[HN Gopher] U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech...
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U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown
Author : throwawaysea
Score : 333 points
Date : 2021-04-16 09:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| more_corn wrote:
| I'm pleased to see that Netflix has been kicked out of FAANG.
| Makes sense since they are facing robust competition and no-
| longer qualify for near monopoly status. I also support the
| reordering of the words as presented in the article since GAAF is
| way more appealing than leaving it as is with Netflix removed.
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP...
| 3327 wrote:
| 10 years too late but better late than never...
| the-dude wrote:
| And Microsoft is not in this list. Who would have predicted that?
| asah wrote:
| IBM and Microsoft already had their anti-trust run-ins in the
| 80s and 90s.
| the-dude wrote:
| So what happened?
| ohashi wrote:
| What sector does Microsoft dominate these days? They
| actually are pretty good at competing.
|
| Major units at Microsoft:
|
| OS. This one is old, gone through anti trust stuff already.
| There's Mac / Linux.
|
| Cloud. Azure is competing against AWS, GCP, everyone else.
|
| Gaming. Xbox has Sony and Nintendo.
|
| The strongest monopoly argument is still operating
| system/office, but even that Google is eroding away at
| office. The server market is dominated by *nix.
|
| Microsoft do have enormous stockpiles of cash and are
| acquiring things and behaving similarly to the others. But
| their major monopoly has already been tested and their
| power is waning according to market share (https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).
| zepto wrote:
| > OS. This one is old, gone through anti trust stuff
| already. There's Mac / Linux.
|
| Ok but by that argument, Apple wouldn't be considered
| dominant either.
| capableweb wrote:
| You're forgetting a entire ecosystem: developers.
| Microsoft owns NPM Inc, GitHub and Linkedin, all but
| Linkedin focused on developers and both GitHub and NPM
| owns their respective markets (GitHub for source code
| management and NPM Inc for JavaScript distribution)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > But their major monopoly has already been tested and
| their power is waning according to market share (https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).
|
| I don't see their power waning. Their control of Office
| and Windows lets them bundle things like Teams and
| OneDrive, which puts pressure on smaller companies like
| Slack (sold to Salesforce) and Dropbox, who have a harder
| time selling when MS is throwing in OneDrive for free if
| you're already buying Windows/Office/Exchange/Azure/etc.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Let's all shed a tear for the billionaire founders of
| slack and dropbox, if it wasn't for Microsoft they'd have
| 10 billion each instead of 1-2 billion. Poor Drew, poor
| Stewart, the world has been cruel and unforgiving to
| them.
|
| Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat
| rooms aren't innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-
| billion dollar rewards?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat
| rooms aren't innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-
| billion dollar rewards?
|
| I made no claim regarding what ideas deserve what. Simply
| that Microsoft is not losing power, by showing the kind
| of effects it can have on other businesses.
| the-dude wrote:
| Well, so what anti-trust measures were taken then?
|
| And the server market is not dominated by *nix. Public
| facing websites, yes. Corps are full of Windows Server.
| Filled to the brim.
| [deleted]
| input_sh wrote:
| For Microsoft, absolutely nothing. The majority of the case
| was related to Windows coming with IE pre-installed, which
| it still does.
|
| They've reached a settlement which was not even a slap on
| the wrist. They've agreed to share some APIs and have a
| couple of people in charge of ensuring compliance for some
| years. Nine states + DC objected the settlement claiming
| that it didn't go far enough, but the appeals court
| dismissed their objections.
|
| In my view Microsoft antitrust is blown way out of
| proportions and didn't achieve absolutely anything
| concrete. One can claim that it discouraged similar
| behaviour in the next decade or so, but that's about it. As
| to why Microsoft is no longer considered a monopoly, I'm
| more of an opinion that it's Microsoft's internal decisions
| that did that, not anything antitrust-related.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I don't think having one in the past should be a "get out of
| jail" free pass for future offenses.
| capableweb wrote:
| Probably Reuters editors who made it so, Microsoft is mentioned
| plenty in the report itself (https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU
| /JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP...), I'm getting 74 hits when
| searching for "Microsoft".
| the-dude wrote:
| Thanks for checking.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Most of those references are talking about how Microsoft
| can't compete with its competitors who own the market (AWS,
| chrome, Google search, etc...).
|
| There is some talk about Office though.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Could you explain why you think that they should be?
| akie wrote:
| Break up Google.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| And Amazon. And Microsoft. And Apple. And Netflix. And every
| other conglomerate...
| nightwing wrote:
| And USA and China, they are too big and a threat to everyone
| else.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Imperialism and colonialism are the greatest threats to
| humanity. The actors don't matter, intentions don't matter.
| Actions matter. CCP and the US elite are the two worst
| group of actors by number in the world.
| odiroot wrote:
| One is unlike the others.
|
| You're probably looking at Facebook, Oracle. Netflix is a
| small fish.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I'm open to discussion. My inclusion of Netflix is based
| upon their ownership of content and distribution, last mile
| excluded. Which reminds me to mention: Comcast, and co, as
| well as the mobile carrier companies for inclusion. I'd
| definitely agree that Oracle should face more scrutiny but
| don't know enough about their business to say much besides
| the fact that they're starting to look like Yahoo and IBM.
| Facebook is a given.
| etripe wrote:
| How do you define "last mile"? I worked at ISPs that
| housed Netflix storage boxes in their access layer, i.e.
| the last site before the cable/fibre/copper pairs went to
| customers' houses or mobile towers.
|
| So do you specifically mean "except the access layer"
| (not accurate) or "except the last mile pairs"
| (accurate)? I think the distinction matters when
| considering monopolistic behaviour, because it determines
| service quality (access speed, loading times, maximum
| throughput...)
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I'll defer to the experts on a definition here. I'm
| trying to speak generally about the tax funded
| infrastructure versus the actual work of connecting to
| the backbone providers and providing satellite rack
| space. The infrastructure costs virtually nothing to
| maintain and is great for rent seeking monopolists to own
| and neglect while running a city scale network connected
| to the backbone requires constant maintenance and
| upgrades to keep up with demand and the dynamic security
| landscape.
|
| I guess my argument is Comcast shouldn't be they only
| competition for coaxial internet if they can't offer an
| internet only service, without discounts, for less than
| their cheapest regular rate off contract package.
| tolbish wrote:
| Disney and Proctor & Gamble dare you to try.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Can I borrow 20 billion usd in unmarked cash loaded on 737s
| for this?
| capableweb wrote:
| > potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating
| the markets in which they also compete
|
| Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can
| Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete
| in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions
| if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost
| of doing business instead of deterrents.
|
| How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their
| mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in
| the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own
| marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should
| have been forced to divide their business long time ago. Of
| course they are gonna use metrics from competitors that only they
| have access to, in order to make their own product line get
| better.
|
| Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more
| general results? Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what
| the top hit is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even
| know, because no one knows how their algorithm is working, but
| one thing is clear, Google products consistently rank higher than
| anything else in the search engine.
|
| The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just
| worried how it took so long to get here.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit
| is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even know, because
| no one knows how their algorithm is working, but one thing is
| clear, Google products consistently rank higher than anything
| else in the search engine.
|
| If you search "earth" on bing or duckduckgo, google earth is
| the first result for both.
| prepend wrote:
| > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on
| their mobile devices? We already went through this with
| Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is not. Microsoft compelled
| their hardware partners to not do business with competitors,
| Apple is vertical regards to hardware.
|
| While I like protocols and interoperability, it's hard to
| achieve that through antitrust laws because antitrust focuses
| on consumer harm and without monopoly power that's hard to
| show. I'm trying to think of any anti-trust for non-monopolies
| or threat of monopoly and can't.
|
| Should my NAS have to include third party browsers just because
| they have a browser?
| osrec wrote:
| The mobile phone market is an oligopoly, with each
| participant pushing their own (sometimes terrible) agendas.
|
| Given that Apple is very deliberately resisting the adoption
| of PWAs in order to protect their app store, I think it's
| fair to say they're playing dirty. I mean, why are they
| restricting other browsers from using their own web views?!
| So that they can't implement annoying web push notifications
| (which users can turn off anyway)?! That's a terrible excuse
| to hold the web back, and it annoys the heck out of me.
| Especially given the number of apps in the app store with a
| bunch of security issues and equally annoying push
| notifications.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Apple has about 60% share of mobile phones in the US. I'd say
| it definitely should be considered a monopoly.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on
| their mobile devices?
|
| They now allow it by the way. I don't know why. I am using
| Firefox on iOS and it was supported for at least half a year
| AFAIK.
|
| Your point still stands obviously.
| kwyjobojoe wrote:
| It's not really Firefox. They have to use the same engine as
| the Apple browser.
| capableweb wrote:
| I should have been more clear. I'm not talking about the
| "browser shell" (the UI for tabs, settings and so on) but
| about the "rendering engine" which in the case of Firefox is
| Gecko on PC, but since Apple has this arbitrary restriction,
| is Webkit on iOS, which is the same engine everyone on iOS is
| forced to use, no matter what.
