We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google - I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
The implication here isn't so much that google shouldn't be the only search engine, but that google shouldn't simultaneously control a massive search platform while also controlling a popular browser environment and advertising platform because that situation ultimately quashes competition via unchallengable market control.
Which competition has it quashed? ~40% of the market is still not-chrome for browsers. I'm not well-versed on the ad side so I can't speak to it, but what's the harm in google running an ad service and also making a browser? The browser doesn't preferentially serve google ads over others at a given website.
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Well you don't have to do the work on the competing Z, you just have to make public the integration points for X so that it's possible for somebody else to compete with Y on a level footing
The benefit is that google can make their chromecast listen to amazon App just as the competing fire product does
You have to do the work maintaining and documenting the integration, not to mention stuff like ensuring you don't tell the Y dev team about any api changes because if they know before you make it public that's an unfair competitive advantage, so you have to silo off X development to some degree in order to maintain compliance...
basically you're demanding that the software company hobble itself just in case somebody ever wants to make a competing app.
+4
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
So, to carry this away from apple into other examples...
If Sony wanted to release the last of us and bloodborne on the xbox, but bypass retail and the xbox marketplace that provides licensing fees to Microsoft for use of the platform by building their own Sony storefront app and do all financial transactions on there... this would be fine? Microsoft would need to approve that different storefront on the platform which would gut the profitability of their entire division because it is unfair for a platform maker to run it as a private business instead of a utility?
Does this mean that since the platform owner cannot provide preferential treatment, videogames with explicit hatespeech and far fringe thoughts would have to be approved because of 1A reasons, due to it being a public utility. Who could control what ends up on the platform that isn’t biased towards company values/positions in a way that could be perceived as them protecting their brand value?
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
+2
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Well you don't have to do the work on the competing Z, you just have to make public the integration points for X so that it's possible for somebody else to compete with Y on a level footing
The benefit is that google can make their chromecast listen to amazon App just as the competing fire product does
You have to do the work maintaining and documenting the integration, not to mention stuff like ensuring you don't tell the Y dev team about any api changes because if they know before you make it public that's an unfair competitive advantage, so you have to silo off X development to some degree in order to maintain compliance...
basically you're demanding that the software company hobble itself just in case somebody ever wants to make a competing app.
Which is doubly unneeded because a much larger platform doing what you want is right over there.
Which is why I am saying this cannot fit monopoly. It is not a monopoly by definition, as there are multiple viable, and in some cases larger options for people to choose from and they are most definitely not colluding and remain in active competition with each other. This is strong arming a company into doing harm to itself for some perceived good that I don’t think can be blanket applied to any large company.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google - I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
The implication here isn't so much that google shouldn't be the only search engine, but that google shouldn't simultaneously control a massive search platform while also controlling a popular browser environment and advertising platform because that situation ultimately quashes competition via unchallengable market control.
Which competition has it quashed? ~40% of the market is still not-chrome for browsers. I'm not well-versed on the ad side so I can't speak to it, but what's the harm in google running an ad service and also making a browser? The browser doesn't preferentially serve google ads over others at a given website.
Here's an example from Marshall with regards to the power Google has if they choose to use it:
With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.
Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.
Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?
If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?
If the first stopped we’d lose a big chunk of money that wouldn’t put us out of business but would likely force us to retrench. If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road – i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again. That’s not including some unknown period of time – certainly weeks at least – in which we went with literally no ad revenue.
Needless to say, the impact of this would be cataclysmic and could easily drive us out of business.
Now, that’s never happened. And this whole scenario stems from what is at least a well-intentioned effort not to subsidize hate speech and racist groups. Again, it hasn’t happened. So in some sense the cataclysmic scenario I’m describing is as much a product of my paranoia as something Google could or might do. But when an outside player has that much power, often acts arbitrarily (even when well-intentioned) and is almost impossible to communicate with, a significant amount of paranoia is healthy and inevitable.
I give this example only to illustrate the way that Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally. As a general matter, I’d say our worst experiences with Google – and to be fair, none have been that bad – have been cases like these where Google is so big and its customers and products (people are products) are so distant from its concerns that we’ve gotten caught up in or whiplashed by rules or systems that simply don’t make any sense or are affirmatively absurd in how they affect us. One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
+9
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Well you don't have to do the work on the competing Z, you just have to make public the integration points for X so that it's possible for somebody else to compete with Y on a level footing
The benefit is that google can make their chromecast listen to amazon App just as the competing fire product does
You have to do the work maintaining and documenting the integration, not to mention stuff like ensuring you don't tell the Y dev team about any api changes because if they know before you make it public that's an unfair competitive advantage, so you have to silo off X development to some degree in order to maintain compliance...
basically you're demanding that the software company hobble itself just in case somebody ever wants to make a competing app.
