actual phone via anything like MacOS's Spotlight. I don't even know if my phone has any search capability like that.
Wow, there is, and I somehow had no memory of it. My first thought was "no, the bottom row is just my quick-launch apps, where I typically launch Chrome". But you're absolutely right. I don't think I've ever used it. I somehow tuned it out entirely.
Not the OP, but I use an alt launcher, and I use Firefox (w/ Privacy Badger + Ublock) with Kagi set to the default search.
I'm sure Google still see some metrics from me (maybe from Google Services Framework or Android System - two services that Glasswire reports sending small amounts of data periodically.)
How often do people even use that? I remember having it on all my phones, but I'm so used to searching via the browser (where I now have Kagi as default) that I never even think to use the search bar widget.
> What if Apple would put all that money back into developing its own search engine?!
They have 50B cash on hand, I don't think the money would be the limiting factor if they wanted to do it or think they are in a position where they could do it.
It's safe to assume Apple executives look at Bing and estimate the costs and potential ROI when considering their own plans for an in-house search engine.
Also they don't have to spend it all at once, they have been crawling the web for a long time already and are not starting from scratch. So far it's just more in the background and integrated into the OS (Siri etc.)
That ~$11 billion is revenue not profit. We'd have to compare Bing's lower profit numbers to the various reports ($4-$7 billion? $18 billion?) of Apple payments from Google.
Microsoft doesn't break out profit/loss for Bing in its financial reports so we (as outsiders) can't calculate an ROI. It's probable that Apple has enough inside info from Microsoft to determine if the ROI makes sense for them.
That’s a good point to being up. Apple’s entire pile of cash is just under three years of Google payments. This tells me Apple’s been spending the money on other things. “Replace Google Search” probably isn’t high on their list of priorities, as opposed to Microsoft who seem really intent at it.
It is pretty amazing to realize Apple's oft-commented upon huge pile of cash could be entirely attributed to google payments...
And to me makes it make sense that a company with enough control over search that they can pay other companies 18 billion a year to maintain that control, may be an antitrust issue. I don't actually know much about antitrust law, but it seems like paying competitors to stay out of your business to maintain your monopoly might run afoul of it.
Your argument for control is 180° wrong: Apple has the control and that is why it can demand excessive payment.
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
Apple could swap to Bing and few people would notice the difference.
Apple 2022: $99.8 billion profit (over 1 year)
Google Q4 2022: $18.16 billion profit on $76 billion in revenue (over 3 months).
Apple App store profit: The App Store generated US$1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022, Apple has revealed. More than 90 percent of the billings and sales went to developers and businesses without a commission being taken by Apple. https://itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/apple-s-app-store...
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
I use duckduckgo which is backed by Bing. Apple doesn't use Bing because Apple can extract monopoly rents from Google. Who's the bad guy here? 18 billion a year is a lot of money relative to the profits of the companies. For comparison, Apple seems to make more from its searchbox than it does from the App Store (widely regarded as usurous).
And as we know, "free" search is really just a way to sell ads. So Apple would be effectively getting into the ads business and competing with google on that front. I hope I speak for other Apple users when I say we don't want that. I pay the Apple tax to have some of my privacy respected and a less ad-riddled OS.
Apple could theoretically use search as a way to compel people to buy Apple devices, or to become iCloud subscribers, or whatever. It doesn't have to be an advertising business. That is a manoeuvre they are quite familiar with.
In reality, I'm not sure Apple could actually create a search engine that is compelling enough against the competition to see people drawn into the Apple ecosystem, but in theory...
> What if Apple would put all that money back into developing its own search engine?! That would be beating Google with its own money!
But then they would loose the $18 billion each year they got from Google.
By keeping Google as the default search engine - they get free money and send Apple users to the search engine they probably want to use, without being targeted with the flack Google gets for tracking/mingling ads with search etc.
Billions have been invested in making a better Google than Google by other entities but most people just want Google.
Even if Apple did make a search engine, that’s no guarantee iPhone users would want to use it, and if Google and nobody else paid Apple a penny to be the default, there’s better than even odds Google would still be the default.
Look, I like Apple too but don’t get too high on their supply.
Apple does the possible but extremely challenging, frequently. Given enough time and money, they probably could be at least competitive with Google, but how much time? How much money? What are the opportunity costs to doing this and not investing somewhere else where they are either stronger or there’s a more lucrative future business to be had (like their mixed reality headset)?
There would be an opportunity cost even without Google’s money. Google may not be what it once was but it is definitely still the best in the free-tier search engines you can use today and in 2007 it was several heads and shoulders above anything else Apple could have picked as the default on iPhones.
If payment from Google (or anyone else) isn’t a factor in what Apple uses as the Safari default, it is not at all clear that this change alone would make it worth Apple’s time to develop their own search engine. You have an easier argument with that change, but it’s not a slam dunk.
When I walk in the mountains here I am walking in a big empty green square according to Google :S Same with Apple.
Meanwhile OSM knows every little trail including surface and gradients <3 It's amazing. And I can turn on layers so I only se the things I need and not everything else.
And not just there, also when walking in the city. Little shortcuts are often not on Google maps at all. The only thing where I see Google beat it is live public transport information.
And perhaps traffic but I don't drive so I don't know how good that is.
By most reports I'm hearing lately, it's doing quite well, better than Google Maps in a lot of ways. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't vouch for it myself.
You can certainly pick&choose user comments, but aggregate statistics suggest that apple maps have ~10% of the maps market. Although it's not clear what that number would be if they ever released their maps for Android, it's a good indication that they are a distant second at best. Note that this is a _much easier_ problem to solve than search, and they have not been able to dominate it, 11 years after launch, despite their tight control of their platform.
Do you have a citation for these numbers? I'm not at all sure how one would go about measuring that. I see some sources from 2020 claiming ~10%, but it's not clear to me where they're getting that information, and it's old info.
Slight tangent, but I bet apple maps would have a much greater market share if maps.apple.com actually showed something useful. If I go to maps.google.com, I see maps, which is exactly why it's popular.
It’s been better than Google Maps for years for me. Not designed to sell ads (I don’t need to see every McDonald’s on the eastern seaboard) and the directions tended to be safer and more accurate on timing by relying less on dangerous moves like unprotected left turns on major roads.
I prefer these days while it doesn’t have a feature parody with Google maps. It has a much cleaner interface, doesn’t have ads and half the time gives us better search results.
This also makes the assumption that simply having money will equal a great product.
It takes the right engineers with the right management, and a lot of focus and iteration. You don’t just throw money in a hole and get a great product back.
A lot of companies have had plenty of VC to try beat Google and they haven’t, Microsoft has been trying forever and they still haven’t and they have billions of dollars.
They would need an entire ad ecosystem to monetize that search, to make the $18 billion back.
That's a lot of work, likely far more work than building decent search in the first place. They'd rather let Google get their hands dirty, claim the moral hight ground, and take the rent.
> They would need an entire ad ecosystem to monetize that search, to make the $18 billion back.
Why? How does Apple monetize their software and their hardware today? It is not with an ad ecosystem. If Apple offers superior search on their devices, that is yet another reason for customers to purchase their hardware. Could that be worth $18B per year? That's 4-5% of their total revenue, which sounds like a lot. Development costs for a search engine can be discounted, as it wouldn't cost Apple more than a few million dollars to make a better search engine than Google.
For Apple, developing a new modern search engine will create an extremely broad array of legal, technical, ethical and political problems (think about running a search engine in China) if you want to keep the business sustainable, not even profitable! In that sense, when you can outsource this to someone else and get some sweet money even for the Apple's scale, why wouldn't you do that?
Impressed that Apple pockets $18 Billion and still mostly protects privacy with reasonable UX choices. Nothing is perfect, but denying Google more data about me is one reason I’ll always stick with iOS over Android and why I’ll ditch my Fitbit when it forces a Google account in 2025.
If you think Apple cares more about you and your privacy than Google, I have a bridge to sell you.
Sure, it probably does deny Google some data, but you really think Apple doesn't collect data for itself?
It's the world's most valuable company, its iOS is not open source, and by extension we can't verify that it doesn't do shady stuff with our data - and given that it's a pretty big megacorp, experience says to be cautious, to say the least.
Microsoft also wasn't a data selling company, but that didn't stop them pivoting into one when they realized that Google was making more money from Windows users than they were.
At some point in the future Apple's growth will plateau, Tim Cook will retire, another CEO will be appointed, while shareholders will always demand more growth, so guess where that growth will come from.
Companies always change with time, they never stay the same, otherwise Woz would still be working there. Which is why I trust no big company in the world and why you shouldn't either, no matter how shiny their products are.
> that didn't stop them pivoting into one when they realized that Google was making more money from Windows users than they were.
That's the thing, Microsoft was making peanuts from Windows users, especially after they started offering upgrades for free. Microsoft sells Windows licenses at a discount to OEMs, and OEMs sell the laptops where the real money is made.
Apple doesn't have this problem. They make a buttload of money from macOS users because they sold the (very expensive) hardware it runs on. Apple's incentive is to keep those users happy, so they keep buying $1200-$4000 laptops every few years. Sacrificing $100-$200 worth of data/ad revenue to keep those big purchases coming makes sense. It's why when you set up a new mac, you aren't bombarded with ads for candy crush.
Google doesn't sell your data. They sell ads based on your data. They also go buy up your data from data brokers that sell it wholesale...like Mastercard, Lol
They are not an advertising company who doesn’t need to uniquely target you for a billion different ads. And no, their app store ads are not the same as Googles ads in search, gmail, maps, YouTube, and…
Stop saying everyone is equally bad with zero evidence to the contrary.
There’s a comment like yours every time Apple is called out as having a better business model here.
This, Apple is not primarily an advertising company. I buy quality products from them that last, still using a 2013 iMac that has never had any issues. Even original AirPods work so well, I replace them as the battery degrades.
The ads aren't to maximize their own revenue; that's marketing expense, not ad revenue.
The ads that drive their ad revenue are product placement within their store, like Walmart charging for a higher place on a shelf, or featuring a product in a sign at the end of an aisle, or offering it for free at a tasting booth.
Walmart doesn't make meaningfully more money when you buy product A or B (not counting their store brand), both are on the shelf, so their motivations are different.
Perhaps "ad company" is reductive, as there are different ways to make money for offering visibility.
Arguably the same definition of "advertising company" as Walmart, by charging those selling products in its store for placement, display ads, inclusion in promotional materials, etc.
Arguably not the same definition as ClearChannel, who will take money from anyone to make every drive in America less scenic by plastering them with billboards. (And who combine data from third parties to understand who is seeing which billboards when.)
Apple is a first party supermarket that lets sellers self-promote, Google is operator of third party billboards at scale that reaches and watches all the traffic.
That said, I agree with the thread above that Apple taking great pains to anonymize things like maps trips, while selling user searching priority wholesale to Google, is hypocritical.
TL;DR: I don't understand why Apple doesn't acquire Kagi, put Kagi basic in iCloud and Kagi Ultimate into Apple One, and go from there.
> Apple is a first party supermarket that lets sellers self-promote
Apple works hard to change that though. Apple made 26% of their revenue from services last quarter, it was less than 10% 8 years ago, that is where most of their growth is coming from.
They did use to make most of their money selling products, but now they started to exploit their platform dominance to make money from all other areas of it as well. Apple today isn't the Apple you bought into 10 years ago.
It's been a while since I last saw someone mention that article during debates on this topic.
Admittedly, it has a catchy headline, but the article doesn't contain much substance.
Apple, for better or worse, doesn't publicly report granular-level revenue streams.
So, I can't attribute much value to some “expert” doing back-of-the-napkin calculations to get their 15 minutes of spotlight.
Does Apple sell ad space? Definitely.
Is their ad revenue or even their profits from ads substantial enough to be their core product, therefore making them an ad company? Definitely not.
It's because of this that people aren't worried by Apple’s little venture in ads because it means that there's no incentive to turn their customers into their product.
Additionally, again, for better or worse, Apple has adopted a very narrow definition of tracking.
That definition is the sharing and co-mingling of collected data from different sources.
Under this definition, Apple says it does not track people, which is true.
Apple solely uses data they collect from its services and doesn't use other company's collected data, nor does it share its own.
This means that if you like a Facebook post by a Facebook group of expectant mothers, Apple won't suddenly start advertising diapers to you.
These might seem like distinctions without a difference, but for many people, it offers peace of mind.
Google has 280b (2022) in revenue mostly (entirely?) from ads.
Apple's is 394b (2022), so you're talking about 1%... growing to, what? 1.1%?
Everyone complains about overpriced Apple products and that's specifically because that is where they make their money. And services a bit now, but mostly products.
It's so easy to be nihilist about this, there's plenty of things Apple sucks at. They're certainly not perfect on privacy either.
But for the love of god don't act like they're "just as bad at privacy" as you are intentionally moving us to a world where literally no large company cares about privacy.
*I forgot to mention my (least) favorite category of Google's ads! Banner ads.