|
| So yes, you're using Firefox, but you're still using the same
| rendering engine for your browser, as any other browser on
| iOS. Effectively limiting how powerful browsers can be on
| iOS, as Apple has full control over Webkit and doesn't allow
| anything else, literally anti-competitive behavior.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| On Desktop, how many rendering engines are there out there
| today? 3? Most browser creators cannot afford to create
| their own rendering engine, so we get Gecko, WebKit, or
| Blink.
|
| With this in mind, when you're asking for alternative
| rendering engines, you're really asking for Google to be
| able to get their hooks into iOS. It would be nice if
| Mozilla were free to develop their own engine but that's
| not without downside and the most likely outcome is an iOS
| dominated by Chrome and ad-tracking.
| spideymans wrote:
| > It would be nice if Mozilla were free to develop their
| own engine but that's not without downside and the most
| likely outcome is an iOS dominated by Chrome and ad-
| tracking
|
| The impacts go beyond iOS. The reality is that Safari is
| the only thing standing in the way of Google having IE-
| style dominance of browser usage share. As of now,
| Chromium has just under 80% usage share. If Chromium were
| as dominant as iOS as it is on desktop, it's usage share
| would likely exceed 90%
|
| Alternate engines are a fine idea in principle, but we
| need to consider whether a Chromium monopoly on the web
| is indeed an improvement from the status quo.
| aww_dang wrote:
| It would be nice if developers could debug Safari
| specific issues without jumping through Apple imposed
| hoops.
| pojntfx wrote:
| You're not using Firefox, you're using Safari with another
| skin. Browser engines other than Apple-approved Safari/WebKit
| are illegal on Apple platforms, effectively rendering it the
| biggest blocker for the web right now (no PWAs, no push
| notifications, no offline support, no support for free audio
| codecs, extensions ... and the list goes on!)
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I wouldn't bury your flag on this argument. Many users
| don't care about that stuff, and Apple is winning the
| privacy war through decisions like these.
| capableweb wrote:
| Doesn't matter what users care about, what matters is:
| "Is Apple abusing their position in the market?"
|
| One could claim since Apple IS the iOS market, for them
| to disallow competitors in certain app categories but not
| others, they are indeed abusing their position as a
| market owner, especially since they are the only one
| allowed (by them) to develop a browser engine.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| That claim is moot if you can't prove articulable harm
| that is in excess of the articulable benefits.
| pojntfx wrote:
| Well, the alternative to PWAs is publishing through
| proprietary app stores - the users might not care to
| much, but it's incredibly important for us as devs. Also,
| one really can't trust a proprietary browser like Safari
| with their personal data - while one might be able to
| switch from Chrome due to FLOC on Android, Linux, Windows
| etc., Safari would _force_ the change on their users,
| with them being unable to switch to anything but the
| "officially approved" browser.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Well, the alternative to PWAs is publishing through
| proprietary app stores
|
| This is what PWA really boils down to isn't it. It's not
| about standards or openness it's about money. It's about
| bypassing the App Store to do whatever the fuck you want.
| [deleted]
| spideymans wrote:
| I'd hate to see the mobile landscape dominated by web
| apps the way the desktop is. PWAs benefit developers, but
| I've yet to see how they improve my UX as an end user
| (when compared to native)
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Many users don 't care about that stuff_
|
| Users don't object to a lot of things when either they
| aren't aware of them or they believe they can't do
| anything about them. That doesn't mean they aren't still
| being harmed.
| izacus wrote:
| Users also "didn't care" about using Internet Explorer in
| the Microsoft days and the browser market was STILL
| severely handicapped with their monopolistic abuse.
|
| Same goes for Apple - with no ability to build an
| alternative browser engine the market IS handicapped,
| especially since Apple is abusing this restriction to
| prevent web applications from competing with applications
| from which they charge tax on every single monetary
| transaction.
| sbuk wrote:
| The difference here of course is that Microsoft we're
| shown to be threatening to withdraw OEMs licenses if they
| provided Netscape preinstalled. They also threatened the
| same if OEMs provided alternative OSS such as Linux.
|
| Apple on the other hand are preventing alternative
| rendering engines. It's a very different situation.
| That's not to say that it isn't problematic, but it not
| as simple or as cut and dried as "but Microsoft and
| IE!?!"
| izacus wrote:
| It's actually even simpler - Apple doesn't even open an
| option to even have any kind of threats for withdrawing
| licenses because they own everything and use hard DRM to
| prevent any alternatives.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Call me stupid, but what exists on android that users on
| iOS are begging for that only exists on android because
| of the "freedom" of the platform. I'd like to take a
| moment to say that android is just handicapped because I
| can't run a different OS, or screw around in the OS and
| change things to my whims. But no ones talking about
| that, why not?
| nmfisher wrote:
| > Call me stupid, but what exists on android that users
| on iOS are begging for that only exists on android
| because of the "freedom" of the platform.
|
| Right now, Fortnite.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Epic is trying to strong arm their way into a position of
| power against steam and apple so they increase their take
| off the casino they've filled with children. Like under
| 10 years old children, asking parents to buy them skins.
| Skins and loot boxes are the worst thing to happen to
| gaming and should be regulated. I, and many others are
| firmly on Apple's side on this issue. If Epic made
| revolutionary or just great games and didn't get children
| addicted to digital heroin then I'd give their argument
| more consideration. I don't want kids sideloading random
| casino malware just because the kid at recess says it's
| cool.
|
| Got a better example?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Epic is trying to strong arm their way into a position
| of power against steam and apple so they increase their
| take off the casino they 've filled with children._
|
| And Apple has the moral high ground wanting a cut of
| proceeds because they make it easy for children to get to
| the casino? Not a great analogy.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Apple has a better record on this than every other
| company I can think of. So it is actually a good analogy.
| Perhaps Epic didn't want to abide by these rules and used
| the fees as a cover?
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/94213
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Apple has a better record on this than every other
| company I can think of._
|
| Rent seeking on things you find immoral?
|
| > _Perhaps Epic didn 't want to abide by these rules and
| used the fees as a cover?_
|
| Is this something Apple has alleged? Because otherwise it
| looks like you're speculating wildly to appeal to
| emotion. "It's ok because maybe they're bad people."
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| That's not even an argument. It seems you're commenting
| in bad faith trying to trap me in some linguistical
| mistake.
|
| I did say perhaps which, last I checked, is a sign of a
| rhetorical thought.
|
| Apple is not perfect, I don't like Apple, but epic is
| selling crack to kids in my community. at least apple
| keeps intermediaries between them and their child slaves.
| I'm not taking sides here. All these huge companies are
| deplorable and should never have been allowed to grow so
| large.
| saurik wrote:
| Apple had no issue with Epic selling crack to your
| kids... as long as they got their 30% cut: there are no
| universally good actors here, and deciding your opinions
| on right and wrong based not on what should have happened
| but on your general opinions about the parties isn't how
| any of this should ever work.
| danShumway wrote:
| Depending on your interests, that could be anything from:
| Fortnite, Tasker[0], NewPipe, Ublock Origin[1],
| Syncthing, xCloud and GeForce Now (until pretty
| recently[2]), RetroArch, the Dolphin emulator (as of iOS
| 14.4), and the most recent addition, NSFW Discord
| servers.
|
| > android is just handicapped because I can't run a
| different OS, or screw around in the OS and change things
| to my whims
|
| You totally can. I've been running LineageOS for a while,
| it's great. Improves my battery life, allows me to
| quarantine apps, gives me more access to the firewall for
| adblocking, and lets me get rid of cruft like the
| launcher. You can even completely de-Google Android, or
| install a community-maintained shim called MicroG that
| enables some of the features without the tracking.
|
| The Android situation could be much better, this is why
| some people are excited about Linux phones. But I don't
| know a ton of Android users who are clambering to make it
| _harder_ to use storefronts like F-Droid. I literally can
| not imagine going to a phone platform that didn 't
| support NewPipe, I watch too many videos on my device,
| using the official Youtube apps would degrade the
| experience way too much.
|
| I do think that the number of Android-exclusive things
| you can do is much lower than it used to be. It used to
| be pretty easy to make a compelling case that if you
| cared about flexibility at all, you bought an Android
| phone. I don't think that's the case anymore. But Apple
| still hasn't really stopped being Apple, so while the
| differences have become a lot less glaring, they also
| haven't completely disappeared. And sure, you can get
| some of this functionality back by jailbreaking, but in
| comparison the vast majority of the stuff you do on
| Android won't require root access, and all of the apps I
| listed above can be installed on a stock Android device
| without flashing or breaking anything at all.
|
| Whether or not iOS users actually care about that
| stuff... :shrug: I suspect many of them don't. I'm not
| going to try and make a giant case about whether your
| average person on the street wants to be able to emulate
| Gamecube games on their phone. But I also don't really
| care; I'm a consumer and I want to be able to emulate
| Gamecube games on my phone. I'm a consumer, and I want to
| be able to install alternative Youtube front-ends that
| increase my privacy. I want to be able to block ads in my
| browser.