Your last sentence is broadly applicable to any enforcement of open competition upon an app making company
Of course it's inconvenient for the company, I'm arguing the best interests of the company and society are opposed in this matter
If regulation wouldn't hobble the company then there'd be no need to write it
+13
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
to me, asking apple to open up the APIs to all of their walled garden integrations is like asking Nintendo to let the switch run Windows so you can use Steam on it.
At what point is the company allowed to say “that’s not the thing we are building”
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
+4
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Well you don't have to do the work on the competing Z, you just have to make public the integration points for X so that it's possible for somebody else to compete with Y on a level footing
The benefit is that google can make their chromecast listen to amazon App just as the competing fire product does
You have to do the work maintaining and documenting the integration, not to mention stuff like ensuring you don't tell the Y dev team about any api changes because if they know before you make it public that's an unfair competitive advantage, so you have to silo off X development to some degree in order to maintain compliance...
basically you're demanding that the software company hobble itself just in case somebody ever wants to make a competing app.
Which is doubly unneeded because a much larger platform doing what you want is right over there.
Which is why I am saying this cannot fit monopoly. It is not a monopoly by definition, as there are multiple viable, and in some cases larger options for people to choose from and they are most definitely not colluding and remain in active competition with each other. This is strong arming a company into doing harm to itself for some perceived good that I don’t think can be blanket applied to any large company.
I think the good is manifest, it can be blanket applied to all companies, and "strong arming" is just a silly loaded term for any regulation
I think requiring companies to allow competitors on their otherwise walled gardens would be great even if bundling continues to be allowed for practical reasons.
Apple would still massively benefit from the app store being on every iOS device even if forced to allow Amazon's storefront on the device. Same with Amazon and the Kindle. The main argument I see against that is that it undercuts their revenue model (so what?) and could let users do things that harm their devices (which they are already allowed to do anyway and any rules could have some good faith anti-malware provisions).
MS was heavily criticized for using bundling to push their various products in an attempt at vertical integration, and it was kind of the reason some of their products were popular for a good period of time.
to me, asking apple to open up the APIs to all of their walled garden integrations is like asking Nintendo to let the switch run Windows so you can use Steam on it.
At what point is the company allowed to say “that’s not the thing we are building”
If MS could and did want to make Windows run on Switch, I would love for Nintendo to have to do so.
Edit:
Market share is not a good measure of competition. It is possible and has frequently happened that companies in a market set up their turfs and do not compete with each other significantly even when there the industry is not very geographically tied like ISPs.
Couscous on
+4
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
So if that is your stance, answer my question above re: when a company is allowed to say “this isnt the product we are making”.
We accept closed platforms all throughout our life. Some serve a use as closed, some are closed because the company deems to make it so, some are open or semi/accessible using APIs and whatnot.
Is the line in the sand 90million a year? 25bn a year? Is money even the best determinate that the government gets to decide what kind of product the company is allowed to make?
And note I am using charged words like strong arm because it is. This isn’t one company owning the entire telephone infrastructure or the only railways an leveraging those rails to give incentives to their own businesses with no other means of transport available; this is, in some cases, just wildly successful companies who are being told to stop being successful regardless of viable, functional and profitable competition being present.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Well you don't have to do the work on the competing Z, you just have to make public the integration points for X so that it's possible for somebody else to compete with Y on a level footing
The benefit is that google can make their chromecast listen to amazon App just as the competing fire product does
One of the basic questions you should consider when thinking about these things is: Is this thing actually better then the competition or is the competition simply not allowed to do the same thing?
Is this software better or is it simply that other software can't access the same things as it?
Is this hardware better or is it simply that the people who make it make sure that the software you want can only run on that hardware?
etc, etc, etc
to me, asking apple to open up the APIs to all of their walled garden integrations is like asking Nintendo to let the switch run Windows so you can use Steam on it.
At what point is the company allowed to say “that’s not the thing we are building”
Never?
Why shouldn't you be able to run Windows on your Switch if you want to?
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google - I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
The implication here isn't so much that google shouldn't be the only search engine, but that google shouldn't simultaneously control a massive search platform while also controlling a popular browser environment and advertising platform because that situation ultimately quashes competition via unchallengable market control.