Trust is a thing to be earned. Since Apple has anti-RtR and anti-consumer business models I have no other suspicion but Apple is treating my data with the same degree.
Stop telling that Apple is not there to screw you where they can because they definately will and are if there are no repercussions.
They have a track record of being anti-repair and suddenly changing strategy is a bigger suspicion. Besides their repair manuals and tools are one of the most terrible ones. Technically they do offer some repair options but it is almost unusable so you are better off without it.
>> They are not an advertising company who doesn’t need to uniquely target you for a billion different ads.
Yet.
Apple is running out of multi-billion dollar product ideas. To play the devil's advocate, if google can earn hundreds of billions from ads, one can argue that Apple is leaving that money on the table for a pittance.
I don’t care what Apple or Google “cares” about; I am deeply skeptical that multi-billion-dollar companies even can “care” about anything.
But if you look at track record and technical implementations, Apple has less incentive and less capability to abuse my personal info. Its just a pragmatic thing, no need to bring principles into it.
Apple doesn't make their money by collecting your information. they make their money mostly by selling you expensive stuff and by selling you streaming services.
Their ads business is pretty minimal and is much smaller than their hardware business.
They sell ads in their App Store in the search results and some listings. They also sell regular display ads in the News app which does not have a massive following.
> Sure, it probably does deny Google some data, but you really think Apple doesn't collect data for itself?
You can read their privacy policy. It's possible they are lying about what data they collect, but that wouldn't make a lot of sense seeing as their business model is not built around it like Google's is.
Apple would be forced to integrate AI into their products given all the competitive pressure from Microsoft and Google. It would be fun to see how Apple spins how it will collect all the data necessary to train the models. Given the current direction of LLMs, they'll need lots of data to train the foundational models. So, either Apple will swallow their ego and cut a deal with Meta to use LLAMA2 as a base model that they can fine-tune, or I predict you'll see Apple come out all guns blazing that AI is fundamentally against human privacy, so no iAI. Either ways, would be good fun to see how iFanBoys spin this.
Well since we're clarifying - it's a user opt-in to provide the advertiser ID to an app. That's why keeping Google apps away from your iPhone is how you stay safe!
The side that doesn't cheer on trillion dollar market cap companies.
Nobody should celebrate Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. They create barriers to competition that suck the air out of the small company and startup ecosystem.
Smartphones should be a dead and withered technology. Instead they're wholly owned by two giants that sit atop them and tax them in perpetuity.
We need to move on and forward, yet we're being leased old tech because the regulators haven't done anything to protect competition in decades.
Apple isn't defending privacy. They're hoovering up information for themselves using their massive anti-competitive platform apparatus.
Google isn't advancing web browser tech. They're extending their claws into every pane of glass and search interface for society, making themselves the gatekeepers of search intent commerce.
Amazon isn't offering amazingly flexible and scalable cloud hosting. They're reaping fat profits off the back of open source, locking companies into years of bills that slice the fat off of their margins.
To answer that, you have to understand what cell phones came from.
Prior to the major smartphone push starting with Apple, cell phones were horrific devices that charged $5 per ringtone, apps were $30 or more and only per provider, no tethering, and basically were nasty little expensive locked down bricks.
Apple did change that, with the initial strong-arming AT&T. And Iphone compared to prior was amazingly open. Had no app store yet, but had a real full-featured web browser and lots of useful tools.
But, this was still very locked down to what the iPhone really is - a general purpose computer. The company still has say-so on everything on these devices. I'd argue that these are rentals, instead of a purchase.
Android is a different beast. Google never created Android. They *BOUGHT* android, as a back-way in to the smartphone ecosystem. And they marketed it as "free", to get all the i-clones to use it. Of course, as Google does, it starts free, but you slowly pay more (with your data) and the noose slowly tightens. Now, we have locked bootloaders and PlayProtect and other invasive "root detection" garbage. And the platform becomes less and less hospitable.
Forward? Im no fortune teller, but it seems that separating the actual physical interface from the compute would be a great start. And these *general purpose* computers need to be enforced as such. Tie-ins and cloudshit need to be unbundled or FTC enforced as rentals.
The platforms we currently have are locked down. The first big steps are actual device ownership.
> "Apple sells there users searches to Google for $18 Billion"
I feel like this is worded in a misleading way. Apple does not sell user data or search information to Google. It sells Google the option to be the default search provider.
Google will, of course, vacuum up as much data as possible from these searches. As would Bing if you select them. Ultimately, I have a hard time seeing how the privacy problem in this is on Apple and not the search provider.
By this same argument your router is selling the data of people who don’t know how to connect to a VPN.
At some point - probably almost immediately - you’re going to use your phone to access a service or app outside of Apple’s walled garden. You’re going to connect to an open WiFi network, a secure WiFi network without a VPN, the wrong VPN, use Bluetooth, download an app, visit a website, make a search. At that point your user data is going to be collected by services Apple does not control.
By all accounts Apple has and continues to implement increasingly aggressive privacy protecting measures on their devices to minimize the amount and type of data third party users can collect.
I’m not an Apple apologist. But it’s just funny to me how someone could see all these services collecting their data and see Apple as the problem. Apple cannot save you from yourself. If you want complete privacy, you need to jump through hoops to get it, and you need to know a lot about technology across all levels.
> By this same argument your router is selling the data of people who don’t know how to connect to a VPN.
Is my router company getting money for this? If not, it's not selling. Apple knows very well why Google pays so much for the default search engine: to track Apple's users. This is intentional. Your Internet provider doesn't necessarily track you (at least outside of US) and you can't change any option in the router to affect that.
And for those people, the only thing that matters is having the best search engine as the default. Which other engine doesn’t track user searches and can compete? I can only think of DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think they’re good enough.
DuckDuckGo can be good enough, depending on your search habits. But in general, people who don't want to be tracked and don't know about alternatives are sold to Google.
Well, they probably still fingerprint you and build a profile around that fingerprint - and when you do log in, they probably associate that fingerprint with your profile.
Not going to respond to the ad hominem flame war comments but I’ll just add, it’s about relative choices, hence why I still use a Fitbit.
I can see how each public company makes money and can examine their technical decisions. I’ve been working in wearables and healthcare, for instance, since 2010. Fitbit sends all data to the cloud then updates your data in your app. Not a huge deal and provides nice API opportunities. But as soon as Google takes over that data explicitly, I expect it will be used to advertise to me, despite the assurances to the contrary on the acquisition.
By contrast, Apple chose to develop a strong privacy model for health data on the Phone. They certainly didn’t need to and could have readily chosen the same cloud-first implementation. But they didn’t. And the APIs are harder to work with as a consequence. I respect and appreciate those decisions and so I buy their products more. You may choose differently.
Firefox is just a skin on iOS because Apple forces Safari's web implementation on all iOS browsers via their draconian App Store. So it is very much about operating systems.
It boggles my mind that Apple’s market position allows it to pocket $18 billion a year in pure rent for this real estate on its platform and the company paying is the one that gets an antitrust suit.
Google is the offender because they control both the search and the browser market. Imagine having to pay $18 billion and still coming on top.
Folks hooked to Chrome seem to forget that whatever they do online is used to refine their ad profile and generate even more ad money for Google and you can't opt out.
We don't forget. We just don't care. I am in no way upset that Google is refining my ad profile and making money. Many billions of other people are also not upset by that.
Of course they were being hyperbolic with the use of the word "billions". The point still stands though. The vast majority of people using Google's services do know about adtech surveillance, and just don't care.
Do you have a source for that claim? I think laypeople know google serves them custom ads, but don’t understand how or the extent to which adtech is tracking and profiling them to select those ads.
In fact, because it’s a common trope to say “they must have been listening to our conversation” when served an eerily specific ad, I’d wager people do not know about adtech at all.
> In fact, because it’s a common trope to say “they must have been listening to our conversation” when served an eerily specific ad, I’d wager people do not know about adtech at all.
That meme is evidence you are wrong, so not sure why you brought it up. If people didn't believe they were being tracked they wouldn't have thought it listened on them. Listening on them is tracking.
Now of course the device probably wasn't listening and it just suggested the ad for other tracking reasons, so they are wrong about the specifics but they do understand that they are being tracked.
No. The joke’s humor is in the fact that it’s such a strange coincidence that they were served the ad that something totally absurd, like their phone listening to a private conversation, is a possibility.
Someone making a joke says nothing about what they believe to be true. Like the birds not being real.
> The joke’s humor is in the fact that it’s such a strange coincidence
No it isn't a joke, people know their phone is listening to them, smart assistants has made the world perfectly aware of how much they are monitored. So since they know the phone is listening, they think the phone showed them the ad since it listened to them. It isn't a joke, people think this, memes aren't always jokes they are just ideas that spread easily.
Look at this thread for example, does this look like a joke to you? People think it is listening to everything and just give up and go on with their life, that is what typical people believe.
"This has happened to me several times. Sadly, there is not much you can do about it. If your phone has a mic, it is listening to everything you say 24/7."
Since before the age of the smartphone, people have thought their phone conversations are being recorded. And there’s absolutely evidence that it’s true. So too is evidence of UFOs and aliens.
But that’s a tangent. The claim I was seeking evidence for was:
“The vast majority of people using Google's services do know about adtech surveillance, and just don't care.”
People who read HN are not the vast majority (thankfully).
I still don’t think the vast majority of people are aware of the depths of adtech because Google and Meta go to great lengths to control the narrative and keep people in the dark. They make people believe they’re “in-control” of their privacy. If people were made aware of how much tracking still goes on then they would care.
> People who read HN are not the vast majority (thankfully).
I meant the reddit thread I linked. In all such threads I've seen people think that their phone is recording everything they say to show ads, no jokes about it.
Here on HN people know that the phone doesn't do that, since we have people who looked at what code is activated on the phone and what it sends. But regular people doesn't know that, they think they are constantly being monitored and there is nothing to do about it, so all they can do is either stop caring or fall into despair, and most just choose to stop caring.
Smart assistants were a great trick to get people used to the idea that they are constantly being monitored. Makes them less likely to put up a fight when you start monitoring everything for real.
In support of your claim, look at how much effort companies like Google or Facebook have put into avoiding disclosure. If the general public was knowledgeable they wouldn’t have fought things like privacy labels so strenuously.
It's also just a vastly inferior browser at least on Android compared to Firefox.
Videos stop playing when you leave the tab, no AdBlockers.
Don't know why anyone would use this voluntarily, if it wouldn't be preinstalled
I use DNS level blocking, it syncs with everything I use, and has better compatibility and faster rendering performance (battery life). Don't want to use FF on Windows either due to the mentioned issues. On windows I have also found FF RAM usage is significantly higher.
> Apple’s market position allows it to pocket $18 billion a year in pure rent
Google's market position both allows and makes it financially beneficial to pay $18 billion to suppress one single source of competition. Nobody forces google to buy the default search spot.
> Nobody forces google to buy the default search spot.
Someone would pay Apple to be the default search, if Google didn't pay billions Microsoft would pay billions to make Bing the default search. Would you prefer that?
Apple is auctioning it out to the highest bidder, I don't see how bidding in an auction is wrong.
Tell that to Apple, Google doesn't have the power to give you that.
Edit: Also Google would love a law enforcing that, since now they don't have to pay all of these billions of dollars and most people would pick Google in that choice anyway. The main players that doesn't want that are Apple and the others that auctions out default search.
So Google convincing the judges to stop Apple from auctioning out default search would be a Google win.
Google might not have the power to give you that, but they certainly have the power to prevent Apple from giving you that
Or do you really think Google is paying billions without stipulating that Apple can't offer a choice during setup?
> Also Google would love a law enforcing that, since now they don't have to pay all of these billions of dollars and most people would pick Google in that choice anyway
I need you to square this circle for me. If Google were so confident that people would pick Google of their own volition, why would they bother spending billions?
> Or do you really think Google is paying billions without stipulating that Apple can't offer a choice during setup?
If you do get a choice at startup then there is nothing to sell since there is no default. So yes, if Apple isn't selling the product then they don't get any money.
But Google paying Apple has nothing to do with it, Apple would make billions selling the default to Microsoft otherwise, they wouldn't give you a choice at startup. The only thing that would give you that choice is if laws ban Apple from selling the default search provider spot.
> I need you to square this circle for me. If Google were so confident that people would pick Google of their own volition, why would they bother spending billions?
Because otherwise Microsoft would spend those billions and now Bing would be the default. Defaults matters, but if you force the user to make a choice they would pick Google due to brand recognition.
The way Mozilla did it with Yahoo seemed very palatable, honestly. They asked Yahoo to make a special search page, that had most crap removed and if I remember correctly they also had demands on response time.
The phone manufacturers don't have much of a choice unless they are willing to ditch support for all the proprietary Google parts of Android. People probably won't buy android phones without play store access.
I just bought an android, there was no default search on it and playstore works. As I booted it up it asked me what search engine I wanted, Google wasn't on top or preselected.