|
| At the moment, Android provides an alternative for me.
| I'm very lucky that I never got locked into Apple's
| ecosystem so I don't have to make a choice between losing
| access to my credit card and being able to have a user-
| respecting Youtube client. But if you are locked into
| Apple's ecosystem, making a switch between phone
| platforms can be really prohibitively expensive and time
| consuming, so I sympathize with people who are in that
| position.
|
| ----
|
| [0]: To be fair IFTT is pretty good, but it just can't
| offer the same level of functionality.
|
| [1]: I know someone will jump in on this, but adblocking
| in Safari is just not comparable to Firefox. There is no
| way to get what I would consider to be adequate
| adblocking on the web in iOS.
|
| [2]: Microsoft/Nvidia have only been able to launch on
| iOS using webapps, which given Safari's current
| limitations are arguably a worse experience than having
| native apps.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I don't own any apple devices. I'd support movements to
| get Apple to be more open to allowing the apps you
| mentioned, excluding fortnite, onto their platform
| through alternative means. However, epic seems to be
| dominating the discussion and they are a bad actor acting
| in bad faith who peddle digital crack to children
| fleecing their parents. If we can disambiguate between
| useful apps, or apps that aren't designed to vacuum money
| out of children and the flaws with apples model that'd be
| great.
|
| To say that you can just install lineage is disingenuous.
| I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs
| at launch so my argument stands against these phone
| manufacturers as much as they do against Apple.
|
| Simply, my perspective is that people are going too hard
| on apple and not hard enough on Google. They both need to
| be broken up and forced to allow more programs on the
| products they sell. Epic is tainting the argument and
| trying to disingenuously spin their self interests as a
| benefit for consumers.
| saurik wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, Epic also sued Google;
| that lawsuit just doesn't get much press, as the
| narrative surrounding Apple's store is so much easier to
| attack due to how almost all Android devices technically
| support sideloading (though as a second-class feature
| which is actively crippled and discouraged by Google in
| ways that are maybe anticompetitive).
| danShumway wrote:
| Epic is also currently in a lawsuit against Google over
| Google threatening phone manufactures who include
| alternative stores alongside Google Play. I'm not sure
| where the argument is that Android is the ideal; Google
| does restrict a lot of functionality to the Play store,
| arguably illegally. They're just comparatively less
| restrictive than Apple is.
|
| > I've never had an android phone that allowed custom
| ROMs at launch
|
| Valid concern, but this is less a Google problem and more
| a hardware problem. Google isn't doing anything to block
| LineageOS, it just takes time to support the new
| hardware. You'll see the same problem with consumer
| laptops and Linux. This is why we have increasing
| movement to try and get Open hardware/firmware.
| Nevertheless, the situation with LineageOS is still
| comparatively much better than it is on Apple hardware.
| At least with LineageOS, you don't need to find a
| jailbreak to get it working.
|
| Part of the reason Apple dominates these conversations is
| because it's the most obvious, clear example of what
| we're talking about -- not because the situation on
| Android is ideal or because we wouldn't like the Android
| situation to be better. Check out the discussions about
| the Librem 5/Pinephone if you're interested in getting
| involved in the effort to make hardware compatibility
| better in general.
|
| > epic seems to be dominating the discussion
|
| It's not so much that everything revolves around
| Fortnite, it's just that Epic is currently one of the
| biggest forces in play surrounding antitrust. It's a bit
| like how Google and Oracle dominated the conversation
| around API Copyright -- not because Google was a saintly
| company, but because they were currently arguing about it
| in front of a judge, and that's a newsworthy event that
| might have large effects on the industry.
|
| That being said, I'm also a little bit confused about why
| you're voicing this objection here, because this article
| doesn't mention Epic at all, and outside the comment
| thread that you started, I don't really see anywhere else
| in the comments where anyone has brought Epic up.
| Fortnite was 1 out of 10 apps that I mentioned in a
| comment thread that was originally talking about Apple's
| refusal to allow alternative browsers like Firefox. So
| while Epic is certainly getting a lot of coverage in
| general, it's not like nothing else is being talked
| about. I certainly didn't zero in on Epic in my comment
| other than to list Fortnite as one of multiple examples
| of apps some consumers might care about.
|
| On the note of "unequal coverage", it's also worth
| mentioning that the legislative effort being covered in
| this article _is_ targeting both Apple and Google and
| would affect both companies equally. So I 'm not even
| sure it's accurate for you to say that Google is getting
| a free pass legally. The Judiciary Committee is certainly
| not ignoring Google right now.
| risyachka wrote:
| Where do you draw a line between abusing and feature?
|
| If Apple didn't position itself as privacy-focused, then
| not allowing other browsers would be clearly violation,
| but if this is basically part of the product description
| - and many people buy iPhones in the first place because
| they don't want or case about other browsers - they want
| safety - why should Apple be forced to do it?
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| >Where do you draw a line between abusing and feature?
|
| When there's articulable harm.
|
| Microsoft forcing the junk that was IE, and all their
| other thuggish tactics, is articulable.
|
| The differences between chrome and safari are
| insignificant enough that you'll bore most people when
| trying to superficially explain how pretty much the only
| people negatively effected are advertisers, who have been
| avoiding their public reckoning over the straight up
| horrific things they do in closed rooms.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by
| the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios, but that'd be news
| to me.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Maybe I 'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by
| the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios_
|
| Well, developers of modern web apps can offer a
| qualitatively better experience on those other platforms
| in some ways than they can with iOS Safari. The offline
| working features are one clear example. The use of open
| (=> cheaper and sometimes better-performing) standards
| for things like audio and video content is another.
|
| Unless you contend that the only reason any web developer
| ever uses the features available in other browsers but
| not iOS Safari is to abuse or exploit users, in other
| words that no-one is (or would, if Apple supported them)
| make any legitimate use of those features that would
| improve the user's experience in some way, it is clear
| that users are materially disadvantaged by the
| limitations of iOS Safari, unless they have the choice to
| use another browser that does offer those features
| instead.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Microsoft didn't ban anything. They commited the mortal sin of
| bundling notepad.exe and freezing out text editor innovation...
| or something like that.
| xxs wrote:
| >Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit
| is. Is that really a fair ranking?
|
| As shocking as it is Microsoft's "bing" does the same... Some
| more: duckduckgo.com does the same as well. (ok it uses
| microsoft's stuff underneath)
|
| To be fair I am surprised with the results.
| zffr wrote:
| WebKit on iOS has special sandbox privileges not available to
| other user frameworks. I think it allows it to spawn other
| processes, and do special stuff to increase its performance and
| decrease energy consumption. It seems like an engineering
| challenge to expose these features to arbitrary 3rd party
| frameworks in a way that doesn't allow these features to be
| abused.
|
| Not sure of Apple's full motives, but I think this is at least
| part of the reason other rendering engines are not supported.
| traib wrote:
| > WebKit on iOS has special sandbox privileges not available
| to other user frameworks.
|
| Okay so WebKit cannot be used as is, but then why forbid
| other alternatives [1]? Seems like a Catch-22.
|
| > It seems like an engineering challenge to expose these
| features to arbitrary 3rd party frameworks in a way that
| doesn't allow these features to be abused.
|
| How does literally every single other platform manage this?
| AFAIK none of Android, Windows, the many Unix-like OSs, even
| Apple's MacOs have such restrictions on browser apps.
|
| And I think it'd be unfair to characterize the users of those
| other platforms as being "abused" by their browser apps. E.g.
| Firefox seems pretty trustworthy.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
| - "2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate
| WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| What prohibited browsers are you referring to?
| traib wrote:
| I was mainly referring to how every browser app on iOS is
| forced have Safari underneath. The wiki page on Firefox
| for iOS [1] mentions this in some detail - it cannot use
| Gecko like it does on desktop and Android, it must use
| WebKit instead.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
| fingerlocks wrote:
| This is a technical detail most people don't care about.
| You still get all the competing browsers with all their
| specific features on iOS, regardless of the rendering
| engine.
| gorbypark wrote:
| All non-Safari browsers on iOS use the Safari engine
| underneath, which doesn't currently support WebRTC. It's
| a pretty huge blocker for a lot of sites (video
| conferencing, etc) to have to throw up a "Please use
| Safari" banner for iOS users using anything other than
| Safari.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It also doesn't support Web APIs that Chrome and Firefox
| have supported for 8+ years now.
| cma wrote:
| I believe due to webkit no browsers are allowed to do
| full screen with multitouch. It is possible this only
| affects Safari and Chrome and isn't a webkit limitation,
| I haven't tested Firefox.
| zepto wrote:
| > How does literally every single other platform manage
| this? AFAIK none of Android, Windows, the many Unix-like
| OSs, even Apple's MacOs have such restrictions on browser
| apps.
|
| They don't. All of those platforms are less secure than
| iOS.
| traib wrote:
| > All of those platforms are less secure than iOS.
|
| Do you have a source for this statement, specifically in
| relation to browsers?
|
| Let's consider Android. I wouldn't automatically assume
| that using Safari on iOS is more (or less) secure than
| using Chrome or Firefox on Android - they are all
| provided by well known tech companies with years of
| expertise building browsers and a focus on security.
| zepto wrote:
| Android is definitely less secure than iOS, you can
| easily verify this by googling.
|
| Controlling the execution environment is part of iOS's
| defense in depth strategy. Focussing on browsers alone is
| a red herring. You have to look at the whole system.
|
| It's true that Google or Mozilla may be able to produce
| an equivalent level of security in a browser engine, but
| that's a false comparison, since alternative browsers are
| not limited to just these companies.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| iOS still runs main parts of its text rendering in kernel
| space. It is by definition less secure than almost any
| other operating system.
| zepto wrote:
| And yet somehow isn't as plagued by botnets and banking
| Trojans etc.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Android is definitely less secure than iOS, you can
| easily verify this by googling.
|
| You can also verify that the world is run by lizard
| people by googling.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| And yet iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits
| because iOS exploits are so plentiful[1][2].