Which competition has it quashed? ~40% of the market is still not-chrome for browsers. I'm not well-versed on the ad side so I can't speak to it, but what's the harm in google running an ad service and also making a browser? The browser doesn't preferentially serve google ads over others at a given website.
While not all of these are inherently a bad thing, imagine the effect this ultimately has on the small business space around each of the relevant sectors represented in that list. Alphabet is large enough that it can undercut any individual sector while absorbing the losses via one of its other business channels. At a certain point, powerful corporations become functionally indistinguishable from competing with, say, the state. The functional advantages of free market competition are eroded completely by a juggernaut that has surpassed the constraints that force small businesses to be effective/efficient.
I'm for breaking up big companies that have an unfair market share allowing continued dominance. We should have started it back in the 90s. We didn't. You can't just skip the last 30 years and be upset about tech companies (what a silly term).
I think this is stupid. It's flavor of the month nonsense. While Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon and so on should probably be heavily regulated and forced to split off divisions into separate companies you don't get to just stop attempting to reinforce Dodd-Frank and let banks/insurers do what they want. Let Monsanto own basically every seed supply. Let Wal-Mart liquidate half the fucking stores in the country and then get all warglgarbl about Amazon selling the FireTV. It's theater and it's stupid theater. I've never thought Warren was a bad person, I just hate her idiotic populist politics.
I mean fuck, our food sourcing is actually very diverse compared to much of the medical supply and banking system. Start with the good ol' boys who have been running shit for 50 years, then we can talk about Google and Amazon.
I'm for breaking up big companies that have an unfair market share allowing continued dominance. We should have started it back in the 90s. We didn't. You can't just skip the last 30 years and be upset about tech companies (what a silly term).
I think this is stupid. It's flavor of the month nonsense. While Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon and so on should probably be heavily regulated and forced to split off divisions into separate companies you don't get to just stop attempting to reinforce Dodd-Frank and let banks/insurers do what they want. Let Monsanto own basically every seed supply. Let Wal-Mart liquidate half the fucking stores in the country and then get all warglgarbl about Amazon selling the FireTV. It's theater and it's stupid theater. I've never thought Warren was a bad person, I just hate her idiotic populist politics.
I mean fuck, our food sourcing is actually very diverse compared to much of the medical supply and banking system. Start with the good ol' boys who have been running shit for 50 years, then we can talk about Google and Amazon.
No. We can talk about all of them. We can talk about tech right the fuck now.
These companies have become MASSIVELY influencial on everything. Facebook is basically one of the biggest tools for the dissemination of political opinions to the voting public. These things are important.
If you have no history of following through on anything, I have very little interest in what you say you're going to do tomorrow.
I fully agree that it should be a thing.
You can also break up Facebook as much as you like, I don't think it would change anything about elections unless you just shut it down or force it to be advertisement free.
Industrial food production is such a narrow part of the entire food industry. The equivalent of Google would be if one company controlled 50% of the land, owned every farm on that land, owned the R&D for pesticides, owned the shippers, processors, and grocery stores the food goes through. Oh, and they operate two of the five most successful international restaurant chains as well.
The scale is not the same. It is mind boggling how big the FAANG companies are, relative to their peers who represent the "old guard" of consolidated industry.
It's more "Why are we talking about these companies instead of anti-trust and financial regulation that should have always been a big deal?"
Nearly all of our laws and regulations are cobbled together from when the internet didn't even exist. Pointing at a handful of companies isn't how this should go.
We're talking about these companies because they are An Issue.
They control significant aspects of our lives.
There's also the bit where Warren has talked about how this isn't tech industry only. See the SXSW Verge interview when they noted that, like, how grocery stores would be impacted and her explanation wasn't that this was just a tech bill, but at the valuation of the business.
+2
thatassemblyguyJanitor of Technical Debt.Registered Userregular
So two days ago, via a post on Medium, Elizabeth Warren released a proposal on how we should break up some of the largest technology companies in the world, and the methods in which this could happen. Before going further I strongly suggest people read the post in question:
If you are a company making 25bn or larger, you have to break off any parts of your business that receive competitive advantage from being part of the company. Amazon selling Fire and Echo devices on the store competing devices are on? They have to be spun off as an independent hardware company. Apple running the app store and selling Logic or Final Cut on there? Apple the Software company cannot also be Apple the App Marketplace.
