It's scary to think how easily a handful of giant corporations can destroy most smaller businesses, either through malice or indifference. If Apple/Google wipe your store or restaurant off their maps, or let only bad reviews stay visible, if Cloudflare drops their DDoS protection, if Chrome flags your website as harmful, or Windows flags your app as malware, an app store bans you.. even your personal life can be made difficult if Amazon or Uber ban you from their services.
That applies to everything in life though... even when your literally doing nothing, just sitting under a tree on a pleasant day, a single big tree branch falling could end your life in an instant.
Purely due to random chance that a tree branch grew too weak and fell at the wrong time.
But the issue is that there is now only 3 trees in town and you have little to know control over their maintenance or what goes on and off the branches.
You still need shade, and so do others, and if you're doing any business that requires shade, you have no choice, but these 3 trees.
I'm fairly certain many many businesses are not reliant on those '3 trees'.
Even in a narrower scope, just talking about mass market businesses selling consumer products, an example would be the huge number of Walmart suppliers that do fine without sitting under those specific '3 trees'.
Yes a large fraction do sit under the big 'Walmart tree' but they're not chained to it forever, the big 'Costco tree' is also available, along with many other smaller trees.
If your counter argument to consolidation is "Walmart", you're way off the mark to begin with, because they're a megacorp of their own.
But even then, in a very interesting twist of absurdity that is the current state of affairs, your argument gets even more funny when you consider that Walmart spends some 4 billion dollars on ads per year, and are one of the largest customers of Google ads and Facebook Ads. So even Walmart depends on those 3 'trees'.
1 in a million random chance is a simpler assumption, if there was some sort of coordinated 'working in the canopy overhead' to mess with the mapping of small rural roads and farmers... that would require a very elaborate set of circumstances.
I can certainly empathize with the farmer's situation and the financial repercussions from an event that clearly isn't their fault at all. It's strange to me though that people think that Apple/Google are _obligated_ to list their business. They're private companies, providing a service to users in exchange for eyeball time. Unless the business is outright paying Apple to be correctly listed/mapped (which I doubt they are), it doesn't seem like they're at all entitled to be listed correctly.
That said, it intuitively feels like they do at least to the farmer from the tone of the article (and similar stories), and to me as well. To me, this means that we're all sort of categorizing such mapping services in the same way that we categorize government services/utilities, and act like we _just for existing_ deserve some form of FRAND treatment from such services.
I wonder if there is some kind of legal framework to be found that could better align how people expect apple/google to interact, with their actual legal obligations towards listed companies (which AFAICT is fuck all).
In the case of Google, it wasn't entirely privately funded. Look into the history of Keyhole, Inc. and Google Earth / Google Maps - lots of taxpayer dollars went into this.
It’s pretty clear to me why people feel that way - there are basically two mapping platforms in the global west that matter. This duopoly should expect increasing scrutiny of their operations and increasing regulation to ensure fairness in the way they handle things.
> That said, it intuitively feels like they do at least to the farmer from the tone of the article (and similar stories), and to me as well.
Listen (but not blindly) to your intuition, because its sense of fairness is keenly honed to allow society to function. Consider the case where Apple doesn't list companies FRAND (and perhaps for a small fee not much larger than their expenses in maintaining a listing) - because of the mass reliance on Apple (or Google) maps, it turns them into either an extortion racket as they extract the highest price they can for good listings, or a blind force of nature, randomly sending small businesses into ruin.
The only way to avoid this is mass organization by people to demand fair treatment. We have a mechanism for such organization: laws. They were used against railway trusts, they're used to prevent power and water companies from discriminating, and they could be used here. Non-physical infrastructure such as maps and yellow pages has the same dangers of monopoly power as railways and power lines.
Step 1) Aggressively capture some digital space using money and resources few others can match in physical space. Step 2) Control who or what can access this now prevalent realm.
“It is understood that after being contacted the business listing for Thistleberry Farm was changed.”
It sounds like someone other than Apple or the farm owners changed the information for the farm in Apple Maps.
I don’t know if anyone can do this, but I have reported problems with businesses in Apple Maps - marking them as closed, or changing contact information, or moving their position on the map when it was wrong. These changes don’t take effect immediately - I get a notification (usually within a few days) that the changes have been approved. I assume someone at Apple (or more likely, a contracted third party) reviews these suggestions and approves them.
Not to attempt to absolve Apple in any way of responsibility, but what I suspect we are seeing here is a sort of information warfare, where competitors/malicious individuals are reporting changes that they know will hurt the business in question.
19 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadPurely due to random chance that a tree branch grew too weak and fell at the wrong time.
You still need shade, and so do others, and if you're doing any business that requires shade, you have no choice, but these 3 trees.
Even in a narrower scope, just talking about mass market businesses selling consumer products, an example would be the huge number of Walmart suppliers that do fine without sitting under those specific '3 trees'.
Yes a large fraction do sit under the big 'Walmart tree' but they're not chained to it forever, the big 'Costco tree' is also available, along with many other smaller trees.
But even then, in a very interesting twist of absurdity that is the current state of affairs, your argument gets even more funny when you consider that Walmart spends some 4 billion dollars on ads per year, and are one of the largest customers of Google ads and Facebook Ads. So even Walmart depends on those 3 'trees'.
That said, it intuitively feels like they do at least to the farmer from the tone of the article (and similar stories), and to me as well. To me, this means that we're all sort of categorizing such mapping services in the same way that we categorize government services/utilities, and act like we _just for existing_ deserve some form of FRAND treatment from such services.
I wonder if there is some kind of legal framework to be found that could better align how people expect apple/google to interact, with their actual legal obligations towards listed companies (which AFAICT is fuck all).
I.e. "if they are listing the other businesses then they shouldn't be able to discriminate against my business without good reason."
I think it is important to prevent that from happening.
Listen (but not blindly) to your intuition, because its sense of fairness is keenly honed to allow society to function. Consider the case where Apple doesn't list companies FRAND (and perhaps for a small fee not much larger than their expenses in maintaining a listing) - because of the mass reliance on Apple (or Google) maps, it turns them into either an extortion racket as they extract the highest price they can for good listings, or a blind force of nature, randomly sending small businesses into ruin.
The only way to avoid this is mass organization by people to demand fair treatment. We have a mechanism for such organization: laws. They were used against railway trusts, they're used to prevent power and water companies from discriminating, and they could be used here. Non-physical infrastructure such as maps and yellow pages has the same dangers of monopoly power as railways and power lines.
Step 1) Aggressively capture some digital space using money and resources few others can match in physical space. Step 2) Control who or what can access this now prevalent realm.
The shortest path (OSPF) helps sustain it.
[OSPF] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Shortest_Path_First
It sounds like someone other than Apple or the farm owners changed the information for the farm in Apple Maps.
I don’t know if anyone can do this, but I have reported problems with businesses in Apple Maps - marking them as closed, or changing contact information, or moving their position on the map when it was wrong. These changes don’t take effect immediately - I get a notification (usually within a few days) that the changes have been approved. I assume someone at Apple (or more likely, a contracted third party) reviews these suggestions and approves them.
Not to attempt to absolve Apple in any way of responsibility, but what I suspect we are seeing here is a sort of information warfare, where competitors/malicious individuals are reporting changes that they know will hurt the business in question.
Apple Maps wrongly lists restaurant permanently closed, costing owner thousands
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39098142