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_f
| laws/
|
| [2] http://zerodium.com/program.html
| [deleted]
| zepto wrote:
| That's a function of unsold _inventory_ and the
| usefulness of exploits and nothing to do with the number
| of possible exploits.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Bing.com has Google Earth first on the list as well.
|
| I think you are overreacting to how many searches give Google
| products as the first result.
|
| The only products that do rank high are literally the most
| popular products. What do you think they should rig the results
| against themselves? Why would that help people?
| notyourwork wrote:
| > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on
| their mobile devices? We already went through this with
| Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| How can Microsoft control what games you play on Xbox or how
| can Nintendo control what games you play on switch?
|
| Why are grocery stores allowed to sell private brand products
| that compete?
|
| I'm worried we don't quite have a good grip on how to solve
| this problem.
| kortilla wrote:
| > The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm
| just worried how it took so long to get here.
|
| Because this is a Gish Gallop of weak individual reasons
| batched together to make it seem like a stronger obvious
| argument when it's not.
|
| > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed
| to compete in it?
|
| They don't. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads.
| You need to be more specific.
|
| > How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their
| own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace?
|
| Go to a store, this is what Walmart, Albertsons/Safeway,
| Costco, etc have been doing for longer than any of the FAANGs
| have existed.
|
| > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on
| their mobile devices? We already went through this with
| Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| The same reason you can't put software you want on a
| Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
|
| > Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of
| more general results?
|
| Because it's their algorithm to do with what they want. If they
| want to erode public trust by using it to advertise their
| products, that's their choice. Other things they adjust the
| algorithm to do: filter malware, filter porn (by default),
| filter unreliable sites, etc. You're going to have a really
| hard time defining what's "fair" for a black box algorithm to
| do.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "The same reason you can't put software you want on a
| Xbox/PlayStation/Switch."
|
| Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
|
| Furstly, which law or court case actually establishes that
| those business practices are right and proper?
|
| Secondly, which law or court case establishes that
| smartphones can be equated with game consoles? There is a
| huge body of law that governs mobile connectivity, spectrum,
| emergency services, etc. that has no bearing on a gaming
| device.
| ben_w wrote:
| I believe the principal is that everything which is not
| banned is legal. This probably has a funky Latin
| translation, but I don't know as I'm not a lawyer.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| John has gone to the pub, a random person gave him $5,000
| and said he can keep half if he transfers the rest to
| Bob. Later it turned out it was drug money.
|
| The question in court will not be "is money laundering
| illegal" or "is taking money from random people illegal".
| The question in court will be "does this amount to money
| laundering, or is john just an idiot and it was not his
| responsibility to know".
|
| Similarly, here we are discussing not "is market
| manipulation illegal", but "does the activity carried out
| by Apple amount to market manipulation"
|
| Comparing Apple to game consoles is basically: "stop
| selling drugs" - "John does it too, and he is not in
| jail, so it's fine."
|
| That argument only works if John has been to court and a
| judge has ruled that he is innocent. That's case law - it
| established that previously, in similar circumstances, a
| court has rules that this was / wasn't a crime.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Mens rea._
| kabdib wrote:
| >>"The same reason you can't put software you want on a
| Xbox/PlayStation/Switch."
|
| > Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
|
| Letting anyone put any software they wanted on an
| Xbox/Playstation/Switch would diminish the platform's value
| by eroding security and trust.
|
| For instance, compare online cheating ecosystems between
| those three platforms and the PC (where you _can_ run any
| software you want). The PC is a much, much worse platform
| in terms of cheaters, scammers and account hijacks.
|
| I have no problem with people running whatever they want on
| the hardware they purchase, but extending that to "I should
| also be allowed to be trusted when I do this" does not
| logically follow. In other words, feel free to reflash your
| Xbox, but don't expect to be able to play games or connect
| to your Xbox Live account from that hardware after your
| jailbreak.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| That is totally irrelevant.
|
| This about not allowing competing browsers as a blanket
| policy. If this was trully about security, Apple can do
| as many security audits as they want. They can even
| charge for them. They can require affidavit, security
| officers, insurance policy, indemnity, etc.
|
| But they dont because this is not about security, it is
| about controling the market
| bun_at_work wrote:
| Controlling what market? The browser market?
|
| A large part of Apple's brand, at this point, is security
| from snooping, personal privacy, etc etc. It makes sense
| to control the browser on the iPhone for privacy than it
| does to seek to eliminate browser competitors. Safari
| isn't a crucial part of their revenue, devices with the
| security promise are. Furthermore, the browser seems to
| be the key space where use privacy is violated from, via
| cookies and other tracking software. If Apple want's to
| say they have a pro-privacy device, controlling the
| browser makes sense for that goal.
|
| It just doesn't make business sense for Apple to be
| attempting to control the browser market. Maybe you mean
| they are controlling some other market through the
| browser, though.
| kabdib wrote:
| Not allowing arbitrary code on a platform is hardly an
| irrelevant point. It's a fundamental architectural
| decision that makes deep statements about what a platform
| can do, and who has permission to do it. These decisions
| define both business models AND features such as user
| security and trustworthiness.
|
| For instance, to be competitive in terms of performance,
| a browser almost certainly needs to JIT Javascript. If a
| platform prevents apps from generating code and enabling
| the 'X' bit in PTEs then this isn't going to work. Even
| if the platform provides JIT services (e.g., pass in an
| AST, out pops a few pages of callable code) there is
| still a ton of added risk.
|
| Designing and maintaining the security of a platform is a
| ton of work and a big investment (assuming it's done
| well). Security teams are already quite busy, and adding
| whole app categories that are suddenly able to break
| previously established design decisions is not easy --
| "just do a security audit on a handful of titles" is a
| phrase that we've all heard, many times, and it sends
| shivers down our spines. Having seen it tried, and been
| on some projects that did it, I think it's impossible to
| do well even at a small scale.
|
| Been there, done that, seen projects canceled because PMs
| couldn't internalize the nature of the risk to the
| platform.
| ben_w wrote:
| > You're going to have a really hard time defining what's
| "fair" for a black box algorithm to do.
|
| To which the two biggest counter-arguments are:
|
| 1. "So don't allow black box algorithms"
|
| 2. "This is why the search engine company should be separate
| from the company which owns all the other products"
| Nasrudith wrote:
| So when are we banning human judgements? They are the
| ultimate black box.
| Tarsul wrote:
| at least humans are held accountable.
| kortilla wrote:
| People use Google because the algorithm is a black box that
| is constantly updated to keep away black hat SEO crap. An
| open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an
| adversarial environment. There is no current signal that
| can't be trivially gained that doesn't effectively require
| mass user surveillance (to see "what's really popular").
|
| > 2. "This is why the search engine company should be
| separate from the company which owns all the other
| products"
|
| This doesn't solve the problem. They can still alter top
| listings to push things for "preferred partners and
| truths".
| neolog wrote:
| > An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an
| adversarial environment.
|
| Anybody with Search experience confirm or deny this
| claim?
| random314 wrote:
| I have experience, and this is trivially true. Search
| engines can only look at proxies for relevance , as
| General AI hasn't been achieved yet. Proxies can always
| be gamed.
| telmo wrote:
| > black hat SEO crap
|
| Pretty redundant if you ask me: black hat, SEO and crap.
| echelon wrote:
| > > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers
| on their mobile devices? We already went through this with
| Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| > The same reason you can't put software you want on a
| Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
|
| The iPhone is a general purpose computer, not a gaming toy.
| You do finances, email, chat, dating, games, spreadsheets,
| GPS navigation, photos, video - your entire life, all one one
| device.
|
| For half of Americans, this is the only computer they own.
|
| For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you can
| use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
|
| That's mafia behavior.
|
| Gamers can choose between Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC,
| Steam, Epic, and dozens of other platforms. There's lots of
| choice, and this is just one industry with a very narrow
| impact on consumers' lives.