So yes, phone manufacturers have a choice here, they don't have to make Google the default.
Pixel or maybe Nokia / Fairphone / Motorola (Stockish Android) if you are a regular user, but you will have to change a few options for sure, modded Pixel if Privacy Nut.
This is the same as any laptop discussion. If you mention any brand someone is bound to say how negative their experience was. Probably there were a few bad models, but Im not aware of any common issues with moto phones.
It's likely not about the brand, but about the location. As a result of the Android anti-trust lawsuit in EU, Google has shown a search engine choice screen at initial setup since (I think) 2018. They also unbundled Chrome and Search from the other proprietary apps.
If Google didn't pay Microsoft would, we know this since Microsoft has already talked about it with Apple. Apple is the one selling this, if Google didn't buy someone else would, so stopping Google from buying wouldn't change anything except now default search would be Bing on iphones.
The argument is that you can't ban market leaders from participating in fair auctions. Google isn't using its market dominance to force Apple to make them the default search engine, they are just paying money and aren't applying any other sort of pressure.
So my argument is that there isn't an antitrust issue here, not that Microsoft paying would lead to antitrust issues. Winning fair auctions isn't an antitrust issue. Antitrust is when you issue abusive contracts such as "You get a discount if you only sell our products and no products from out competitors", but that isn't a fair auction since you use your dominance to change the deal and pressure the vendor to stop selling others products. In this case Google just bid higher than the competitors, there is no other reason for Apple to use them as the default.
You would need to show that Google pays more than they earn for the default search engine spot, or that they used some other means to force Apple to accept the deal. But I have seen no evidence of that.
I believe the argument counter to yours is that antitrust is more than just abusive contracts.
It also encompasses behavior facilitated by market dominance that makes it impossible or too difficult for new market entrants to compete, including behavior that, under different circumstances, would be completely fine.
A generic example of something that would be completely fine in many situations would be a merger & acquisition. It's the best example of what you describe as “winning a fair auction”.
Companies B, C, and D might all make an offer to buy company A, and since company B made the highest bid, they win, and all is fine.
If, however, company B is a huge conglomerate and the M&A of company A would consolidate even more power into Company B, perhaps even increase their monopoly position to the point that company B ends up being the sole company in multiple verticals, then this might prove to be an antitrust issue even though no abusive contract is in play.
Because this can have undesirable outcomes in terms of competition with unwanted effects downstream for consumers, we, as a society, have decided to put some guardrails in place in the form of antitrust legislation.
Circling back to the situation at hand, the argument at hand by the DOJ seems to be that Google has gained a significant market leader position and that deals such as the one made with Apple make it impossible for other competitors to compete effectively.
Even more so when it pertains to search engines because they seem to rely heavily on usage data to be able to improve.
At face value, that argument isn't much different than the argument behind preventing M&As that are deemed antitrust issues.
The DOJ’s arguments go further, however, in stating that it is the market leader position combined with the deep pockets funded by Google’s other divisions that make it possible for them to offer billions in the first place.
Which, within the antitrust context, adds a deeper dimension beyond just the “you're big, you shouldn't get bigger” argument I mentioned above.
You seem to touch upon this a little in this part of your comment:
> You would need to show that Google pays more than they earn for the default search engine spot […] But I have seen no evidence of that.
We will be unlikely to see evidence of that, assuming it exists, because the parties and the judge would discuss that under seal, and only they will get to see those numbers (unless someone does a whoopsie and forgets to redact it before uploading it to the docket).
> Google is expected to begin a three-week presentation of its defense in the lawsuit’s monthslong trial on Thursday.
Implicit here is that prosecution's case has rested. How about all those bombshells that dominated the news for months and months? /s /s
There IS a case to be made, but I don't think they made it. Expect the verdict to be a mild slap on the wrist and a (empty) promise from Google to sin no more.
> Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple’s search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google’s Chrome web browser instead of Apple’s Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times.
So their top secret plan is to.. make a competing product? AKA what all companies always do with their competition?
> At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.
Europeans like to cry blasphemy whenever this is mentioned, but the article above is great evidence of it, one which I have to save for later discussions.
Since this is an article on regulation that increases competition in the market and it is your opinion that it is favoring the big players than what you are saying is that competitive markets favor big players. Will we now be receiving a quarterly reminder that competition favors the big players?
I wonder if this might backfire and have the opposite effect, compel Apple to enter the search engine game because Google is attacking them on their own turf.
If Google controls search and the browser on iOS, Apple would have ceded a ton of control to Google.
> “I prefer companies to compete on the merits for consumers to want to use their products by offering higher-quality products,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “Not by paying lawyers to go to the European Union and get rules in place in order to obtain access to their competitors’ platforms.”
This somehow implies that Apple with Spotlight and Safari competed on merits for consumers and it won over Google alternatives and now Google is somehow trying to use the law to get an advantage... basically the author nor Mr. Hurwitz have no idea what they are talking about.
Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.
Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s reliance on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker...
Google, which the law will force to allow more competition in search, explored ways to lobby E.U. regulators to crack open Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could siphon users from Safari and Spotlight...
Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water in these skirmishes advocating a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose, in service of enabling the deepening of Google's moat in collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand.
Stepping back...
I believe engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy. I believe the hard work for achieving that ease makes users happy and engineers wealthy.
Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
I have no problem with "carrying Google's water" in this case. They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. They should totally get to enjoy that freedom on Apple devices. As should we.
This is completely independent from Google's surveillance capitalism problem. We should deal with that separately by turning personal information into massive liability. Society should make it so it costs them literal truckloads of money to know even a single bit of information about any human being. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them.
> sell a mobile console appliance
Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.
You sure about that? Google's been one of the better companies when it comes to free and open source work. Their phones are significantly more free than their competition. It's ironic, they sell the easiest phones to install custom operating systems on. They even put in work into open firmware for their chromebook laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about them, despite their surveillance capitalism.
I switched away from Android in part because I wanted a phone that was just an appliance that always worked. I enjoyed fiddling with alternative ROMs and such but I eventually realized that, as a tinkerer, the only way to make sure my phone always worked when I needed it was to pick a device I couldn’t root and tinker with. I think the market is big enough for both models and we’re all worse off if the users that want the Apple experience are unable to pick it.
Just because you can root and tinker with something doesn't mean you have to. Millions of people use Android phones without ever having touched a third party rom (or even have the knowledge that they exist).
Additionally, Apple allowing a user to install a browser with a rendering engine other than webkit does not preclude a completely different user from experiencing the "Apple experience". The default experience will be the Apple experience.
I really don't understand this common sentiment that more freedom for a user to use a device in the manner in which they want to somehow takes away the freedom of others.
These days Android is just a worse iOS anyway. All the freedom we used to have was wiped out by hardware remote attestation. If you tinker with anything, your phone will fail attestation and you'll be refused service everywhere. Might as well buy into the better kept garden if that's how it's going to be.
I have exactly two reasons to still prefer Android: Termux and GrapheneOS. Who knows what Google's going to break next though? There's already hints that the Linux system calls used by Termux will be sandboxed away someday. If that happens, there's no reason for me to use Android anymore.
Stuff like remote attestation should be illegal. They should be required by law to interoperate with you no matter what software you choose to run.
> I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.
This is great! This is the actual argument, so the clarity is wonderful.
If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles) as a market alternative to mobile general computing devices, then, 100% agree that means there's no place for iPhone or iPad.
But then this seems weird, because these days everything has a computer in it, digital machinery to go along with mechanical machinery, and it's not clear why we get mad at Apple about "right to tinker" (that's not a real thing even though competitors attack competitors by gaslighting about it) without getting mad at all of these things.
It's not clear to me nobody should be allowed to fully integrate software and hardware (which are "just" different amounts of machinery or logic permanence embedded in one user experience), whether they allow "apps" as pluggable cartridges or not.
To borrow a non-computing utility tool metaphor: I consider the iPhone like a Leatherman™ tool. The maker works with people like me to decide an ideal mix of tools a Leatherman™ should be, perhaps offer me a few different tool mixes or sizes. I choose a known-good configuration I want, then I don't expect or need to be able to plug random third party accessories to the Leatherman™.
I find it anti computing freedom (as well as anti-libertarian and anti-capitalist) to forbid Makers™ from using their computing freedom to offer the marketplace an appliance that can take pictures or make phone calls or plug in apps. The computer form lets you invent new configurations (like a box of Legos turned into a model), then the appliance form lets others use it (like 3D printing the model). That should be OK.
So we disagree on the real argument, and that's fair.
I have a question though, what does this mean:
> Infinite potential, wasted.
I find dedicated gaming PCs far more wasteful of time and materials than consoles: wasteful of materials to have a predictable gaming experience, wasteful of time between wanting to be able to play a game and playing them, wasteful of time on an ongoing basis maintaining the ability to play a game.
(I say this as a person who made a living building and selling "beige box" computers in college, and who values understanding how to build a computer from parts.)
I'd argue that for casual gaming, consoles -- which also use fewer non-renewable materials than a PC sufficiently powered for equivalent game performance -- save far more time and materials "per gaming-hour" than they waste.
Yes, some of us have to learn to build tomorrow's consoles, but most just want to play a game. As in my opening remark, I believe our job as engineers is to learn, build, and deliver the "capability" to game, tailored to and fit for purpose.
But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?
> This is the actual argument, so the clarity is wonderful.
Thanks, that matters a lot to me. I really make an effort to be clear about what I think.
> If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles)
I have no problem with the devices themselves. I have a problem with not being able to run my own software on them.
It was such a problem for me I installed custom firmware on my PSP. Even had my own pandora battery back then. Hell I hunted down and bought a very specific PSP model with a very specific motherboard revision so I had maximum control. Over a decade ago I installed rockbox on my 80 GB iPod so I could have FLAC support.
> these days everything has a computer in it
All the more reason to run our own software on them. We should always have the power to do that. Anyone who doesn't care can just use the manufacturer software.
> But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?
The potential to do literally anything you want. As opposed of course to the limited set of things the true owners of the platform merely allow you to do.
Thanks to apps like Termux which turn consumer hardware into real computers, I'm able to write software on my phone. I contributed to free and open source software from my phone. I developed a feature for and submitted a patch to GNU coreutils entirely from my phone; if you check their mailing list archives you can find some termux paths in the emails which I forgot to sanitize before sending. I forked and maintained npm packages from my phone. I wrote my own website with my phone. Hell I implemented my own lisp programming language with my phone, perhaps the first programing language ever to be literally born inside a phone.
This is the sort of creative potential you miss out on when you accept this "appliance" nonsense. I can only imagine what the next generation will be like, a whole generation raised on these appliances rather than real computers. A whole generation that only knows how to do what their corporate masters allow them to do.
This notion of "fitness for purpose" is absolute nonsense. Computers don't have a set purpose. Their purpose is whatever we make of them. It fills me with sadness to see that potential reduced to just the things corporations make money on.
> I'm able to write software on my phone. I contributed to free and open source software from my phone. I developed a feature for and submitted a patch to GNU coreutils entirely from my phone
I write software on the iPad Pro w/ Magic Keyboard using Blink and Blink Code, as well as Pythonista, committing code to GitHub from both, so I'm not seeing the loss in potential.
I loved the Radio Shack "kits" when I was young, built all kinds of things from radios to home security systems. It doesn't follow, for me, that radios and home security systems must be all made from kits.
Similarly, most consoles start as dev kits.
I think there's a place for kits, and a place for products.
Yes? I do consider computing freedom to be far more important than whatever convenience is gained by allowing them to do this. We should always be able to run our own software at all times with no restrictions. If that turns everyone into a "linux sysadmin" I'm okay with that. Better than a future where our computers come pwned straight off the factory, where we need permission from corporations and governments to write and execute software.
Powerful technology corporations are good for American hard and soft power. Also, they can create crucial technology. OpenAI would be nowhere without the transformer.
> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose
"deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil.
> Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss.
I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.
> .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.
The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)
> The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question
Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place.
Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices.
But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.
I think the Microsoft judgement was opening up their APIs for other companies to make apps. If that's all you're comparing than that's a tough argument as that has little to do with the hardware being tied to an OS.
And to be clear, I'm not pro-Apple on not being able to install another OS. I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.
The antitrust fights against Microsoft I think were a big reason why IE and Word ended up coming to MacOS. Apple also benefited from being able to reverse-engineer Word's format without facing legal trouble. And I think there were a lot of knock-on effects from that; even if we just look at the IE bundling would the web have looked the same if that ecosystem had never changed? Remember that iOS started out primarily supporting web apps; a closed down web ecosystem would have fundamentally changed the device.
Is that the same as forcing a company to open up hardware access? We can argue that, and I sort of see where you're coming from, but... I think my bigger point is:
> as that has little to do with the hardware being tied to an OS.
I feel like this is a very narrow interpretation of antitrust. Microsoft was prevented from abusing a market power that could have prevented other competitors from gaining a foothold in the market. Apple directly benefited from the government and regulators stepping in and saying "we don't think a company should be able to unduly block competition."