If you are a business making 90mm or more annual, you are required to not promote your products over that of others if you engage in running a marketplace. For example, if an online grocery store were to promote their own brand over that of other products. Enforcing neutral algorithms with the ability to be audited for compliance.
I will admit I am very mixed on this topic. I see the problem she is trying to solve but I also see huge ramifications from a business and legal perspective in telling apple, for instance, that they are a monopoly. There is a rich and vibrant ecosystem of devices people can choose from, so while Apple does run a walled garden with al the pros and cons associated with it, there is nothing they are doing to keep people from using competing products in the market which hold a much larger marketshare.
Meanwhile, it is hard to look at what facebook is doing and say with a straight face that there is any meaningful competition whatsoever. Your friends and family are all there, there is no second or third platform with that kind of lock, and they keep buying products that could rival their and integrate them into their mass. Forcing facebook to spin off Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. would be healthy for the social ecosystem.
So is the issue one of monopolies, or one of if a company grows too large the government has the right to force dissolution regardless of market dominance? Is the old definition of monopoly no longer relevant when discussing it?
WARNING DANGER WARNING
I really want to have this chat and I think it is a valuable one in and of itself. I feel this will get locked if we use it as a vehicle to discuss Elizabeth Warren the candidate, the 2020 election, viability against Bernie/Biden... like, all of that shit. I don’t want it here at all. This should be about the philosophy of massive corporations, government oversight/overreach, regulations v. Free market (and if that is a false dichotomy), etc. etc. - there is a lot of meat on this bone and I definitely think we should have this conversation out.
Disagree. For example, most media cannot be moved to another device, or media ecosystem, and used on that devices playback software seamlessly. I will say that other competitors to Apple have the same issue (unless you use their software). It's a thinly veiled attempt at getting around being defined as monopolies (usual TechBro stuff, "well technically..")
It's difficult for me to break down my feelings about this in a hung-over 5 minutes this morning. I definitely think that the Bigs need to be slapped around like Microsoft was back in the late 90s, but for overlapping reasons that we don't have a legal framework for yet. Europe is starting to lean on Google properly. Amazon and Apple both need to be leaned on, too, as their data warehousing is a huge privacy threat.
Here's some topics I think this break-up framework touches that isn't even closely covered by the current legal framework.
App Marketplace
Media Marketplace
Back-end Hosting
Edge Service
ISP
Devices
[**] Manufacturer Choice
[**] Return to the days where a manufacturer couldn't dictate how you used the device (i.e., I shouldn't have to pay $100 per year to develop an application for hardware that I've purchased)
Privacy
[**] This is big because I think breaking up the Bigs will make our privacy more vulnerable with the current way it is treated legally and technically.
[**] Treating my data as theirs is anti-competitive in my opinion, but that isn't a good word to use in the current legal framework.
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google - I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
This is the Reagan Administration mentality that has gutted anti-trust law - the idea that the only consideration that matters is a shallow consideration for consumers. The reality is that Google has immense power because of their search monopoly, and has used and abused it (hence why they've been sued over giving preference to their platforms in their search results.) Google can, in a very real way, make a website "disappear" or pick a winner just by altering their PageRank.
TORONTO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Sidewalk Labs unit is proposing it get a share of property taxes, development fees, and the rising value of Toronto city land as part of a deal to build a smart city, according to the company’s slide presentation made public on Friday.
Maybe we should stop the Megacorps from, I don't know, taking the steps towards cyberpunk arcologies.
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Because, if the market share in users or revenue is big enough, and you allowed the platform holder to gimp all competing products in competition them, then you have created an anti-competitive market place.
Which is something Apple has done - for example, the reason nobody but Apple has an ereader app with store integration is because of Apple's rules on in-app payments making doing so unprofitable for anyone but Apple.
Apple crippled google maps Siri integration a few years ago, didn't they? Moved public api calls to private?
By far the most egregious example, to me, is amazon's removal of chromecast casting from their app
Not really on the google maps thing.
Apple always used google maps as the mapping backend for the iPhone, and it was 100% behind the scenes, not open API. This was even before Siri.
They struck a good deal with google when the original iPhone launched that google did not want to continue when the contract came up for renegotiation. Apple did not want to send user data over to google, and google refused to provide the API to apple’s development team unless they passed user info back to them.
Apple knew this was a possibility, so they started work on their own mapping product some time prior to this, and in advance of google pulling the plug (or apple having to relent and give google the data) they dropped a map app that was years behind google maps into the iPhone’s map app, and google released google maps as a separate app on the app store.