|
| Mobile computer (aka smartphone) users get to choose between
| Apple and Android for the entirety of everything they do, and
| both of these companies try to butt into everything. They
| even want to control banking and payments.
|
| The App Stores aren't given to us benevolently out of the
| good will of a loving Apple and Google. They're means of
| exerting control and extracting profit in a monopolistic
| fashion. They both need to die.
| ben_w wrote:
| > You do finances, email, chat, dating, games,
| spreadsheets, GPS navigation
|
| > For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you
| can use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
|
| 30% (or even 15%) of $0 is $0.
|
| Apple gets nothing from me for my finance apps, my email
| client, my chat apps, my spreadsheet apps, or my GPS apps,
| _because they are free_.
|
| I can't comment about dating apps as I'm not using any.
| Complaining that Apple charges for gaming, however, is
| weird given you choose to reject them as gaming devices.
| andiareso wrote:
| The argument was "general purpose computer" which would
| include games. It's not exclusively a gaming device
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| > > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be
| allowed to compete in it?
|
| > They don't. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from
| ads.
|
| Yes, but they own _search_ ads and a large percentage of web
| ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less
| relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to
| put people into their ad funnel.
|
| They control 50% of the mobile OS, 70%+ of the browser
| monoculture, and nearly 100% of search. They can order sites
| according to which ones use AdSense or AMP, neuter ad
| blocking (especially of AdSense), and collect behavior across
| the web even when website owners don't want it.
|
| They're fucking up an entire set of technologies to further
| their goals.
|
| That's not monopolistic. That's horrific. I don't think we
| even have a term to describe this yet, it's so bad.
|
| We're all getting _Big Teched_.
| darawk wrote:
| > Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of
| web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and
| less relevant each year), and they do everything in their
| power to put people into their ad funnel.
|
| You can call any company as a monopoly if you define its
| market narrowly enough. The hard question is making a good
| argument for your choice of market. Google is absolutely a
| monopoly in search advertising. But is search advertising
| the right market to consider? Google would argue the
| appropriate market is advertising as a whole, where they
| are clearly not a monopoly.
|
| The ultimate question at hand is whether and to what extent
| consumers are being harmed by anti-competitive practices. I
| think in Google's case that's a hard case to make. It might
| be a bit easier for e.g. Facebook or Amazon, though.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their
| own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They
| should have been forced to divide their busin
|
| Depends on how you define "marketplace". Costco/Walmart/Best
| Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe's/grocery stores all sell their own
| brands next to competing brands in their stores.
|
| Is their one store _the_ marketplace? It takes considerably
| more effort to go to a different store than going to a
| different website.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's not just whatever marketplace, anti-monopoly legislation
| focuses on markets where the players own a significant share
| of the full market. In the case of Amazon, it seems like they
| have above 52% of the e-commerce market in the US in 2019
| (https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-
| e-c...) so probably it's even higher now.
|
| When one player now has over half the market, you need to
| carefully watch what they are doing in order for them not to
| start exploiting their position. This is why it's different
| between Amazon and Home Depot, they hold different amount of
| the market, so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their
| position, they probably couldn't. Amazon with their
| marketshare, can do so much easier.
|
| Then there is the issue of specifically Amazon ranking their
| own products above others in their search results, even if
| others have better reviews, more purchases, more page views
| and so on. Then we start getting into "abusing their market
| position" territory, and this is what is getting investigated
| now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, so the issue is not just selling your own products in
| your own marketplace.
|
| > This is why it's different between Amazon and Home Depot,
| they hold different amount of the market, so even if Home
| Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably
| couldn't.
|
| I would say Home Depot has far more control of their
| markets than Amazon does. Pick any smaller metro, and the
| only consumer building materials store around is Home Depot
| or Lowes. The two basically split up all the markets, and
| if there's not enough business to sustain both, then there
| will be just one. But no other store will be able to
| compete.
|
| If you're a manufacturer and you can't convince Home Depot
| or Lowes to stock your item in their store, then you're not
| going to reach 90% of people via in store attention (for
| home improvement stuff).
|
| Almost all big box store brands have whittled down to two
| viable options, or even one in the case of Best Buy.
| Although, I think that might be the natural state of things
| given how low profit margins are for retail (low single
| digit percentages).
| capableweb wrote:
| > Yes, so the issue is not just selling your own products
| in your own marketplace.
|
| Of course not, the final issue is companies becoming
| monopolies and companies abusing their market positions,
| that is what we want to prevent, in order to foster
| innovation and open markets.
|
| > I would say Home Depot has far more control of their
| markets than Amazon does
|
| Maybe you're right, I know nothing about what's going on
| on the ground of the US. So if Home Depot do have more
| control of their market than what Amazon has of the
| e-commerce market (more than 50%), then they should also
| be under watch to see what "strategies" they employ to
| get more profits.
|
| Just because the House is now investigating technology
| companies doesn't mean that hopefully whatever
| legislation comes out of this, cannot be applied to other
| industries.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I'm from a rural county in Illinois and our largest city
| has Lowes, HD, Menards, Ace, Farm and Home Supply and a
| number of specialty stores. There's considerably more
| competition in Home Depot's field.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I forgot about Ace, but searching on Maps shows there's
| still a few around! I wonder if they are franchised. I
| only recall seeing HD and Lowes on the coasts though.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Most Ace Hardware stores are franchises. There's 5000 of
| them in the US.
| ericmay wrote:
| How is it more competition? You'll visit at most what 2
| of those stores looking for a product?
|
| I can use plugins in a web browser to effectively visit
| 100 stores to shop for the best price on an item. Amazon
| is just another vendor.
|
| -edit-
|
| To add to this. If you want to compare to Amazon then you
| have to look at the market share and revenue of those
| stores too. Not simply their existence. It doesn't matter
| if an ACE hardware is in the area if it is 3% of the
| market.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I can use plugins in a web browser to effectively visit
| 100 stores to shop for the best price on an item. Amazon
| is just another vendor.
|
| Sure you could, but is that how most users use the web?
| According to Statista (2019 -
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-
| e-c...) [same link I put before], over 50% of the market
| is just Amazon, even though it's soooo easy to chose
| another one.
|
| Since they now have a grip of the majority of the market,
| they should be having lots of eyes on them, as they can
| easily abuse their position, which most of us don't want
| to them to do.
| zepto wrote:
| > Sure you could, but is that how most users use the web?
|
| It's not clear what the point is here.
|
| > According to Statista (2019 -
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-
| e-c...) [same link I put before], over 50% of the market
| is just Amazon, even though it's soooo easy to chose
| another one.
|
| Could it be that people choose Amazon because despite its
| faults it provides the best service?
|
| I dislike Amazon and try to avoid them wherever possible,
| but in practice I probably use them 50% of the time,
| because in those instances there isn't a better
| alternative.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It doesn't matter what percentage of people choose an
| option so long as competing options are readily
| available. The fact is Amazon can't abuse it's position
| and raise prices dramatically or severely reduce service
| or otherwise take advantage of a captive market because
| the market is not captive.
| ericmay wrote:
| I can't view the link without paying unless you are
| simply showing that Amazon has 13% of the global
| e-commerce market and 50%~ of the U.S. market.
|
| To answer your question - it doesn't matter. We don't
| determine monopolies simply because of market share. If
| we did, why aren't we filing another anti-trust
| investigation against Microsoft and Windows?
|
| The point anyway is that people have no switching cost.
| Amazon faces stiff competition not just in America but
| globally. I remain unconvinced that they have a monopoly
| on e-commerce. Sure they may have take some monopolistic
| _actions_ which could be addressed, but that's not enough
| for me to demonstrate that they are a monopoly.
|
| Frankly, I think Amazon has really been struggling. Prime
| sucks. 2-day shipping is slipping not just in service but
| as new competitors enter the market. It's a fierce
| competition.
|
| Google and Facebook on the other hand _are_ monopolies.
| That's a no-brainer.
|
| Apple I'm not sure how they've even been in the
| discussion.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Apple I'm not sure how they've even been in the
| discussion
|
| Remember that Apple and Google pulled a legal app from
| their stores, regular Apple users (like 50% of US) can't
| install stuff on their device without Apple parental
| approval and the "make it a website argument also fails
| because Apple is does not let you install a better
| browser".
|
| 50% still affects a lot of people, though Apple fanboys
| will attempt to say is not a big enough number (remember
| you could install other browsers and whatever application
| you wanted on Windows without a Microsoft approval or
| tax).
| ericmay wrote:
| Depends on how you look at it. Are we comparing operating
| systems? Then we have a duopoly and should regulated
| Android as well. Are we comparing phone manufacturers?
| Well, there's a ton of them, Apple just competes and does
| the best.
|
| > Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores
|
| I can't sell anything I want at Wal-Mart. Doesn't PayPal
| not allow porn sites to do business? I don't see how this
| is different.