It feels a little hand-wavy if someone wants to make the argument that it's all different just because Apple now has a different mechanism for locking down the market. The problem was locking down the market, and that's still the problem. And what we're really asking is "should the government be able to stop a company from making the market uncompetitive?"
Sure, someone could make the argument that allowing a custom OS on a phone is technically different from government intervention standardizing electrical outlets so the iPhone can charge, but they're both regulations that serve basically the exact same purpose that are coming from the exact same authority. If Apple wants to claim that opening up the hardware would be a step too far, I'd want to see an argument from them about what is practically different about that regulation that makes it a step too far. We regulated device compatibility for phone networks and that led to an explosion of innovation that shaped the modern Internet.
Not all regulations are good. There should be limits on what the government can do. But I think the onus is on companies like Apple who have benefited from the government saying, "we have a vested interest in making the market competitive" to explain not just why the regulations being proposed are technically different, but to also explain why it matters that we're talking about opening hardware and not just software and why that regulation should be treated differently.
> I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.
This is technically true (the best kind of true), but fails to mention that there was both a huge gap between Office on the Mac between 4.2 and 98 (coincidentally the version that came out in 1998 right around the antitrust case), and more importantly, ignores the fact that Microsoft literally is on record threatening to use Office to kill Mac, and negotiations around Office were literally presented as evidence during the antritust case against Microsoft: https://www.macworld.com/article/184614/macoffice.html
> Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.
It's not really debatable whether an unchecked Microsoft monopoly would have affected Office on the Mac or whether it would have affected the trajectory of Apple's ecosystem as a whole -- it was straight-up part of the antitrust case against Microsoft. Delaying and degrading Office releases on Mac was the active policy of Microsoft by the late 1990s, both because it gave Microsoft power over Apple during business negotiations and because it allowed Microsoft to simultaneously hold off competing office-suite products while pulling more users away from Mac towards Windows, which had more up-to-date and less buggy versions of Office and IE.
---
And of course, notably, this is an example of antitrust being relevant to a company choosing not to provide a service. It's not merely that Microsoft went out of its way to block Apple's access, Microsoft was threatening to withhold development on Apple-compatible products. So let's not pretend that asking a company to go out of its way to do something can't be part of antitrust or that companies have an unimpeachable moral right to refuse to expend developer resources or adapt their business models when their business models are anticompetitive. Apple certainly wasn't arguing that it was "theft" in 1998 when the government was pointing out that Microsoft withholding active support could be an anticompetitive action.
How can your arguments not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight or to force McDonalds to serve Pepsi and not only Coke? These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?
> These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?
If you mean, are businesses other than Apple subject to antitrust law, the answer is yes, they obviously are. That's not really a gotcha, that's just how the US/EU markets have always worked.
> not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight
Whether or not an airline serves pickles is not an antitrust concern. There's this idea people bring up where if the market is regulated in any way at all, then suddenly all bets are off and nobody has any freedom. But it's just plain silly, it's a ridiculous way to think about regulation.
It's like saying, "Oh, you support laws? Cops should be able to pull you over for speeding? So what, they should also be able to come into a restaurant, steal your food, and then slap you?" No, of course not, because those are different things and our society is capable of looking at different actions and judging them differently depending on context. Heck, you want to get wild -- we are even capable as a society of deciding that individual regulations are good or bad on a case-by-case basis based on their likely effects and side-effects.
So saying "the government has the authority to interfere with business practices when businesses are harming the entire market" is not carte-blanch permission for the government to do literally anything it wants. It's a specific category of regulation, one that is well-established within US and EU law.
But yes, if an airline was engaged in anticompetitive activity we would as a country be justified in regulating it. In fact, airlines are regulated today. It's not theoretical, we force airlines to follow rules to prevent excessive customer abuse. We force airlines to follow safety regulations. And yes, part of the reason why we can force them to do that is that airlines are a part of a regulated market where they benefit from regulations, and as willing participants in that market who have benefited from that market, they can't just randomly decide, "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
I haven't seen any evidence of anticompetitive activity on Apple's part. Not mass producing products and services to the exact and exquisite taste of each hacker news poster is not anticompetitive activity, just like an airline not serving your favourite pickle sandwich is not anticompetitive activity. Ford will make their cars compatible with Ford engines only, and if you want to put another engine inside your truck you'll have to do it yourself. Just as with Apple hardware. There's nobody stopping you.
Then of course the law and justice system are able to and will do whatever they want, in a completely arbitrary fashion as they usually do. That's reality. If they want to go after Apple they will.
The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted. Something that just magically pops up to be taken advantage of by forcing other people to bend to your will, using the government as a club to hammer them with. Sure, if there's abuse. But not making a Linux-compatible iPhone is not abuse, no matter how hurt hackers feel. Why not focus on actual abuse instead, of which there is a lot?
> "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
That is what has always happened and is called brain-drain. People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.
> I haven't seen any evidence of anticompetitive activity on Apple's part.
I guess agree to disagree? Apple has a massive effect on the computing market, particularly around smartphones. We're currently legislating a Google antritust case in the US (which I hope Google loses) that alleges having default settings on an iPhone was worth billions of dollars to Google to help cement their place in the market.
But sure, you can disagree with that if you want. Lots of people do. Just don't pretend that regulation is inherently some slippery slope, argue against the specific regulation that you don't like.
> Ford will make their cars compatible with Ford engines only, and if you want to put another engine inside your truck you'll have to do it yourself. Just as with Apple hardware. There's nobody stopping you.
Not a great example, it would honestly take me a minute or two to think of a bigger industry off the top of my head where standardization and cross-device compatibility is more regulated than the auto industry. And it's been hecking fantastic; it is extremely good that the auto-industry uses mostly compatible parts and that it's forced to allow for 3rd-party repair and aftermarket customization and swapping of parts.
I would kill to have regulations for compatibility and 3rd-party support in the computing industry that were as strict as automotive regulations. Imagine it being illegal for Apple not to make diagnostic information available to all 3rd-party repair shops using the same physical port on the phone and using the same standardized communication format to query diagnostics that every other OS and phone uses. By all means, let's copy the auto industry, that is a great idea :)
> The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted.
I would argue that if you look at the history of computing, increased competition between vendors and Open access to platforms between vendors has historically strongly coincided with innovation and better products for consumers. But... again, you can disagree with that if you want.
> People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.
They're welcome to do so. Look, I'm not trying to force anyone to be part of a market; if Apple doesn't want to sell in the EU or US, there are very few companies in the world who have more capital and resources at their disposal to help them move markets. It's not like they're a mom-and-pop shop that can't afford to move and that are trapped under regulations, they are one of the biggest computing companies in the world and they have the resources to go elsewhere if they don't like the arrangements.
> entity that made, invested & owns the device in question
They made have made and investors in the device, but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me.
It’s absolutely ludicrous that anyone can describe their relationship to a device as “ownership” after the sale. We’ve given up so much as consumers. We’re in such an abusive relationship that we can’t even _see_ what a normal and healthy consumer relationship with these companies would actually look like.
> but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me.
Are you really sure about that? Apple can, at any time, and without any permission from you, remotely access your device and make changes including :
reverting settings you've intentionally configured
Adding software
Removing software
Changing the way already installed software works
Disable features you're using
Enable features you don't want
View/modify/delete "your" files
Restrict your access to access certain files/features/software
Brick your entire device
In what way really is the cell phone in your pocket "yours"?
Your ability to use a cell phone you paid for is entirely dependent a company granting you permission and you are totally powerless to prevent them from revoking that permission if they wanted to.
"Your" device is already filled with encrypted storage and software you can't access but others can, along with chips from companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. that you cannot access, modify, or control but which can be remotely accessed to execute code on "your" device or transmit data collected from "your device" without your knowledge or consent
It really doesn't matter if your phone is apple or android. Under no sane definition of "ownership" do you own your cell phone. You are, at best, a low privileged user of someone else's system. It doesn't matter how benevolent the true owners of "your" cell phone are. It doesn't matter if they've never cut you off from your device entirely, or if every update they've ever silently installed has been something you approved of after the fact. It doesn't matter if they never do anything you object to with their device. It's still their device. They allow you to use it after you paid for it because it's profitable for them that you do use it and for no other reason.
Sure, your cell phone manufacture can't come into your home and take the brick of plastic metal and glass you paid for away from you, but it doesn't matter because they don't have to do that. They can take all of it's functionality away from you without ever physically touching it and if they ever do it'll be left useless to you for anything other than scrap or parts.
That’s kinda my point. That’s the abusive relationship.
I am the legal owner of the device, however. That part is still true. If you ask any Court in the United States who is the owner of the device, they will tell you that I am the owner and that Apple is not.
Users owns the device. Why would you think Apple does? And Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. Why are users forbidden from programming html rendering?
Because all of those are different things. People are not saying that they practically own an iPhone in the sense that they control it; they are saying that they are the moral and/or legal owners of an iPhone and it's messed up that Apple is still allowed to exercise a "might makes right" kind of ownership over a device that the user purchased, essentially overriding and stealing ownership back from the user.
Be cautious about talking past each other in these situations. Apple's exertion of control is the thing people are complaining about here, and that exertion of control is not a legal or moral doctrine that dictates whether Apple should have that control.
If I get sued for stealing someone's car, and I tell the judge, "but it's not his car, it's mine. Look, I have it and I have the keys and he doesn't and I can drive it and he can't, so by definition it belongs to me", well... that's not an argument that's going to get me very far legally with that judge even though technically, sure, that is a definition of ownership. I don't think if Apple ever gets sued for antitrust the lawyers are going to be arguing, "but the consumer doesn't own their iPhone because we can remotely brick it, so by definition we own it." Again, not wrong, that is technically a definition of ownership. But it's just not what people here are talking about.
That's just the thing. The whole idea that they should be able to own the iPhone is nonsense. They shouldn't be able to own the hardware after they sold it to you.
> What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone.... if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.
There are plenty of Android phones available for that. The OS choices are technically interesting, but not suitable for anyone but the most dedicated techie. I probably wouldn't call the situation "proliferating" either. At least not on a level where everyday people would see the benefit.
But in any event, developing a well-functioning phone OS take billions of dollars, especially when it comes to regulatory things like radio use. And even more especially when it comes to phone companies certifying the phone for use.
Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.
> Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.
I'd say that projects like Ahahi Linux are evidence of the contrary.
The hardware standardization that an open iPhone would bring to the table would be fertile ground for OSS.
Android is a clusterfuck of abandoned and shitty drivers and hardware that no one cares to reverse engineer due to fragmentation and fast obsolescence. It's the Internet Explorer 6 of mobile hardware and software, it's misery.
> "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil.
Lesser evil of what? There are plenty of Android phones/tablets, and there are _many_ flavors of Android. There are _so_ many Linux/Windows laptops.
People choose Apple both because it's a good experience, and because the alternatives suck. The answer to the problem is _not_ to make Apple's products worse
No amount of repetition is going to convince such people. Their entire argument is predicated on an absolutely erroneous belief that sideloading or user modifications will somehow ruin the experience of people who don’t wish to modify their phone knowing fully well that more setting for users won’t diminish the experience for other users. They’re literally playing stupid to defend a corporation and its practices.
I don't have a strong opinion about sideloading applications.
What I'm more concerned about is Apple being forced to allow non-WebKit browsers in the App Store.
Apple requiring the use of WebKit on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome from having a complete monopoly, aside from Firefox with its 5% marketshare.
> We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it
> Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water
Well if you search for things like "Google anti-trust docs"[1] you can see HN is ostensibly less interested than the rest of the media in Google's lawyer's scorched-earth blockade of public access to the trial documents and testimony. A lot of the actual material benefits that Google extracted from its anti-competitive schemes have been redacted or explained in closed-door testimony. Curious readers show know that stories like the OP are ones that Google's lawyers want you to focus on rather than what's not being shown. As bad as OP looks, it must be seen in the context of Google hiding other information for the public.
If even Alphabet cannot get a toehold on Apple devices, then other competitions have no chance.
In this case, I strongly favour opening the IPhone. Not because I care about Google, but because I care about completion at large.
25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. They never stopped you from installing anything else. I don't understand why the same rule doesn't apply to Apple.
Microsoft was a monopoly because it had 97% of the desktop market. Their anticompetitive behavior is too long to list but include not being able to remove IE, they bundled Windows Media Player, wouldn't make office for competing products until the second coming of Steve Jobs, they tried to make their own version of Java, ...
> 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE.
We said Microsoft was abusing their monopoly because they used criminal blackmail against hardware sellers, threatening to cease business with sellers if they tried to sell any computers with competing operating systems or without operating systems.
iOS is not a feasible long-term solution to browser monoculture. It's just not. And the (heavy quotes) "equilibrium" between Chrome and Safari is not really want we want, we don't want 2 giant corporate browsers, we want diversity.