But apple had never provided a way to change default apps on the iPhone and I would be surprised if they ever do. They didn’t roll anything back, they just changed to their own API.
The implications of telling platforms they have to provide an even playing field even if they aren’t technically a monopoly could be far reaching. It could mean xbox game pass on the PS4 with Sony unable to block its release. Steam releasing clients on the xbox and switch.
Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo not being able to develop first party games and make hardware.
I dunno, its not like what I am listing there is inherently bad but I do see businesses losing their minds over the ripples from a decision like this,
I really thought a read an article a couple years ago explaining why you could have Siri open apple maps and start navigation but not open google maps and start navigation, and it was because apple maps gets special Siri access google maps can't have. I'm completely misremembering?
Up until this release of iOS, nobody got access to siri outside of companies apple wrote integrations for. Siri was never promoted as an open platform; rather, it was the digital assistant on your phone, with no user facing controls other than to change language, male or female voice, and default search provider.
Now devs can write siri shortcuts and bake them into their apps, so technically siri is open for the first time, though your app does still need app store approval (which is trivial)
yeah i guess i do think it should be illegal for apple to have a maps app that has more access to the digital assistant on your apple phone than competing maps apps can get
why though? I'm struggling to come up with a reason why a piece of apple software should not work better with another piece of apple software than it does with not-apple software. If I make X and Y and they're tightly integrated, why should I be forced to also ensure the Z you made is just as good at working with X?
Because, if the market share in users or revenue is big enough, and you allowed the platform holder to gimp all competing products in competition them, then you have created an anti-competitive market place.
Which is something Apple has done - for example, the reason nobody but Apple has an ereader app with store integration is because of Apple's rules on in-app payments making doing so unprofitable for anyone but Apple.
It took me a while to figure out how to buy Kindle books for my iPhone.
We're talking about these companies because they are An Issue.
They control significant aspects of our lives.
There's also the bit where Warren has talked about how this isn't tech industry only. See the SXSW Verge interview when they noted that, like, how grocery stores would be impacted and her explanation wasn't that this was just a tech bill, but at the valuation of the business.
Actually yeah that's kind of insane. Wal Mart couldn't sell its store brand anymore, for instance.
We're talking about these companies because they are An Issue.
They control significant aspects of our lives.
There's also the bit where Warren has talked about how this isn't tech industry only. See the SXSW Verge interview when they noted that, like, how grocery stores would be impacted and her explanation wasn't that this was just a tech bill, but at the valuation of the business.
Actually yeah that's kind of insane. Wal Mart couldn't sell its store brand anymore, for instance.
What's insane is the almost 40 year perversion of anti-trust law that started in the Reagan Administration. A large part of why this problem is as massive as it is stems from the fact that we have a near half-century backlog to work through.
to me, asking apple to open up the APIs to all of their walled garden integrations is like asking Nintendo to let the switch run Windows so you can use Steam on it.
At what point is the company allowed to say “that’s not the thing we are building”
Well, here's the thing - corporations wouldn't exist without society, so society has a vested interest in how corporations operate, especially when those operations have far reaching ramifications for society as a whole. As a result, society has a number of good reasons to tell corporations that "no, you don't get to run things the way you want - you have to build them in a way that makes you a good member of society as well."
We're talking about these companies because they are An Issue.
They control significant aspects of our lives.
There's also the bit where Warren has talked about how this isn't tech industry only. See the SXSW Verge interview when they noted that, like, how grocery stores would be impacted and her explanation wasn't that this was just a tech bill, but at the valuation of the business.
Actually yeah that's kind of insane. Wal Mart couldn't sell its store brand anymore, for instance.
What's insane is the almost 40 year perversion of anti-trust law that started in the Reagan Administration. A large part of why this problem is as massive as it is stems from the fact that we have a near half-century backlog to work through.
They're both insane. The sub 25b "no unfair promotion" is as far as it should go. The idea that IGA would have to stop* selling IGA brand shit because they crossed the 25b dollar line seems absurd.
*Or sell the IGA generic brand division to Walmart.
The stores in the alliance remain independently owned and operated. The alliance oversees several resources shared among the member stores. These include, most visibly, the IGA store brand products and the logistical network that distributes them. The alliance also provides training and assessment programs and an online advertising platform. It regularly coordinates promotional events and charity fundraising events that benefit store communities.
that seems different from the corporations we're talking about.
Everything's going to suck until we can extract function that makes a mega-company's service good and franchise it out to independent operators, if not make it an open source standard.