|
| > Windows without a Microsoft approval or tax
|
| So is it market share or what? What exactly is the
| monopoly? Microsoft doesn't allow me to play PlayStation
| games on Xbox. Most computers are sold with Windows
| operating systems. I don't know what the monopoly is
| supposed to be with Apple.
| simion314 wrote:
| - consoles, I am against their locking too , there is
| less complains about them so far since people can
| jailbreak them and their mostly media/enterteiment
| devices, but again I don't agree with the locks on
| consoles either
|
| - monopoly, duopoly is not that important, you can have 3
| big actors in a market that are cooperating against the
| users for their own interests, so the market share is
| irrelevant and the abuse/damage is relevant. Is Apple not
| allowing say 10 million users to install some app because
| of political reasons or 50 million users to install a
| game because some other policy reason? This people were
| affected , for example Joe did not know when he bought
| his iPhone that Apple can block his favorite game , or
| some app , is friend Bob has Android and he side loaded
| it, Joe is pissed now and feels tricked because on the
| box it was not printed that Apple can abuse his trust
| like this.
| katbyte wrote:
| What app?
| simion314 wrote:
| I don't want to name it, because the US guys will start
| again a big debate why X event is worse then Y event, why
| this P app is worse then F app, and since X > Y and P< F
| then Apple is right to ban the legal app P to protect the
| citizens.
|
| That is a very visible case, but there were other smaller
| cases , where smaller applications were blocked because
| they had a link and that link was going to a page and on
| that page a developer would accept donations and Apple
| wanted a but from that.
|
| Then you have apps blocked on totalitarian states, an
| entire nation is affected because they can't side load
| applications.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is
| does not let you install a better browser".
|
| I'm currently on chrome on my iphone. Maybe you can't
| install arbitrary browsers, but you can certainly install
| different ones. And there's always jailbreaking.
| simion314 wrote:
| Chrome is a bit more then a skin and you know it and I am
| sure you can't expect to trick competent people with this
| argument. If iOS would implement PWA then some native
| applications could be implemented as as PWA and Apple
| would lose money(I don't believe the security or privacy
| excuse either, a PWA will always have less access then a
| native app)
| jjk166 wrote:
| PWA are supported by iOS
| simion314 wrote:
| Is this "Safari the new IE" just a meme
| https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com
|
| I will have to let someone else to continue this since I
| don't own a iOS device and at work we don't target
| mobile.
|
| Though I had to fix soem iOS issue sin a third party
| plugin, it was using some WebGl and it was broken on iOS,
| so the plugin was using a software(slow and ugly thing)
| for iOS but then Apple change things so tablets pretend
| they are desktops and broke the plugin(so from my limited
| experience iOS browsers are inferior ).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I can't tell if you're joking or not. Apple refuses to
| implement Web APIs that make PWAs usable, the same Web
| APIs that Google, Chrome, Firefox, etc have all
| implemented 8+ years ago.
| clairity wrote:
| the percentage share of a market is an indicator but not
| the defining characteristic of monopoly practices, rather
| it's control. principally that manifests as pricing power
| and leverage over competitors. a monopolist can have a 20%
| share and still exert anti-competitive power over that
| market.
| 8note wrote:
| How much of the home tools and amateur construction market
| does the hone despot have? I'd image they have more than 50
| as well
| skystarman wrote:
| The standard for antitrust enforcement for decades has been
| when the action of a company harms consumers.
|
| How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?
|
| Amazon is one of the most highly rated companies in the US
| by its customers. Its NPS score is 69 and 70 is considered
| "world class".
|
| I can get almost anything online shipped to my house the
| SAME DAY. If Amazon sends you the wrong item they'll let
| you keep the wrong one and immediately ship you a new one!
|
| How is taking action against Amazon going to help
| consumers? Seems to me that just ends up being a giant win
| for Walmart and target who offer worse service and often
| worse prices!
|
| So how are consumers being hurt?
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| "The standard for decades"... the article is about a new
| laws being proposed because the current laws don't
| properly account for the harms monopoly actors cause.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Isn't that itself very suspicious that they are going all
| Calvinball and changing the rules which long stood out of
| the blue?
|
| Now they say it is a monopoly is a problem after Walmart
| managed to become the biggest employer in several states
| and literally becoming the only option in many areas? Now
| they cite vague unspecified harms while long ignoring
| concrete ones and claim the ones with no ability to
| exclude from the market are too far? That just screams
| "pretext".
| zepto wrote:
| What harms?
| Renaud wrote:
| >How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?
|
| but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller
| product competitors away, reducing their sales and their
| ability to grow and innovate.
|
| Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other
| brand sold, and made them cheaper. Great for consumers if
| the only thing you care about it price.
|
| Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products
| will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with
| Amazon on these products.
|
| You end up with less competition and less choice. Amazon
| can just undercut you, push you down in their listings
| and get the lion's share of any product type they find
| lucrative.
|
| Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this
| is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon?
|
| Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on
| countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial
| party so they have a chance to sell their ware.
| insert_coin wrote:
| The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same
| arguments word for word.
|
| And yet we saw the rise of independent stores,
| gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the
| rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple
| Store, the rise of...
|
| And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands.
| Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market
| despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their
| suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to
| chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear
| mongering, today there is not a single product category
| where only one brand exists, there is not a single
| product category where only the Walmart brand exists.
|
| Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot
| be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge
| today because Walmart was so huge before it; people
| actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of
| spite.
|
| Competition cannot be stopped, except _by_ regulations.
| Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making
| sure they 'll never let anyone else in.
|
| Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been
| so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as
| Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty
| GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
| pydry wrote:
| >The same things were said against Walmart, the exact
| same arguments word for word.
|
| And?
|
| >And yet we saw the rise of independent stores,
| gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the
| rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple
| Store
|
| So... Walmart was outcompeted by the Apple Store?
| baq wrote:
| One example: Amazon doesn't seem to care about fraudulent
| sellers and fake paid-for reviews on its platform.
| zikzak wrote:
| They seem to have a lot of sellers (relatively speaking)
| that do "triangle fraud". So they sell the part, order it
| from another site using stolen card, ship to original
| customer. They could be doing a lot to combat this but
| basically say "call the police" if they don't just ignore
| well sourced reports. Moving to more "fulfilled by
| Amazon" helps but that's never going to cover of all the
| inventory so fraudsters will always have a home there.
| zepto wrote:
| That's an example of poor service. Not them harming
| consumers. Do you know whether Walmart.com or Aliexpress
| are any better?
| baq wrote:
| actively looking the other way in presence of fraud on
| your platform is only 'poor service'? goalposts moved to
| the moon.
| zepto wrote:
| Are they "actively looking the other way", or is it just
| hard to detect when there is so much money involved?
| baq wrote:
| i don't know, do you?
| zepto wrote:
| So you just made up a bullshit accusation to discredit
| Amazon based on no evidence at all, and then claimed I
| was moving the goalposts?
| baq wrote:
| i know nothing happened in the review and fraud for
| years, i don't know if it's too expensive to fix - your
| bullshit against mine. (also, too expensive for amazon?
| what?)
|
| as to your goalposts, poor service is literally bad for
| customers/consumers, so i don't even know what to say
| except that you're quite likely incapable of letting go
| of your beliefs, because logic can't reconcile the
| dissonance.
| [deleted]
| jcrites wrote:
| Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things.
|
| As is the case when you are fighting against other
| humans, who are crafty, financially-motivated, and are
| willing to break the law, and may be operating from
| different jurisdictions where attempting to get the DA to
| prosecute them or filing a lawsuit against them is
| ineffective, it's a very difficult battle to fight.
|
| As an example I'd be surprised if Amazon could get China
| to prosecute a business operating from their country
| that's selling counterfeits on Amazon. Additionally, it's
| hard for Amazon to know if a product sold in its
| marketplace is counterfeit: there's no global API or
| method to look up if a product is authentic. The best you
| can do is rely on the trust of the seller. If you want to
| mitigate your risk, buy products that are only sold by
| Amazon itself, or name-brand 3rd party sellers who have
| high reputation (like Belkin for electronics; Apple even
| lists Belkin products that integrate with theirs on
| Apple's online store:
| https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/power-
| cables?fh=4... ).
|
| People occasionally experience counterfeits, but once
| reported the seller is typically caught and banned. (But
| if they're a corporation in another country, and willing
| to break the law and ToS, they'll reincorporate under
| another name and try to do it again. Stopping this is
| difficult.)
|
| Reviews are also a difficult problem to tackle. Amazon
| decided long ago to allow people to leave reviews without
| purchases, though reviews from people who purchased the
| item get an extra "verified purchase" badge. But that
| doesn't stop the abusers: they "buy" the item under
| various accounts they've created themselves, give the
| product a good review, and then return it to their own
| inventory. Small sellers might get a bunch of friends &
| family to do this, which would be hard to detect as ToS-
| violating conspiracy; larger sellers will use
| sophisticated schemes to create many accounts and
| identities to do the same thing (or simply pay a network
| of actual people to do it, such as by asking on
| Craigslist and similar places), to boost reviews of their
| own products, or if they're willing to burn cash, buy and
| negatively-review products of competitors. When done from
| many names/addresses/credit cards/IP addresses, it
| requires sophisticated intelligence analysis to detect
| and stop.