Google is currently involved in a potentially historic antitrust lawsuit in the United States over its search engine dominance. Maybe after that's done we should look at Chrome under the same lens. You don't have to pick a winner and loser and decide whether you're going to carry Apple's water or Google's water. You can just break them both up and force both of the companies to stop doing anticompetitive crap.
It's so dystopian to look at the current browser duopoly and to say, "well, which of these two companies do I want to rule over me, I have to pick one of them." We are capable of better.
> Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
> engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy
Last time I read Apple's privacy statement, which was about a year ago, it said essentially the same thing Google's does. Which is that both companies collect all of your data and use it internally as much as they want including for, among other things, advertising. The reason Apple has a perceived advantage in privacy (other than the fact that they've marketed it heavily) is that most consumers don't see them as an advertising company whereas Google clearly is. But they do have an advertising business, and one would expect it to get larger as they enter the search space.
Apple collects an immense amount of data about its users, including broad categories of data on very private things like health, payments, location, and broad categories like "fraud prevention."
If you're concerned about companies "collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand," then I'm not sure it makes sense to buy Apple products, since they are very tight lipped with what they do with the enormous amounts of behavioral data exhaust they collect.
>Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.
And the Windows app market might actually be profitable rather than a mess of Electron apps. And maybe PC games wouldn’t all come with rootkits to prevent you from using your device.
So your argument is that it's better for your device to prevent you from using it out of the box rather than games which you fairly easily can opt out of by just not installing them?
I don't want to buy other devices. I want to buy Apple devices. I think they're just better phones in every way. I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it. I shouldn't be forced to use their software and I certainly shouldn't have less choices just because they want to "own" their "platform". These "all or nothing, take it or leave it" propositions are hostile to consumers and should be resisted at all costs. I should be able to get an iPhone without iOS.
I sure as hell won't "mind my business" while my freedoms are being denied by rent seeking corporations. If it was up to me, that'd be illegal. Hopefully the EU will put an end to the notion that they can "own" markets. Don't know what spirit possessed them to do it but I ain't gonna argue with a good thing.
Well I don’t want people forcing to Apple to change things when things are working just fine.
Currently opening up the browser to others just means Apple will lose control over that part of the UX as Chrome will eventually take over giving Google to have full control of the future of the web.
Now you will tell me, “We have Firefox!”. I use Firefox too on PC … tell me how that’s working out market-share wise.
Read your comment again and reflect on how you and others have reached total entitlement mentality. Everybody has to bend over backwards to accommodate you, otherwise "your freedoms are being denied" or it's "an abusive relationship" as another hacker wrote here in the thread. There are real people with real problems in this world. Not being able to install Linux on an iPhone is not a real problem. Either purchase products that suit your use or make products that suit your use, it seems beyond being spoiled to demand that somebody else mass produces a product to suit exactly your individual preferences down to the most minute detail.
> I shouldn't be forced to use their software
Nobody has ever tried to force you or other hackers to use any software.
> I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it.
You can do that if you have the know-how how to take complete control of the device by soldering and making your own microchips and software. Nobody can stop you from opening your iPhone and doing what you want with it.
> Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.
If people want a close platform and all that comes with it, it’s their business.
As long as there exist viable open platforms for those who want an alternative, I don’t see the problem.
Google's defense in this case is absurd. If bigger isn't better then let's shrink Google and see what happens. Let's share the index as public data (which it is) and see what others, less "briliant", can do with it. Let the best ingenuity and effort win.
But the court may in fact be persuaded by Google's showmanship.
But CCBot has been a very common robots.txt entry for a long time, long before OpenAI of GPTBot existed, long before site operators were even aware CC was being used to train AI.
This claim can be verified. Archive.org has good collection of robots.txt files. CC itself has collections of robots.txt files.
If CCBot has been in most robots.txt files since 2008, it would be difficult to argue the reason has been to stop usage of crawls for training AI.
Free browsers from for profit corporations always exists to serve some other business goal. Why does Safari exist? Why does Edge exists? Its not benevolence in either case.
> Regulations intended to help smaller companies enter the marketplace “very frequently can also be used by incumbents to gain advantage over their rivals”
But how much do we care if %x of users switch from coke to pepsi? If regulations help produce genuine alternatives that would a watershed moment as the current actors have users pretty much locked.
Apple won't enter search or social networking because Erik Neuenschwander would poke holes in its privacy and Tim Cook would ask how it would add value.
And there's no point in competing in hard-fought, expensive, entrenched categories without a mission and differentiation.
And Spotlight isn't a search engine in the web sense or in the monetizing other things sense. It's an OS-based indexing engine to find local and some web and app content. Windows has one, Linux does, and so on. If anything, I would first bet Microsoft monetizes placement of "rich content" whereas Apple would be unlikely to do so. (Retail Windows looks to me like Yahoo or AOL of the 90's, but as a Teams, OneDrive, and Office365 advertising engine.)
More of these stories come out, it is apparent that Google focused more on protecting their existing business rather than innovating to come up with the next thing after search.
This is a story about Apple being more focused on their existing business rather than innovating and Google using these new regulations to try to force them to compete on a level playing field. How did you get it the other way around?
Gee, I wonder how the NYT got its hands on internal documents that reinforce Google’s public narrative, just days before they’re due to set out their defense in court. :)
They should have seen this coming from a mile away and diversified themselves. How the fuck some execs + CEO ever thought "we have to pay our competitors to use our service as the main one" was a good idea and didn't see it as a "the world is ending time to do things differently" warning sign for the company, ugh.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadFor me, archive.ph always shows an insolvable captcha (the page reloads after submitting the captcha in a never ending loop).
It is weird and confusing, and has to do with the fact, if i remember right, that the Archive.today maintainer is mad that Cloudflare won't forward end-user IP addresses with DNS queries.
This seems mysterious, but one other comment pointed out the maintainer saying that this prevents the maintainer from assigning traffic to servers the way they want, which is an odd way having to do with legal systems and national boundaries and maybe trying to send the user to a CDN endpoint _not_ in their own nation for some reason?
If I'm remembering right.
The whole thing is weird and I can't explain it, and is very under-documented, the archive.today maintainer apparently doesn't really like talking about it or explaining it?
But basically archive.today intentionally deny-lists anyone using cloudflare DNS in a way that results in very mysterious behaivor where you don't know you are denylisted, including infinite captchas.
I have had the same issue with Google 8.8.8.8 DNS and archive.today btw.
I don't really see how this prevents that issue. They still have a server in that country. Just because the DNS name doesn't always point there doesn't seem like it should shield them from legal trouble.
Basically not at all.
e.g. The Google phone dialler which is pre-installed on a lot of phones can bring up the phone number for nearby places without them being in your contacts.
The early idea was very much like spotlight where each app would be able to respond to search queries itself without needing any remote connection. (The Android infra for this inter app functionality like this is criminally wasted).
Google suffered from what now afflicts Microsoft where you alter the product away from what is good for the user towards strategic interests of the company, so the Android search bar widget becomes a Google search bar widget.
Android is a truly lost opportunity - things like it should be possible to launch an Activity on another device, access content providers from another device and so on, all mediated by the OS.
Actually, that does exist, at least for smartwatches. I fail to see the use case for other devices beyond sending links between Chrome on the device and on a laptop.
Besides, links and notes, a seamless transfer like that would be a pretty convenient feature for video/audio apps like YouTube.
<installs f-droid>
Prevented install
<installs f-droid>
Prevented install
<installs f-droid>
Prevented install
<googles for install apk>
does the dumb dev tab dance, that'll likely be removed later, and enables "3rd party apk"
<installs f-droid>
Playprotect wants to block it cause "scary"
Have to select "dont scan"
Playprotect keeps pestering you about turning back on and scanning
Also just disable play protect globally?
I launch apps and use them, that's about it.
I'm sure Google still see some metrics from me (maybe from Google Services Framework or Android System - two services that Glasswire reports sending small amounts of data periodically.)
but I never owned a Google made smartphone
What if Apple would put all that money back into developing its own search engine?! That would be beating Google with its own money!
They have 50B cash on hand, I don't think the money would be the limiting factor if they wanted to do it or think they are in a position where they could do it.
Just to provide some ballpark numbers...
Supposedly, Microsoft spent $100 billion on Bing and the CEO Nadella said the most common search query on Bing is "Google".
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+spent+%24100+billi...
It's safe to assume Apple executives look at Bing and estimate the costs and potential ROI when considering their own plans for an in-house search engine.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-01/could-...
That ~$11 billion is revenue not profit. We'd have to compare Bing's lower profit numbers to the various reports ($4-$7 billion? $18 billion?) of Apple payments from Google.
Microsoft doesn't break out profit/loss for Bing in its financial reports so we (as outsiders) can't calculate an ROI. It's probable that Apple has enough inside info from Microsoft to determine if the ROI makes sense for them.
And to me makes it make sense that a company with enough control over search that they can pay other companies 18 billion a year to maintain that control, may be an antitrust issue. I don't actually know much about antitrust law, but it seems like paying competitors to stay out of your business to maintain your monopoly might run afoul of it.
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
Apple could swap to Bing and few people would notice the difference.
Apple 2022: $99.8 billion profit (over 1 year)
Google Q4 2022: $18.16 billion profit on $76 billion in revenue (over 3 months).
Apple App store profit: The App Store generated US$1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022, Apple has revealed. More than 90 percent of the billings and sales went to developers and businesses without a commission being taken by Apple. https://itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/apple-s-app-store...
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
I use duckduckgo which is backed by Bing. Apple doesn't use Bing because Apple can extract monopoly rents from Google. Who's the bad guy here? 18 billion a year is a lot of money relative to the profits of the companies. For comparison, Apple seems to make more from its searchbox than it does from the App Store (widely regarded as usurous).
In reality, I'm not sure Apple could actually create a search engine that is compelling enough against the competition to see people drawn into the Apple ecosystem, but in theory...
But then they would loose the $18 billion each year they got from Google.
By keeping Google as the default search engine - they get free money and send Apple users to the search engine they probably want to use, without being targeted with the flack Google gets for tracking/mingling ads with search etc.
Even if Apple did make a search engine, that’s no guarantee iPhone users would want to use it, and if Google and nobody else paid Apple a penny to be the default, there’s better than even odds Google would still be the default.
Apple does the impossible. Frequently. If anyone could make a better Google it would be Apple.
Apple does the possible but extremely challenging, frequently. Given enough time and money, they probably could be at least competitive with Google, but how much time? How much money? What are the opportunity costs to doing this and not investing somewhere else where they are either stronger or there’s a more lucrative future business to be had (like their mixed reality headset)?
If payment from Google (or anyone else) isn’t a factor in what Apple uses as the Safari default, it is not at all clear that this change alone would make it worth Apple’s time to develop their own search engine. You have an easier argument with that change, but it’s not a slam dunk.
When I walk in the mountains here I am walking in a big empty green square according to Google :S Same with Apple.
Meanwhile OSM knows every little trail including surface and gradients <3 It's amazing. And I can turn on layers so I only se the things I need and not everything else.
And perhaps traffic but I don't drive so I don't know how good that is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38032540
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764369
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37759964
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37750465
The bike directions are MUCH safer, too.
It takes the right engineers with the right management, and a lot of focus and iteration. You don’t just throw money in a hole and get a great product back.
A lot of companies have had plenty of VC to try beat Google and they haven’t, Microsoft has been trying forever and they still haven’t and they have billions of dollars.
Apple Maps 2: Information Superhighway edition
That's a lot of work, likely far more work than building decent search in the first place. They'd rather let Google get their hands dirty, claim the moral hight ground, and take the rent.
Why? How does Apple monetize their software and their hardware today? It is not with an ad ecosystem. If Apple offers superior search on their devices, that is yet another reason for customers to purchase their hardware. Could that be worth $18B per year? That's 4-5% of their total revenue, which sounds like a lot. Development costs for a search engine can be discounted, as it wouldn't cost Apple more than a few million dollars to make a better search engine than Google.
Might as well have been a one line "I hate Google".
Who's afraid of AI when you have drivel like this written by "journalists".
Sure, it probably does deny Google some data, but you really think Apple doesn't collect data for itself?
It's the world's most valuable company, its iOS is not open source, and by extension we can't verify that it doesn't do shady stuff with our data - and given that it's a pretty big megacorp, experience says to be cautious, to say the least.
Microsoft also wasn't a data selling company, but that didn't stop them pivoting into one when they realized that Google was making more money from Windows users than they were.
At some point in the future Apple's growth will plateau, Tim Cook will retire, another CEO will be appointed, while shareholders will always demand more growth, so guess where that growth will come from.
Companies always change with time, they never stay the same, otherwise Woz would still be working there. Which is why I trust no big company in the world and why you shouldn't either, no matter how shiny their products are.
Apple makes billions off hardware and it's cut in ecosystem sales and has a brand image of privacy which helps those sales.
That's the thing, Microsoft was making peanuts from Windows users, especially after they started offering upgrades for free. Microsoft sells Windows licenses at a discount to OEMs, and OEMs sell the laptops where the real money is made.