Good luck making that happen though, since any company that does this is committing suicide
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google. I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
This wouldn't require another search engine to exist. Google search would still be a thing.
Read the Marshall piece I linked above. Google has immense power over what gets published on the web if they choose to exercise it. Same with Facebook. That power is bad for democracy, as we saw in 2016.
Google search a a separate company would still retain all of the power that is being complained about. It would just have to show more, worse ads I suppose
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google. I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
This wouldn't require another search engine to exist. Google search would still be a thing.
Read the Marshall piece I linked above. Google has immense power over what gets published on the web if they choose to exercise it. Same with Facebook. That power is bad for democracy, as we saw in 2016.
Google search a a separate company would still retain all of the power that is being complained about. It would just have to show more, worse ads I suppose
But it would remove clearly identifiable financial incentives/conflicts of interest.
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google. I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
This wouldn't require another search engine to exist. Google search would still be a thing.
Read the Marshall piece I linked above. Google has immense power over what gets published on the web if they choose to exercise it. Same with Facebook. That power is bad for democracy, as we saw in 2016.
Google search a a separate company would still retain all of the power that is being complained about. It would just have to show more, worse ads I suppose
But it would remove clearly identifiable financial incentives/conflicts of interest.
How? if anything it would make them more mercenary and willing to advertise for whoever pays them the most because there's no other internal business sectors to prop them up.
We should just start breaking up a bunch of these large tech companies just on principle frankly. There's basically no examples of this shit not getting out of control if left unchecked.
The question should not be why it should be why not.
The why not is that in some cases at least, consumers benefit from the monopoly because using multiple competing platforms is trash that everyone hates. Fact is, we all stopped searching anywhere except Google long before the competition vanished. It vanished because it was all trash compared to Google. I don't want another search engine. Look at TV streaming right now - it's dogshit, a half-dozen services and more to come, each with their own monthly fee. Splitting Prime Video out of Amazon because they also sell DVDs isn't going to make anything better for consumers.
This wouldn't require another search engine to exist. Google search would still be a thing.
Read the Marshall piece I linked above. Google has immense power over what gets published on the web if they choose to exercise it. Same with Facebook. That power is bad for democracy, as we saw in 2016.
Google search a a separate company would still retain all of the power that is being complained about. It would just have to show more, worse ads I suppose
But it would remove clearly identifiable financial incentives/conflicts of interest.
How? if anything it would make them more mercenary and willing to advertise for whoever pays them the most because there's no other internal business sectors to prop them up.
They would still be able to sell ads like any other website. I hope you like seeing garbage from outbrain next to your google searches instead of actually relevant ads because that’s where we’re headed.
Google allowing other websites to pay to inflate their position in the search results would probably count as dealing in advertising and would therefore be disallowed.
Divorcing Google Search from other google realms doesn't really affect the consumer side; web search is a natural monopoly.
The change would be on the data-collection and centralization side. Suddenly Google products have to explicitly buy and sell your data from the Search fingerprint database. Your data has to be priced. Other companies can buy your data.
The anti-competitive behavior of Google Search isn't in the quality of search results that consumers see. It is in keeping all the user data that Search collects to internal Google projects, like Google Maps, and refusing to sell it to other companies.
Divorcing Google Search from other google realms doesn't really affect the consumer side; web search is a natural monopoly.
The change would be on the data-collection and centralization side. Suddenly Google products have to explicitly buy and sell your data from the Search fingerprint database. Your data has to be priced. Other companies can buy your data.
The anti-competitive behavior of Google Search isn't in the quality of search results that consumers see. It is in keeping all the user data that Search collects to internal Google projects, like Google Maps, and refusing to sell it to other companies.
No, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell their user data.
Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.
Posts
Which competition has it quashed? ~40% of the market is still not-chrome for browsers. I'm not well-versed on the ad side so I can't speak to it, but what's the harm in google running an ad service and also making a browser? The browser doesn't preferentially serve google ads over others at a given website.
You have to do the work maintaining and documenting the integration, not to mention stuff like ensuring you don't tell the Y dev team about any api changes because if they know before you make it public that's an unfair competitive advantage, so you have to silo off X development to some degree in order to maintain compliance...
basically you're demanding that the software company hobble itself just in case somebody ever wants to make a competing app.
If Sony wanted to release the last of us and bloodborne on the xbox, but bypass retail and the xbox marketplace that provides licensing fees to Microsoft for use of the platform by building their own Sony storefront app and do all financial transactions on there... this would be fine? Microsoft would need to approve that different storefront on the platform which would gut the profitability of their entire division because it is unfair for a platform maker to run it as a private business instead of a utility?