|
| Please consider the attackers that Amazon is actually up
| against when trying to stop these abusive behaviors
| before concluding that they don't care. They have
| multiple hundreds of people working on the problems. They
| are simply hard problems to solve, because Amazon is
| fighting against other smart, sophisticated humans who
| gain financially from their abuse.
|
| Amazon could shut down its marketplace, which accounts
| for 50% or more of all sales on the store, and only sell
| products it acquires directly from manufacturers, but
| that would destroy many businesses who have built
| themselves up using Amazon as a primary venue to sell
| their product. Furthermore, it would disallow people who
| have legitimately acquired the product another way from
| reselling it--for example, say I buy a pallet of some
| authentic product from a retail store that's going out of
| business; shouldn't I be able to resell those products?
| The law says that I can. If Amazon has a marketplace,
| shouldn't I be able to resell there? These could be Nike
| shoes or any name-brand products.
|
| (Sophisticated manufacturers who want to protect their
| supply chains from 3P reselling will repurchase inventory
| from retailers who are going out of business; or
| alternatively provide it to retailers on consignment
| --meaning Nike owns all the shoes being sold in a
| retailer's store up until the point where they're sold to
| a consumer; so upon going out of business the retailer is
| expected to return the inventory.)
|
| Now you run into tricky situations. I buy a pair of Nike
| shoes brand new from a retail store and never use them. I
| decide I don't like their look after all. Should I be
| able to sell my shoes on Amazon as new at a lower price
| than Nike does? Yes, you should and you can (though
| you're unlikely to be selected as the default offer as a
| new untrusted seller with a single product; unless Nike
| is one of the companies with brand protection for what
| may be offered as "new"; though I believe you could still
| sell as "like new"--I am not an expert on this space).
|
| Some brands were counterfeited so frequently that Amazon
| has started to offer the ability to limit who can sell
| trademark-protected items that are only sold by their
| manufacturers with its Brand Registry:
| https://brandservices.amazon.com/
|
| I believe the sellers who are accused of fraud or
| counterfeiting will be asked by Amazon to provide proof
| of authenticity, such as purchase orders from the
| manufacturer or other proof of authentic origin, but
| allowing people to open accounts and sell means they
| start with a presumption of trust -- creating the
| possibility that some people will have bad experiences
| with counterfeiters until they're caught and shut down.
|
| Imagine you're the Amazon engineer responsible for
| figuring out how to stop people willing to break the law
| and all of your policies to make profit; then put
| yourself in an attacker's shoes and imagine all the
| things you could do to circumvent the best ideas you can
| come up with for stopping fraudulent reviews and
| counterfeits. (Assume for the sake of argument that your
| company is committed to allowing third-parties to sell on
| the store.)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Amazon cares substantially about stopping these
| things._
|
| And yet Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose
| the correct reason for returns when they receive
| counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose "This
| item is a counterfeit" or "I believe this item is a
| counterfeit", the customer must choose between reasons
| for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like
| "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or
| doesn't work".
|
| You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing
| vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on
| their platform would at least try to collect data on the
| counterfeits their customers receive.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't buy it. This is why companies have (sometimes
| government-mandated) know-your-customer policies.
|
| Allowing anyone to sign up and do business on your
| platform with minimal friction is great for growing your
| platform, but it's terrible for growing a _trustworthy_
| platform.
|
| The things you bring up are the result of an allow-all
| policy with a denylist. Deny-all with an allowlist would
| fix the problem. But of course that costs a lot more to
| implement, and as long as people still buy stuff on
| Amazon despite the hassle of dealing with counterfeits,
| Amazon will continue to fail to fix the problem.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| They could start by preventing listings from being
| renamed.
|
| I have encountered several items with good reviews, but
| when you read the reviews, they're all talking about a
| completely different item.
| jcrites wrote:
| Yeah, I've personally run into that myself. It's not that
| the listings are being renamed, it's typically that the
| seller is listing their product as a "variation" of the
| other product has has good reviews.
|
| What you're describing is another kind of abuse called
| Listing Abuse, specifically Variation Abuse. If you
| encounter Listing Abuse, use the link on the page "Report
| Incorrect Product Information" [1] and say that the
| product is experiencing Listing/Variation Abuse, and give
| a couple examples of reviews that are clearly for
| unrelated products. It will be investigated, taken
| down/unlinked from those reviews, and the seller will be
| punished as appropriate.
|
| ("Variations" are products that have different SKUs but
| are all linked together and share reviews, such as the
| same product that comes in different colors or patterns
| or sizes. For example, the Speedo Swim Cap has 20+ color
| and pattern variations: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-
| Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B... . Each is actually a
| distinct product SKU, but since they're all functionally
| the same, just with different colors or patterns, they
| have one page and share reviews.)
|
| The fundamental problem that makes Listing Abuse hard to
| stop is that, if you allow people to sell on your store,
| that means you allow them to enter their own product
| information -- which you don't have any way to verify.
| There's no World Authority for Product Information that
| you can check against. And not all sellers use
| Fulfillment-by-Amazon where Amazon holds the inventory;
| plenty of sellers ship the product themselves, meaning
| that Amazon never has an opportunity to see or inspect
| the product. Even if Amazon had a policy requiring new
| sellers to ship a product to Amazon to inspect, that
| wouldn't stop malicious sellers from shipping something
| different to customers.
|
| Sellers have a lot of power to describe the products
| they're selling that they legitimately need.
| Unfortunately this means they have the power to list
| their products as variations of other highly-rated
| products to falsely make them look like they have a lot
| of good reviews. This is another one of those problems
| that is difficult to solve, because you need to give
| sellers access to describe their products to support
| legitimate usage patterns, like adding a new variation.
| (Like Speedo deciding to offer yet another color or
| pattern beyond their existing 20+).
|
| All that being said, I agree that this should really be
| one of the easier types of fraud to stop, and don't
| understand why it's taking so long for the company to
| shut it down effectively. I think they need to build some
| machine learning systems that compares product
| information to review content when new variations are
| created, to flag likely variation abuse for human review.
| I also don't understand why variations are not required
| to all be shown on a single page (which would stop the
| abuse); there are probably legitimate use-cases that
| require it.
|
| [1] Here's a link highlighting where it is on the page
| for the Speedo Swim Cap: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-
| Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B.... - or just find it by
| text searching for "Report incorrect".
| foobiter wrote:
| NPS is gamed so hard with dark patterns that it's
| completely unreliable as a metric... I worked at a sales
| driven company and the lengths they went to push the
| score up despite actual customer feelings was borderline
| fraud.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-pressures-small-
| busine...
|
| Amazon Reportedly Pressures Small Businesses with
| Retaliation if They Don't Hand Over User Data
| skystarman wrote:
| Again, how does this harm consumers?
| Bjartr wrote:
| What are some examples of behavior you would accept as
| being actual harm to consumers?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Under the Bork standard, to which skystarman is alluding,
| rising price is the only concern. "Consumer harm"
| doctrine.
|
| This was invented from whole cloth by Robert Bork,
| Richard Posner, and Aaron Director, at the University of
| Chicago, as part of a decades-long project and
| organisation to redraft US antitrust policy. It was
| devastatingly effective.
|
| It also has little if any basis in the legislative
| rationale of original antitrust legislation in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
| Bjartr wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying! That "consumer harm" is a term of
| art here, and not a catch-all for all downsides the
| consumer experiences is exactly the kind of confusion I
| was hoping to clear up.
| Bjartr wrote:
| I apologize to whoever I apparently offended by being
| curious.
| baq wrote:
| it's in the title?
| arcticfox wrote:
| As one example, I used to sell textbooks on Amazon. Our
| account would be suspended at ANY report of potential
| issues with a book, despite a 98%+ positive feedback
| rating. It was a constant battle against the platform,
| despite doing everything under the sun to ensure our
| customers had a perfect experience.
|
| Meanwhile, Amazon Warehouse was slinging hot garbage and
| getting constant negative feedbacks (80% positive range)
| and they never got suspended. _Amazon Warehouse_ even
| cancelled a massive number of their own negative
| feedbacks by blaming _Amazon Prime_ for things that had
| nothing to do with shipping.
|
| We were undercutting Amazon on price for a long time, but
| in the end we threw in the towel because it was just an
| impossible marketplace to participate in. Interestingly
| there was another textbook seller that had a similar
| experience that got their testimony read to Bezos by
| Congress.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/21349440/amazon-marketplace-
| third-p...
| fakedang wrote:
| Smaller businesses get eaten up, resulting in a bigger
| Amazon with greater monopoly powers, that harms consumers
| with shittier goods and less choice.