Apple doesn't have this problem. They make a buttload of money from macOS users because they sold the (very expensive) hardware it runs on. Apple's incentive is to keep those users happy, so they keep buying $1200-$4000 laptops every few years. Sacrificing $100-$200 worth of data/ad revenue to keep those big purchases coming makes sense. It's why when you set up a new mac, you aren't bombarded with ads for candy crush.
They are fundamentally an anti-freedom company, and you need freedom to protect yourself.
Stop saying everyone is equally bad with zero evidence to the contrary.
There’s a comment like yours every time Apple is called out as having a better business model here.
The ads that drive their ad revenue are product placement within their store, like Walmart charging for a higher place on a shelf, or featuring a product in a sign at the end of an aisle, or offering it for free at a tasting booth.
Walmart doesn't make meaningfully more money when you buy product A or B (not counting their store brand), both are on the shelf, so their motivations are different.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/
Arguably the same definition of "advertising company" as Walmart, by charging those selling products in its store for placement, display ads, inclusion in promotional materials, etc.
Arguably not the same definition as ClearChannel, who will take money from anyone to make every drive in America less scenic by plastering them with billboards. (And who combine data from third parties to understand who is seeing which billboards when.)
Apple is a first party supermarket that lets sellers self-promote, Google is operator of third party billboards at scale that reaches and watches all the traffic.
That said, I agree with the thread above that Apple taking great pains to anonymize things like maps trips, while selling user searching priority wholesale to Google, is hypocritical.
TL;DR: I don't understand why Apple doesn't acquire Kagi, put Kagi basic in iCloud and Kagi Ultimate into Apple One, and go from there.
Apple works hard to change that though. Apple made 26% of their revenue from services last quarter, it was less than 10% 8 years ago, that is where most of their growth is coming from.
They did use to make most of their money selling products, but now they started to exploit their platform dominance to make money from all other areas of it as well. Apple today isn't the Apple you bought into 10 years ago.
Source of services being $21.21b / $81.8bn = 26%:
https://musically.com/2023/08/04/apples-services-revenue-gro...
> TL;DR: I don't understand why Apple doesn't acquire Kagi, put Kagi basic in iCloud and Kagi Ultimate into Apple One, and go from there.
Because they make more by taking money from Google. Why is that hard to understand? Apples goal is to make money.
People not invested in the Apple ecosystem also use Kagi and all it does is ostracize those people just like they did in the Dark Sky acquisition.
It's a terribly selfish idea.
Admittedly, it has a catchy headline, but the article doesn't contain much substance.
Apple, for better or worse, doesn't publicly report granular-level revenue streams. So, I can't attribute much value to some “expert” doing back-of-the-napkin calculations to get their 15 minutes of spotlight.
Does Apple sell ad space? Definitely. Is their ad revenue or even their profits from ads substantial enough to be their core product, therefore making them an ad company? Definitely not.
It's because of this that people aren't worried by Apple’s little venture in ads because it means that there's no incentive to turn their customers into their product.
Additionally, again, for better or worse, Apple has adopted a very narrow definition of tracking. That definition is the sharing and co-mingling of collected data from different sources.
Under this definition, Apple says it does not track people, which is true. Apple solely uses data they collect from its services and doesn't use other company's collected data, nor does it share its own.
This means that if you like a Facebook post by a Facebook group of expectant mothers, Apple won't suddenly start advertising diapers to you.
These might seem like distinctions without a difference, but for many people, it offers peace of mind.
Apple's is 394b (2022), so you're talking about 1%... growing to, what? 1.1%?
Everyone complains about overpriced Apple products and that's specifically because that is where they make their money. And services a bit now, but mostly products.
It's so easy to be nihilist about this, there's plenty of things Apple sucks at. They're certainly not perfect on privacy either.
But for the love of god don't act like they're "just as bad at privacy" as you are intentionally moving us to a world where literally no large company cares about privacy.
*I forgot to mention my (least) favorite category of Google's ads! Banner ads.
Stop telling that Apple is not there to screw you where they can because they definately will and are if there are no repercussions.
"Apple backs national right-to-repair bill, offering parts, manuals, and tools"
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38024573
Yet. Apple is running out of multi-billion dollar product ideas. To play the devil's advocate, if google can earn hundreds of billions from ads, one can argue that Apple is leaving that money on the table for a pittance.
It is not maximizing shareholder value. /s
But if you look at track record and technical implementations, Apple has less incentive and less capability to abuse my personal info. Its just a pragmatic thing, no need to bring principles into it.
They sell ads in their App Store in the search results and some listings. They also sell regular display ads in the News app which does not have a massive following.
You can read their privacy policy. It's possible they are lying about what data they collect, but that wouldn't make a lot of sense seeing as their business model is not built around it like Google's is.
>[Apple] still mostly protects privacy
>denying Google more data about me
i would ask if we are reading the same news but I feel like we aren't even on the same planet...
Apple has an embedded advertiser ID, yet apple fanbois breathlessly exclaim that they don't track.
There's tons of examples, up to and including terrible repairability and locking down components. Crazy stuff.
But here we are.
Sure, but which side of it are you on?
Nobody should celebrate Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. They create barriers to competition that suck the air out of the small company and startup ecosystem.
Smartphones should be a dead and withered technology. Instead they're wholly owned by two giants that sit atop them and tax them in perpetuity.
We need to move on and forward, yet we're being leased old tech because the regulators haven't done anything to protect competition in decades.
Apple isn't defending privacy. They're hoovering up information for themselves using their massive anti-competitive platform apparatus.
Google isn't advancing web browser tech. They're extending their claws into every pane of glass and search interface for society, making themselves the gatekeepers of search intent commerce.
Amazon isn't offering amazingly flexible and scalable cloud hosting. They're reaping fat profits off the back of open source, locking companies into years of bills that slice the fat off of their margins.
I'll bite. What technology should we be using that surpasses smartphones?
Distorted by an anti-competitive duopoly.
Separate hardware from software / platform.
Instead, the argument is that there are some good features about them.
Those good features can be brought to the iPhone to make the iPhone better, even if the rest of the iPhone is better in certain ways.
Prior to the major smartphone push starting with Apple, cell phones were horrific devices that charged $5 per ringtone, apps were $30 or more and only per provider, no tethering, and basically were nasty little expensive locked down bricks.
Apple did change that, with the initial strong-arming AT&T. And Iphone compared to prior was amazingly open. Had no app store yet, but had a real full-featured web browser and lots of useful tools.
But, this was still very locked down to what the iPhone really is - a general purpose computer. The company still has say-so on everything on these devices. I'd argue that these are rentals, instead of a purchase.
Android is a different beast. Google never created Android. They *BOUGHT* android, as a back-way in to the smartphone ecosystem. And they marketed it as "free", to get all the i-clones to use it. Of course, as Google does, it starts free, but you slowly pay more (with your data) and the noose slowly tightens. Now, we have locked bootloaders and PlayProtect and other invasive "root detection" garbage. And the platform becomes less and less hospitable.
Forward? Im no fortune teller, but it seems that separating the actual physical interface from the compute would be a great start. And these *general purpose* computers need to be enforced as such. Tie-ins and cloudshit need to be unbundled or FTC enforced as rentals.
The platforms we currently have are locked down. The first big steps are actual device ownership.
I feel like this is worded in a misleading way. Apple does not sell user data or search information to Google. It sells Google the option to be the default search provider.
Google will, of course, vacuum up as much data as possible from these searches. As would Bing if you select them. Ultimately, I have a hard time seeing how the privacy problem in this is on Apple and not the search provider.
Yes, it does, for people who don't know how to change their search engine.
At some point - probably almost immediately - you’re going to use your phone to access a service or app outside of Apple’s walled garden. You’re going to connect to an open WiFi network, a secure WiFi network without a VPN, the wrong VPN, use Bluetooth, download an app, visit a website, make a search. At that point your user data is going to be collected by services Apple does not control.
By all accounts Apple has and continues to implement increasingly aggressive privacy protecting measures on their devices to minimize the amount and type of data third party users can collect.
I’m not an Apple apologist. But it’s just funny to me how someone could see all these services collecting their data and see Apple as the problem. Apple cannot save you from yourself. If you want complete privacy, you need to jump through hoops to get it, and you need to know a lot about technology across all levels.
Is my router company getting money for this? If not, it's not selling. Apple knows very well why Google pays so much for the default search engine: to track Apple's users. This is intentional. Your Internet provider doesn't necessarily track you (at least outside of US) and you can't change any option in the router to affect that.
> Apple does not allow users to set a default search engine that's not listed within the Safari settings.
https://screenrant.com/change-default-search-engine-safari-i...
I can see how each public company makes money and can examine their technical decisions. I’ve been working in wearables and healthcare, for instance, since 2010. Fitbit sends all data to the cloud then updates your data in your app. Not a huge deal and provides nice API opportunities. But as soon as Google takes over that data explicitly, I expect it will be used to advertise to me, despite the assurances to the contrary on the acquisition.
By contrast, Apple chose to develop a strong privacy model for health data on the Phone. They certainly didn’t need to and could have readily chosen the same cloud-first implementation. But they didn’t. And the APIs are harder to work with as a consequence. I respect and appreciate those decisions and so I buy their products more. You may choose differently.
never seen an ad related to my health on Google, despite using their software to keep track of it
Folks hooked to Chrome seem to forget that whatever they do online is used to refine their ad profile and generate even more ad money for Google and you can't opt out.
In fact, because it’s a common trope to say “they must have been listening to our conversation” when served an eerily specific ad, I’d wager people do not know about adtech at all.
That meme is evidence you are wrong, so not sure why you brought it up. If people didn't believe they were being tracked they wouldn't have thought it listened on them. Listening on them is tracking.
Now of course the device probably wasn't listening and it just suggested the ad for other tracking reasons, so they are wrong about the specifics but they do understand that they are being tracked.
Someone making a joke says nothing about what they believe to be true. Like the birds not being real.
No it isn't a joke, people know their phone is listening to them, smart assistants has made the world perfectly aware of how much they are monitored. So since they know the phone is listening, they think the phone showed them the ad since it listened to them. It isn't a joke, people think this, memes aren't always jokes they are just ideas that spread easily.
Look at this thread for example, does this look like a joke to you? People think it is listening to everything and just give up and go on with their life, that is what typical people believe.
"This has happened to me several times. Sadly, there is not much you can do about it. If your phone has a mic, it is listening to everything you say 24/7."
https://old.reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/ldv1ey/...
But that’s a tangent. The claim I was seeking evidence for was:
“The vast majority of people using Google's services do know about adtech surveillance, and just don't care.”
People who read HN are not the vast majority (thankfully).
I still don’t think the vast majority of people are aware of the depths of adtech because Google and Meta go to great lengths to control the narrative and keep people in the dark. They make people believe they’re “in-control” of their privacy. If people were made aware of how much tracking still goes on then they would care.
I meant the reddit thread I linked. In all such threads I've seen people think that their phone is recording everything they say to show ads, no jokes about it.
Here on HN people know that the phone doesn't do that, since we have people who looked at what code is activated on the phone and what it sends. But regular people doesn't know that, they think they are constantly being monitored and there is nothing to do about it, so all they can do is either stop caring or fall into despair, and most just choose to stop caring.
Smart assistants were a great trick to get people used to the idea that they are constantly being monitored. Makes them less likely to put up a fight when you start monitoring everything for real.
You may not mind, but billions of people paying more for things would likely rather pay less.
Wait, they do search? I go to their website and put in keywords, and it throws random unrelated shit at me.
In any case I have switched to Safari and it feels far less sluggish.
Google's market position both allows and makes it financially beneficial to pay $18 billion to suppress one single source of competition. Nobody forces google to buy the default search spot.
Someone would pay Apple to be the default search, if Google didn't pay billions Microsoft would pay billions to make Bing the default search. Would you prefer that?
Apple is auctioning it out to the highest bidder, I don't see how bidding in an auction is wrong.
Edit: Also Google would love a law enforcing that, since now they don't have to pay all of these billions of dollars and most people would pick Google in that choice anyway. The main players that doesn't want that are Apple and the others that auctions out default search.
So Google convincing the judges to stop Apple from auctioning out default search would be a Google win.
Or do you really think Google is paying billions without stipulating that Apple can't offer a choice during setup?
> Also Google would love a law enforcing that, since now they don't have to pay all of these billions of dollars and most people would pick Google in that choice anyway
I need you to square this circle for me. If Google were so confident that people would pick Google of their own volition, why would they bother spending billions?
If you do get a choice at startup then there is nothing to sell since there is no default. So yes, if Apple isn't selling the product then they don't get any money.
But Google paying Apple has nothing to do with it, Apple would make billions selling the default to Microsoft otherwise, they wouldn't give you a choice at startup. The only thing that would give you that choice is if laws ban Apple from selling the default search provider spot.