Does this mean that since the platform owner cannot provide preferential treatment, videogames with explicit hatespeech and far fringe thoughts would have to be approved because of 1A reasons, due to it being a public utility. Who could control what ends up on the platform that isn’t biased towards company values/positions in a way that could be perceived as them protecting their brand value?
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Which is doubly unneeded because a much larger platform doing what you want is right over there.
Which is why I am saying this cannot fit monopoly. It is not a monopoly by definition, as there are multiple viable, and in some cases larger options for people to choose from and they are most definitely not colluding and remain in active competition with each other. This is strong arming a company into doing harm to itself for some perceived good that I don’t think can be blanket applied to any large company.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Here's an example from Marshall with regards to the power Google has if they choose to use it:
Your last sentence is broadly applicable to any enforcement of open competition upon an app making company
Of course it's inconvenient for the company, I'm arguing the best interests of the company and society are opposed in this matter
If regulation wouldn't hobble the company then there'd be no need to write it
At what point is the company allowed to say “that’s not the thing we are building”
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I think the good is manifest, it can be blanket applied to all companies, and "strong arming" is just a silly loaded term for any regulation
Apple would still massively benefit from the app store being on every iOS device even if forced to allow Amazon's storefront on the device. Same with Amazon and the Kindle. The main argument I see against that is that it undercuts their revenue model (so what?) and could let users do things that harm their devices (which they are already allowed to do anyway and any rules could have some good faith anti-malware provisions).
MS was heavily criticized for using bundling to push their various products in an attempt at vertical integration, and it was kind of the reason some of their products were popular for a good period of time.
Edit:
Market share is not a good measure of competition. It is possible and has frequently happened that companies in a market set up their turfs and do not compete with each other significantly even when there the industry is not very geographically tied like ISPs.
We accept closed platforms all throughout our life. Some serve a use as closed, some are closed because the company deems to make it so, some are open or semi/accessible using APIs and whatnot.
Is the line in the sand 90million a year? 25bn a year? Is money even the best determinate that the government gets to decide what kind of product the company is allowed to make?
And note I am using charged words like strong arm because it is. This isn’t one company owning the entire telephone infrastructure or the only railways an leveraging those rails to give incentives to their own businesses with no other means of transport available; this is, in some cases, just wildly successful companies who are being told to stop being successful regardless of viable, functional and profitable competition being present.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
One of the basic questions you should consider when thinking about these things is: Is this thing actually better then the competition or is the competition simply not allowed to do the same thing?
Is this software better or is it simply that other software can't access the same things as it?
Is this hardware better or is it simply that the people who make it make sure that the software you want can only run on that hardware?
etc, etc, etc
Never?
Why shouldn't you be able to run Windows on your Switch if you want to?
Take a look at Alphabet's list of acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet
While not all of these are inherently a bad thing, imagine the effect this ultimately has on the small business space around each of the relevant sectors represented in that list. Alphabet is large enough that it can undercut any individual sector while absorbing the losses via one of its other business channels. At a certain point, powerful corporations become functionally indistinguishable from competing with, say, the state. The functional advantages of free market competition are eroded completely by a juggernaut that has surpassed the constraints that force small businesses to be effective/efficient.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
I think this is stupid. It's flavor of the month nonsense. While Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon and so on should probably be heavily regulated and forced to split off divisions into separate companies you don't get to just stop attempting to reinforce Dodd-Frank and let banks/insurers do what they want. Let Monsanto own basically every seed supply. Let Wal-Mart liquidate half the fucking stores in the country and then get all warglgarbl about Amazon selling the FireTV. It's theater and it's stupid theater. I've never thought Warren was a bad person, I just hate her idiotic populist politics.
I mean fuck, our food sourcing is actually very diverse compared to much of the medical supply and banking system. Start with the good ol' boys who have been running shit for 50 years, then we can talk about Google and Amazon.
"Diverse"
No. We can talk about all of them. We can talk about tech right the fuck now.
These companies have become MASSIVELY influencial on everything. Facebook is basically one of the biggest tools for the dissemination of political opinions to the voting public. These things are important.
I fully agree that it should be a thing.
You can also break up Facebook as much as you like, I don't think it would change anything about elections unless you just shut it down or force it to be advertisement free.
The scale is not the same. It is mind boggling how big the FAANG companies are, relative to their peers who represent the "old guard" of consolidated industry.
Marin County News is a twitter account that reports the news, presumably in Marin County.
Nearly all of our laws and regulations are cobbled together from when the internet didn't even exist. Pointing at a handful of companies isn't how this should go.
We're talking about these companies because they are An Issue.
They control significant aspects of our lives.
There's also the bit where Warren has talked about how this isn't tech industry only. See the SXSW Verge interview when they noted that, like, how grocery stores would be impacted and her explanation wasn't that this was just a tech bill, but at the valuation of the business.
Disagree. For example, most media cannot be moved to another device, or media ecosystem, and used on that devices playback software seamlessly. I will say that other competitors to Apple have the same issue (unless you use their software). It's a thinly veiled attempt at getting around being defined as monopolies (usual TechBro stuff, "well technically..")
It's difficult for me to break down my feelings about this in a hung-over 5 minutes this morning. I definitely think that the Bigs need to be slapped around like Microsoft was back in the late 90s, but for overlapping reasons that we don't have a legal framework for yet. Europe is starting to lean on Google properly. Amazon and Apple both need to be leaned on, too, as their data warehousing is a huge privacy threat.
Here's some topics I think this break-up framework touches that isn't even closely covered by the current legal framework.
[**] Manufacturer Choice
[**] Return to the days where a manufacturer couldn't dictate how you used the device (i.e., I shouldn't have to pay $100 per year to develop an application for hardware that I've purchased)
[**] This is big because I think breaking up the Bigs will make our privacy more vulnerable with the current way it is treated legally and technically.
[**] Treating my data as theirs is anti-competitive in my opinion, but that isn't a good word to use in the current legal framework.
This is the Reagan Administration mentality that has gutted anti-trust law - the idea that the only consideration that matters is a shallow consideration for consumers. The reality is that Google has immense power because of their search monopoly, and has used and abused it (hence why they've been sued over giving preference to their platforms in their search results.) Google can, in a very real way, make a website "disappear" or pick a winner just by altering their PageRank.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-canada/alphabet-unit-seeks-share-of-property-taxes-for-toronto-smart-city-idUSKCN1Q423Z
Maybe we should stop the Megacorps from, I don't know, taking the steps towards cyberpunk arcologies.
Which is something Apple has done - for example, the reason nobody but Apple has an ereader app with store integration is because of Apple's rules on in-app payments making doing so unprofitable for anyone but Apple.
It took me a while to figure out how to buy Kindle books for my iPhone.
Actually yeah that's kind of insane. Wal Mart couldn't sell its store brand anymore, for instance.
What's insane is the almost 40 year perversion of anti-trust law that started in the Reagan Administration. A large part of why this problem is as massive as it is stems from the fact that we have a near half-century backlog to work through.
Well, here's the thing - corporations wouldn't exist without society, so society has a vested interest in how corporations operate, especially when those operations have far reaching ramifications for society as a whole. As a result, society has a number of good reasons to tell corporations that "no, you don't get to run things the way you want - you have to build them in a way that makes you a good member of society as well."
They're both insane. The sub 25b "no unfair promotion" is as far as it should go. The idea that IGA would have to stop* selling IGA brand shit because they crossed the 25b dollar line seems absurd.
*Or sell the IGA generic brand division to Walmart.
that seems different from the corporations we're talking about.
Good luck making that happen though, since any company that does this is committing suicide
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
You know
The opening salvo where you go above where you'd like to be after a negotiation, and then you back and forth the plan down in compromise.
Google search a a separate company would still retain all of the power that is being complained about. It would just have to show more, worse ads I suppose
But it would remove clearly identifiable financial incentives/conflicts of interest.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
How? if anything it would make them more mercenary and willing to advertise for whoever pays them the most because there's no other internal business sectors to prop them up.
They would still be able to sell ads like any other website. I hope you like seeing garbage from outbrain next to your google searches instead of actually relevant ads because that’s where we’re headed.
Google allowing other websites to pay to inflate their position in the search results would probably count as dealing in advertising and would therefore be disallowed.
The change would be on the data-collection and centralization side. Suddenly Google products have to explicitly buy and sell your data from the Search fingerprint database. Your data has to be priced. Other companies can buy your data.
The anti-competitive behavior of Google Search isn't in the quality of search results that consumers see. It is in keeping all the user data that Search collects to internal Google projects, like Google Maps, and refusing to sell it to other companies.
No, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell their user data.
Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.