> I need you to square this circle for me. If Google were so confident that people would pick Google of their own volition, why would they bother spending billions?
Because otherwise Microsoft would spend those billions and now Bing would be the default. Defaults matters, but if you force the user to make a choice they would pick Google due to brand recognition.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/microsoft...
Not if it is ruled anti-competitive to do this in general.
So yes, phone manufacturers have a choice here, they don't have to make Google the default.
I wouldn't recommend it for privacy, but them giving me the choice means manufacturers can do this if they want.
I agree Xiaomi loves their data collection to the point of selling pole fan that require an app to operate - I saw that one in one of their stores.
So what else is there?
See https://www.android.com/choicescreen/
If there's something wrong with money being exchanged to be a default search provider, that wrong probably still lies with Google.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/microsoft...
On the other hand, it might also create antitrust issues if the market definition were to be broadened.
Either way, the who is just as important as the what in cases like this. Your attempt to equate the two seems to be a fallacy
So my argument is that there isn't an antitrust issue here, not that Microsoft paying would lead to antitrust issues. Winning fair auctions isn't an antitrust issue. Antitrust is when you issue abusive contracts such as "You get a discount if you only sell our products and no products from out competitors", but that isn't a fair auction since you use your dominance to change the deal and pressure the vendor to stop selling others products. In this case Google just bid higher than the competitors, there is no other reason for Apple to use them as the default.
You would need to show that Google pays more than they earn for the default search engine spot, or that they used some other means to force Apple to accept the deal. But I have seen no evidence of that.
It also encompasses behavior facilitated by market dominance that makes it impossible or too difficult for new market entrants to compete, including behavior that, under different circumstances, would be completely fine.
A generic example of something that would be completely fine in many situations would be a merger & acquisition. It's the best example of what you describe as “winning a fair auction”. Companies B, C, and D might all make an offer to buy company A, and since company B made the highest bid, they win, and all is fine.
If, however, company B is a huge conglomerate and the M&A of company A would consolidate even more power into Company B, perhaps even increase their monopoly position to the point that company B ends up being the sole company in multiple verticals, then this might prove to be an antitrust issue even though no abusive contract is in play.
Because this can have undesirable outcomes in terms of competition with unwanted effects downstream for consumers, we, as a society, have decided to put some guardrails in place in the form of antitrust legislation.
Circling back to the situation at hand, the argument at hand by the DOJ seems to be that Google has gained a significant market leader position and that deals such as the one made with Apple make it impossible for other competitors to compete effectively. Even more so when it pertains to search engines because they seem to rely heavily on usage data to be able to improve.
At face value, that argument isn't much different than the argument behind preventing M&As that are deemed antitrust issues.
The DOJ’s arguments go further, however, in stating that it is the market leader position combined with the deep pockets funded by Google’s other divisions that make it possible for them to offer billions in the first place. Which, within the antitrust context, adds a deeper dimension beyond just the “you're big, you shouldn't get bigger” argument I mentioned above.
You seem to touch upon this a little in this part of your comment:
> You would need to show that Google pays more than they earn for the default search engine spot […] But I have seen no evidence of that.
We will be unlikely to see evidence of that, assuming it exists, because the parties and the judge would discuss that under seal, and only they will get to see those numbers (unless someone does a whoopsie and forgets to redact it before uploading it to the docket).
Instead, the law should be that the iPhone has no default search provider, and the user gets to choose, and no money exchanges hands.
So, basically the same thing that microsoft was forced to do, with IE.
Problem solved!
Implicit here is that prosecution's case has rested. How about all those bombshells that dominated the news for months and months? /s /s
There IS a case to be made, but I don't think they made it. Expect the verdict to be a mild slap on the wrist and a (empty) promise from Google to sin no more.
So their top secret plan is to.. make a competing product? AKA what all companies always do with their competition?
> At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.
Yes.
But it is not a law of nature.
And no regulation is very bad for consumers
It is a balance, and there are trade offs
I wonder if this might backfire and have the opposite effect, compel Apple to enter the search engine game because Google is attacking them on their own turf.
If Google controls search and the browser on iOS, Apple would have ceded a ton of control to Google.
> “I prefer companies to compete on the merits for consumers to want to use their products by offering higher-quality products,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “Not by paying lawyers to go to the European Union and get rules in place in order to obtain access to their competitors’ platforms.”
This somehow implies that Apple with Spotlight and Safari competed on merits for consumers and it won over Google alternatives and now Google is somehow trying to use the law to get an advantage... basically the author nor Mr. Hurwitz have no idea what they are talking about.
Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s reliance on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker...
Google, which the law will force to allow more competition in search, explored ways to lobby E.U. regulators to crack open Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could siphon users from Safari and Spotlight...
Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water in these skirmishes advocating a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose, in service of enabling the deepening of Google's moat in collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand.
Stepping back...
I believe engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy. I believe the hard work for achieving that ease makes users happy and engineers wealthy.
Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
This is completely independent from Google's surveillance capitalism problem. We should deal with that separately by turning personal information into massive liability. Society should make it so it costs them literal truckloads of money to know even a single bit of information about any human being. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them.
> sell a mobile console appliance
Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.
Except they tirelessly work on taking computing freedom away from you.
Additionally, Apple allowing a user to install a browser with a rendering engine other than webkit does not preclude a completely different user from experiencing the "Apple experience". The default experience will be the Apple experience.
I really don't understand this common sentiment that more freedom for a user to use a device in the manner in which they want to somehow takes away the freedom of others.
I have exactly two reasons to still prefer Android: Termux and GrapheneOS. Who knows what Google's going to break next though? There's already hints that the Linux system calls used by Termux will be sandboxed away someday. If that happens, there's no reason for me to use Android anymore.
Stuff like remote attestation should be illegal. They should be required by law to interoperate with you no matter what software you choose to run.
This is great! This is the actual argument, so the clarity is wonderful.
If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles) as a market alternative to mobile general computing devices, then, 100% agree that means there's no place for iPhone or iPad.
But then this seems weird, because these days everything has a computer in it, digital machinery to go along with mechanical machinery, and it's not clear why we get mad at Apple about "right to tinker" (that's not a real thing even though competitors attack competitors by gaslighting about it) without getting mad at all of these things.
It's not clear to me nobody should be allowed to fully integrate software and hardware (which are "just" different amounts of machinery or logic permanence embedded in one user experience), whether they allow "apps" as pluggable cartridges or not.
To borrow a non-computing utility tool metaphor: I consider the iPhone like a Leatherman™ tool. The maker works with people like me to decide an ideal mix of tools a Leatherman™ should be, perhaps offer me a few different tool mixes or sizes. I choose a known-good configuration I want, then I don't expect or need to be able to plug random third party accessories to the Leatherman™.
I find it anti computing freedom (as well as anti-libertarian and anti-capitalist) to forbid Makers™ from using their computing freedom to offer the marketplace an appliance that can take pictures or make phone calls or plug in apps. The computer form lets you invent new configurations (like a box of Legos turned into a model), then the appliance form lets others use it (like 3D printing the model). That should be OK.
So we disagree on the real argument, and that's fair.
I have a question though, what does this mean:
> Infinite potential, wasted.
I find dedicated gaming PCs far more wasteful of time and materials than consoles: wasteful of materials to have a predictable gaming experience, wasteful of time between wanting to be able to play a game and playing them, wasteful of time on an ongoing basis maintaining the ability to play a game.
(I say this as a person who made a living building and selling "beige box" computers in college, and who values understanding how to build a computer from parts.)
I'd argue that for casual gaming, consoles -- which also use fewer non-renewable materials than a PC sufficiently powered for equivalent game performance -- save far more time and materials "per gaming-hour" than they waste.
Yes, some of us have to learn to build tomorrow's consoles, but most just want to play a game. As in my opening remark, I believe our job as engineers is to learn, build, and deliver the "capability" to game, tailored to and fit for purpose.
But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?
Thanks, that matters a lot to me. I really make an effort to be clear about what I think.
> If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles)
I have no problem with the devices themselves. I have a problem with not being able to run my own software on them.
It was such a problem for me I installed custom firmware on my PSP. Even had my own pandora battery back then. Hell I hunted down and bought a very specific PSP model with a very specific motherboard revision so I had maximum control. Over a decade ago I installed rockbox on my 80 GB iPod so I could have FLAC support.
> these days everything has a computer in it
All the more reason to run our own software on them. We should always have the power to do that. Anyone who doesn't care can just use the manufacturer software.
> But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?
The potential to do literally anything you want. As opposed of course to the limited set of things the true owners of the platform merely allow you to do.
Thanks to apps like Termux which turn consumer hardware into real computers, I'm able to write software on my phone. I contributed to free and open source software from my phone. I developed a feature for and submitted a patch to GNU coreutils entirely from my phone; if you check their mailing list archives you can find some termux paths in the emails which I forgot to sanitize before sending. I forked and maintained npm packages from my phone. I wrote my own website with my phone. Hell I implemented my own lisp programming language with my phone, perhaps the first programing language ever to be literally born inside a phone.
This is the sort of creative potential you miss out on when you accept this "appliance" nonsense. I can only imagine what the next generation will be like, a whole generation raised on these appliances rather than real computers. A whole generation that only knows how to do what their corporate masters allow them to do.
This notion of "fitness for purpose" is absolute nonsense. Computers don't have a set purpose. Their purpose is whatever we make of them. It fills me with sadness to see that potential reduced to just the things corporations make money on.
I write software on the iPad Pro w/ Magic Keyboard using Blink and Blink Code, as well as Pythonista, committing code to GitHub from both, so I'm not seeing the loss in potential.
https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code
But back to the argument:
I loved the Radio Shack "kits" when I was young, built all kinds of things from radios to home security systems. It doesn't follow, for me, that radios and home security systems must be all made from kits.
Similarly, most consoles start as dev kits.
I think there's a place for kits, and a place for products.
"Everyone has to be a linux sysadmin to keep me happy, you aren't allowed things I don't want you to have."
There are good only for corporations and CEOs.
"deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil.
> Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.
Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss.
I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.
The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)
Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place.
Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices.
But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.
And to be clear, I'm not pro-Apple on not being able to install another OS. I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.
Is that the same as forcing a company to open up hardware access? We can argue that, and I sort of see where you're coming from, but... I think my bigger point is:
> as that has little to do with the hardware being tied to an OS.
I feel like this is a very narrow interpretation of antitrust. Microsoft was prevented from abusing a market power that could have prevented other competitors from gaining a foothold in the market. Apple directly benefited from the government and regulators stepping in and saying "we don't think a company should be able to unduly block competition."
It feels a little hand-wavy if someone wants to make the argument that it's all different just because Apple now has a different mechanism for locking down the market. The problem was locking down the market, and that's still the problem. And what we're really asking is "should the government be able to stop a company from making the market uncompetitive?"
Sure, someone could make the argument that allowing a custom OS on a phone is technically different from government intervention standardizing electrical outlets so the iPhone can charge, but they're both regulations that serve basically the exact same purpose that are coming from the exact same authority. If Apple wants to claim that opening up the hardware would be a step too far, I'd want to see an argument from them about what is practically different about that regulation that makes it a step too far. We regulated device compatibility for phone networks and that led to an explosion of innovation that shaped the modern Internet.
Not all regulations are good. There should be limits on what the government can do. But I think the onus is on companies like Apple who have benefited from the government saying, "we have a vested interest in making the market competitive" to explain not just why the regulations being proposed are technically different, but to also explain why it matters that we're talking about opening hardware and not just software and why that regulation should be treated differently.
> I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.
Completely agreed.
Word was on Mac in 1985, Windows in 1989. There was an earlier version of Word for DOS.
Excel was on Mac first in 1985, and on Windows in 1987.
> Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.
It's not really debatable whether an unchecked Microsoft monopoly would have affected Office on the Mac or whether it would have affected the trajectory of Apple's ecosystem as a whole -- it was straight-up part of the antitrust case against Microsoft. Delaying and degrading Office releases on Mac was the active policy of Microsoft by the late 1990s, both because it gave Microsoft power over Apple during business negotiations and because it allowed Microsoft to simultaneously hold off competing office-suite products while pulling more users away from Mac towards Windows, which had more up-to-date and less buggy versions of Office and IE.
---
And of course, notably, this is an example of antitrust being relevant to a company choosing not to provide a service. It's not merely that Microsoft went out of its way to block Apple's access, Microsoft was threatening to withhold development on Apple-compatible products. So let's not pretend that asking a company to go out of its way to do something can't be part of antitrust or that companies have an unimpeachable moral right to refuse to expend developer resources or adapt their business models when their business models are anticompetitive. Apple certainly wasn't arguing that it was "theft" in 1998 when the government was pointing out that Microsoft withholding active support could be an anticompetitive action.
If you mean, are businesses other than Apple subject to antitrust law, the answer is yes, they obviously are. That's not really a gotcha, that's just how the US/EU markets have always worked.
> not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight
Whether or not an airline serves pickles is not an antitrust concern. There's this idea people bring up where if the market is regulated in any way at all, then suddenly all bets are off and nobody has any freedom. But it's just plain silly, it's a ridiculous way to think about regulation.
It's like saying, "Oh, you support laws? Cops should be able to pull you over for speeding? So what, they should also be able to come into a restaurant, steal your food, and then slap you?" No, of course not, because those are different things and our society is capable of looking at different actions and judging them differently depending on context. Heck, you want to get wild -- we are even capable as a society of deciding that individual regulations are good or bad on a case-by-case basis based on their likely effects and side-effects.
So saying "the government has the authority to interfere with business practices when businesses are harming the entire market" is not carte-blanch permission for the government to do literally anything it wants. It's a specific category of regulation, one that is well-established within US and EU law.
But yes, if an airline was engaged in anticompetitive activity we would as a country be justified in regulating it. In fact, airlines are regulated today. It's not theoretical, we force airlines to follow rules to prevent excessive customer abuse. We force airlines to follow safety regulations. And yes, part of the reason why we can force them to do that is that airlines are a part of a regulated market where they benefit from regulations, and as willing participants in that market who have benefited from that market, they can't just randomly decide, "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
Then of course the law and justice system are able to and will do whatever they want, in a completely arbitrary fashion as they usually do. That's reality. If they want to go after Apple they will.
The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted. Something that just magically pops up to be taken advantage of by forcing other people to bend to your will, using the government as a club to hammer them with. Sure, if there's abuse. But not making a Linux-compatible iPhone is not abuse, no matter how hurt hackers feel. Why not focus on actual abuse instead, of which there is a lot?
> "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
That is what has always happened and is called brain-drain. People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.
I guess agree to disagree? Apple has a massive effect on the computing market, particularly around smartphones. We're currently legislating a Google antritust case in the US (which I hope Google loses) that alleges having default settings on an iPhone was worth billions of dollars to Google to help cement their place in the market.
But sure, you can disagree with that if you want. Lots of people do. Just don't pretend that regulation is inherently some slippery slope, argue against the specific regulation that you don't like.
> Ford will make their cars compatible with Ford engines only, and if you want to put another engine inside your truck you'll have to do it yourself. Just as with Apple hardware. There's nobody stopping you.
Not a great example, it would honestly take me a minute or two to think of a bigger industry off the top of my head where standardization and cross-device compatibility is more regulated than the auto industry. And it's been hecking fantastic; it is extremely good that the auto-industry uses mostly compatible parts and that it's forced to allow for 3rd-party repair and aftermarket customization and swapping of parts.
I would kill to have regulations for compatibility and 3rd-party support in the computing industry that were as strict as automotive regulations. Imagine it being illegal for Apple not to make diagnostic information available to all 3rd-party repair shops using the same physical port on the phone and using the same standardized communication format to query diagnostics that every other OS and phone uses. By all means, let's copy the auto industry, that is a great idea :)
> The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted.
I would argue that if you look at the history of computing, increased competition between vendors and Open access to platforms between vendors has historically strongly coincided with innovation and better products for consumers. But... again, you can disagree with that if you want.
> People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.
They're welcome to do so. Look, I'm not trying to force anyone to be part of a market; if Apple doesn't want to sell in the EU or US, there are very few companies in the world who have more capital and resources at their disposal to help them move markets. It's not like they're a mom-and-pop shop that can't afford to move and that are trapped under regulations, they are one of the biggest computing companies in the world and they have the resources to go elsewhere if they don't like the arrangements.
They made have made and investors in the device, but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me.
It’s absolutely ludicrous that anyone can describe their relationship to a device as “ownership” after the sale. We’ve given up so much as consumers. We’re in such an abusive relationship that we can’t even _see_ what a normal and healthy consumer relationship with these companies would actually look like.
Are you really sure about that? Apple can, at any time, and without any permission from you, remotely access your device and make changes including :
In what way really is the cell phone in your pocket "yours"? Your ability to use a cell phone you paid for is entirely dependent a company granting you permission and you are totally powerless to prevent them from revoking that permission if they wanted to."Your" device is already filled with encrypted storage and software you can't access but others can, along with chips from companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. that you cannot access, modify, or control but which can be remotely accessed to execute code on "your" device or transmit data collected from "your device" without your knowledge or consent
It really doesn't matter if your phone is apple or android. Under no sane definition of "ownership" do you own your cell phone. You are, at best, a low privileged user of someone else's system. It doesn't matter how benevolent the true owners of "your" cell phone are. It doesn't matter if they've never cut you off from your device entirely, or if every update they've ever silently installed has been something you approved of after the fact. It doesn't matter if they never do anything you object to with their device. It's still their device. They allow you to use it after you paid for it because it's profitable for them that you do use it and for no other reason.
Sure, your cell phone manufacture can't come into your home and take the brick of plastic metal and glass you paid for away from you, but it doesn't matter because they don't have to do that. They can take all of it's functionality away from you without ever physically touching it and if they ever do it'll be left useless to you for anything other than scrap or parts.
I am the legal owner of the device, however. That part is still true. If you ask any Court in the United States who is the owner of the device, they will tell you that I am the owner and that Apple is not.
Please consider this if you value a device that is yours https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Users owns the device. Why would you think Apple does? And Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. Why are users forbidden from programming html rendering?
If apple is able to prevent users from doing things they want to on a device, that device belongs to apple and not to the users.
- a moral perspective
- a legal perspective
- a "might makes right" perspective
Because all of those are different things. People are not saying that they practically own an iPhone in the sense that they control it; they are saying that they are the moral and/or legal owners of an iPhone and it's messed up that Apple is still allowed to exercise a "might makes right" kind of ownership over a device that the user purchased, essentially overriding and stealing ownership back from the user.
Be cautious about talking past each other in these situations. Apple's exertion of control is the thing people are complaining about here, and that exertion of control is not a legal or moral doctrine that dictates whether Apple should have that control.
If I get sued for stealing someone's car, and I tell the judge, "but it's not his car, it's mine. Look, I have it and I have the keys and he doesn't and I can drive it and he can't, so by definition it belongs to me", well... that's not an argument that's going to get me very far legally with that judge even though technically, sure, that is a definition of ownership. I don't think if Apple ever gets sued for antitrust the lawyers are going to be arguing, "but the consumer doesn't own their iPhone because we can remotely brick it, so by definition we own it." Again, not wrong, that is technically a definition of ownership. But it's just not what people here are talking about.
That's just the thing. The whole idea that they should be able to own the iPhone is nonsense. They shouldn't be able to own the hardware after they sold it to you.
There are plenty of Android phones available for that. The OS choices are technically interesting, but not suitable for anyone but the most dedicated techie. I probably wouldn't call the situation "proliferating" either. At least not on a level where everyday people would see the benefit.
But in any event, developing a well-functioning phone OS take billions of dollars, especially when it comes to regulatory things like radio use. And even more especially when it comes to phone companies certifying the phone for use.
Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.
I'd say that projects like Ahahi Linux are evidence of the contrary.
The hardware standardization that an open iPhone would bring to the table would be fertile ground for OSS.
Android is a clusterfuck of abandoned and shitty drivers and hardware that no one cares to reverse engineer due to fragmentation and fast obsolescence. It's the Internet Explorer 6 of mobile hardware and software, it's misery.
Lesser evil of what? There are plenty of Android phones/tablets, and there are _many_ flavors of Android. There are _so_ many Linux/Windows laptops.
People choose Apple both because it's a good experience, and because the alternatives suck. The answer to the problem is _not_ to make Apple's products worse
What I'm more concerned about is Apple being forced to allow non-WebKit browsers in the App Store.
Apple requiring the use of WebKit on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome from having a complete monopoly, aside from Firefox with its 5% marketshare.
I don't agree that forcing WebKit on iOS is the solution, however. The law should seek to break Chrome's monopoly, not enforce another.
Yes!! I want this so much.
Well if you search for things like "Google anti-trust docs"[1] you can see HN is ostensibly less interested than the rest of the media in Google's lawyer's scorched-earth blockade of public access to the trial documents and testimony. A lot of the actual material benefits that Google extracted from its anti-competitive schemes have been redacted or explained in closed-door testimony. Curious readers show know that stories like the OP are ones that Google's lawyers want you to focus on rather than what's not being shown. As bad as OP looks, it must be seen in the context of Google hiding other information for the public.
e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
In this case, I strongly favour opening the IPhone. Not because I care about Google, but because I care about completion at large.
25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. They never stopped you from installing anything else. I don't understand why the same rule doesn't apply to Apple.
We said Microsoft was abusing their monopoly because they used criminal blackmail against hardware sellers, threatening to cease business with sellers if they tried to sell any computers with competing operating systems or without operating systems.
Google is currently involved in a potentially historic antitrust lawsuit in the United States over its search engine dominance. Maybe after that's done we should look at Chrome under the same lens. You don't have to pick a winner and loser and decide whether you're going to carry Apple's water or Google's water. You can just break them both up and force both of the companies to stop doing anticompetitive crap.
It's so dystopian to look at the current browser duopoly and to say, "well, which of these two companies do I want to rule over me, I have to pick one of them." We are capable of better.
Wasn't this the dream of MSFT Windows?
Last time I read Apple's privacy statement, which was about a year ago, it said essentially the same thing Google's does. Which is that both companies collect all of your data and use it internally as much as they want including for, among other things, advertising. The reason Apple has a perceived advantage in privacy (other than the fact that they've marketed it heavily) is that most consumers don't see them as an advertising company whereas Google clearly is. But they do have an advertising business, and one would expect it to get larger as they enter the search space.
Apple collects an immense amount of data about its users, including broad categories of data on very private things like health, payments, location, and broad categories like "fraud prevention."
If you're concerned about companies "collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand," then I'm not sure it makes sense to buy Apple products, since they are very tight lipped with what they do with the enormous amounts of behavioral data exhaust they collect.
Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.
Yeah. Always makes me sad to watch people come to Hacker News and defend the dismantling of everything hacking ever stood for.
If people want to buy a non-hackable Apple product that Apple tightly controls, that’s their business.
It doesn’t affect you. You should mind your own business.
I sure as hell won't "mind my business" while my freedoms are being denied by rent seeking corporations. If it was up to me, that'd be illegal. Hopefully the EU will put an end to the notion that they can "own" markets. Don't know what spirit possessed them to do it but I ain't gonna argue with a good thing.
Currently opening up the browser to others just means Apple will lose control over that part of the UX as Chrome will eventually take over giving Google to have full control of the future of the web.
Now you will tell me, “We have Firefox!”. I use Firefox too on PC … tell me how that’s working out market-share wise.
Keeping Apple platforms closed is not the answer though. The answer is to separate Chrome from Google.
> I shouldn't be forced to use their software
Nobody has ever tried to force you or other hackers to use any software.
> I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it.
You can do that if you have the know-how how to take complete control of the device by soldering and making your own microchips and software. Nobody can stop you from opening your iPhone and doing what you want with it.
If people want a close platform and all that comes with it, it’s their business.
As long as there exist viable open platforms for those who want an alternative, I don’t see the problem.
Google's defense in this case is absurd. If bigger isn't better then let's shrink Google and see what happens. Let's share the index as public data (which it is) and see what others, less "briliant", can do with it. Let the best ingenuity and effort win.
But the court may in fact be persuaded by Google's showmanship.
Common crawl[1] data has been in AWS for over a decade.
[1]: https://commoncrawl.org
How many websites block CCBot
How many block GoogleBot
https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:robots.txt+CCBot&num=1...
This claim can be verified. Archive.org has good collection of robots.txt files. CC itself has collections of robots.txt files.
If CCBot has been in most robots.txt files since 2008, it would be difficult to argue the reason has been to stop usage of crawls for training AI.
(And note Google lawyers fought hard to get exhibits like that permanently withheld from public view). https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1717679983617810523
But how much do we care if %x of users switch from coke to pepsi? If regulations help produce genuine alternatives that would a watershed moment as the current actors have users pretty much locked.
Apple won't enter search or social networking because Erik Neuenschwander would poke holes in its privacy and Tim Cook would ask how it would add value.
And there's no point in competing in hard-fought, expensive, entrenched categories without a mission and differentiation.
And Spotlight isn't a search engine in the web sense or in the monetizing other things sense. It's an OS-based indexing engine to find local and some web and app content. Windows has one, Linux does, and so on. If anything, I would first bet Microsoft monetizes placement of "rich content" whereas Apple would be unlikely to do so. (Retail Windows looks to me like Yahoo or AOL of the 90's, but as a Teams, OneDrive, and Office365 advertising engine.)
Google paid $26.3B in 2021 to be the default search engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38041335 - Oct 2023 (104 comments)
They should have seen this coming from a mile away and diversified themselves. How the fuck some execs + CEO ever thought "we have to pay our competitors to use our service as the main one" was a good idea and didn't see it as a "the world is ending time to do things differently" warning sign for the company, ugh.