| pydry wrote:
| Amazon squashes competitors and raises prices or reduces
| quality/costs safe in the knowledge that consumers have
| few alternatives.
|
| It's weird asking "how does killing off the competition
| hurt consumers?" when literally all economic growth
| depends upon it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| By destroying competing businesses and reducing consumer
| choice, isnt it obvious?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| But just offering better service for a lower price
| destroys competiting businesses. There is a reason
| competitor harm wasn't the standard for anti-trust
| despite it being about competition between companies.
| blihp wrote:
| Price and selection. You may love what Amazon offers
| today. I think they're moderately terrible, even compared
| to the Amazon of 10 years ago, and I have fewer
| alternative marketplaces to choose from and products in
| those marketplaces. Try finding the _exact_ thing
| /seller/manufacturer you're looking for... for some
| things I find it damn near impossible due to how they now
| consolidate listings. I'm also pretty sure that the
| prices aren't as good as they would in a more competitive
| environment but can't be certain as Amazon has wiped out
| much of it. Competition is a key mechanism that allows
| markets to self regulate.
|
| The vast majority of companies are incapable of self
| regulating because it is contrary to their primary
| mission of 'maximizing shareholder value'. This generally
| just means eliminate your competition and then maximizing
| profit. In the absence of competitive markets, the
| government often needs to step in at some point.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| There's many that argue that the current standard for
| antitrust enforcement does not consider enough or the
| right factors.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with your point.
|
| I'd rather see legislation that focused on both improving
| worker wage and making it easier for new companies to
| enter the marketplace and compete with Amazon rather than
| punishing Amazon for having a store brand or whatever
| (store brands very often seem to be a good thing for
| consumers, even if companies don't like being undercut).
| ohazi wrote:
| It's possible for a monopolist to have a great product
| that allows people to do amazing things that were never
| previously possible and still be harming the consumer.
|
| Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the
| 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start
| using computers for the first time, yet their browser
| bundling was considered problematic.
|
| Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town
| and across the country in real time. People love talking
| to their far away friends and relatives! But they were
| simultaneously providing this futuristic service _and_
| harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices
| and monopoly pricing.
|
| It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great
| service to you and me _and_ be harming consumers with
| priority placement of Basics products and even harming
| competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in
| deciding what Basics products to make.
| abduhl wrote:
| Let's be clear about something misunderstood about
| Microsoft: Microsoft won that litigation in America,
| which is the jurisdiction we're talking about. Framing
| Microsoft's browser bundling as being "considered"
| problematic is the same as framing someone who was
| acquitted as being "considered" a criminal. The Microsoft
| approach remains an acceptable practice in law and is one
| of the principle points of the Apple v. Epic fight.
| edgyquant wrote:
| >Microsoft won that litigation in America
|
| No they didn't?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_
| Cor...
|
| > the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions
| constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of
| the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of
| Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the
| district court's judgments.
| rovolo wrote:
| To expand on this: they basically won the right to bundle
| on appeal, but they were found to have abused their
| market power in support of IE.
|
| First Trial:
|
| > On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of
| Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment,
| Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate
| units, one to produce the operating system, and one to
| produce other software components.
|
| Appeal:
|
| > On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with
| Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement
| required Microsoft to share its application programming
| interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel
| of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's
| systems, records, and source code for five years in order
| to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not
| require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent
| Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the
| future.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > they basically won the right to bundle on appeal,
|
| If, by "appeal" you mean "settlement negotiated with the
| new, Microsoft-friendly Administration", that is correct.
|
| That's not what "appeal" usually means in a legal
| context.
| abduhl wrote:
| If you're convicted of murder because the government
| dismissed black jurors due to their racial prejudices in
| order to assure the jury was all white and then the
| conviction is overturned on appeal and the prosecutor
| declined to reprosecute, are you guilty of murder? No.
| You aren't.
|
| More closely: if you take a plea bargain and plead guilty
| to breaking and entering instead of murder, are you
| guilty of murder? What if you only agreed to the plea
| bargain because you didn't want to spend the millions of
| dollars to litigate again? This latter hypothetical is
| the reality of corporate prosecution in America:
| companies will settle just to avoid tainting their
| reputation and spending the cash to win on the merits.
| That doesn't mean that they're guilty.
| [deleted]
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Most jurisdictions do not consider American Plea bargains
| a proper legal process.
|
| You are suppose to be tried in a public process by an
| impartial judge and a jury of peers, not making a deal
| behind closed doors with a prosecutor looking to advance
| his career.
| skystarman wrote:
| Microsoft and Bell were successfully sued using existing
| antitrust law because they WERE harming consumers.
|
| So again, how is Amazon hurting consumers?
| kube-system wrote:
| They are using their power to force competitors out of
| the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's
| not really about how happy customers are. "We're the
| best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential
| rivals.
| insert_coin wrote:
| > They are using their power to force competitors out of
| the market.
|
| Everyone does this, it is called _competition_.
| kube-system wrote:
| In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the
| end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust
| regs to act as a reset.
| insert_coin wrote:
| And they would be wrong. The fact that everyone does it
| is the reason no one truly succeeds, not in the long run.
| A MAD strategy not only with two players but with
| millions.
|
| That is why every free market monopoly that has ever
| existed has passed and we are not living under the thumb
| of a single all encompassing mega-corporation and the
| only pseudo-monopolies possible are the ones guaranteed
| by law in regulations.
| dontblink wrote:
| It is in the US though?
| kube-system wrote:
| Laws that prohibit anticompetitive practices do just as
| the name implies -- they prohibit companies from acting
| in a way that inhibits competition with their competitors
| in the market.
|
| The impact on consumers is often used as a justification
| and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement.
| It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive
| itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their
| options.
| [deleted]
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other
| would-be commodity software are legend. They should have
| gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably
| several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a
| nightmare for me as a consumer.
| rincebrain wrote:
| Should they have, though?
|
| I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more
| harshly than they were) for their legendary
| anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that
| partitioning the company out into distinct divisions
| would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to
| be, especially against the specific behaviors they were
| accused of.
|
| How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into
| distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from
| enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on
| companies licensing the OS?
|
| I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in
| an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us
| would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS
| with no browser installed by default would be a
| reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.)
|
| Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but
| there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for
| preventing someone from winding up in a situation where
| they have no browser installed at all and can't look up
| how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is
| obviously less catastrophic.)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into
| distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from
| enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on
| companies licensing the OS?
|
| That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-
| competitive problem, but it would have solved others
| (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS
| APIs to get an edge on competitors).
|
| Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech
| monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking
| it up by division _and_ splitting some of those divisions
| further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in
| two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all
| the Windows trademarks go to some independent
| interoperability consortium).
| rincebrain wrote:
| > it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being
| able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on
| competitors).
|
| I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using
| new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in
| none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break
| the existing usage.
|
| > splitting some of those divisions further into
| competitors
|
| Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need
| enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again
| after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies
| reforming into a few huge companies which usually
| deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm
| not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into
| 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers?
|
| Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors
| simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after
| one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with
| mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of
| the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility.
|
| (I still claim, though, that given two initially equal
| products and equal resources, that one will probably
| relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's
| happened almost every time a large open source project
| has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or
| OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)
| lenkite wrote:
| Amazon regularly carries out malpractice by flouting
| federal regulations as described at
| https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/amazon-i...
| skystarman wrote:
| Us antitrust law has no jurisdiction over what Amazon
| does in India...
| bko wrote:
| > It's not just whatever marketplace, anti-monopoly
| legislation focuses on markets where the players own a
| significant share of the full market.
|
| It depends on what you call the marketplace. Look at the
| broader "retail" sector
|
| > The eCommerce giant [Amazon] accounted for 3.2 percent of
| total consumer spending in Q2 (spanning all categories,
| including retail) and 9 percent of total retail spending...
| When it comes to consumer spending, Walmart accounts for
| 3.4 percent overall and 10.2 percent for retail. That's up
| from 9.6 percent in Q1 2020.
|
| Walmart has a considerable share.
|
| > so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position,
| they probably couldn't
|
| Do you really think Amazon has more pricing power than
| Walmart? I'm much more likely to switch online retailers
| than my brick and mortar store. It's a lot easier to
| compare prices and switch.
|
| https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2020/amazon-and-
| walmarts-...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| If you define the marketplace as the US economy, Amazon
| looks like a tiny blip. If you define it as in-person
| retail Amazon is non-existent.
|
| The analogy I would use is that e-commerce retail is
| smart phones in 2008 (maybe a bit later) and the broader
| retail market includes landlines and feature phones. Even
| today landlines exist and feature phones are sold. The
| growth trajectory for e-commerce won't change and big box
| retail won't encounter a meaningful resurgence. Amazon is
| the second biggest retailer alone as compared with
| Walmart which primarily makes money on big box store and
| has a retail presence in name only (if you take just
| their online sales it's not meaningful competition). The
| concern is that the reason Amazon holds such dominance in
| e-commerce is because it's really leveraging cross-market
| dominance. AWS subsidizes their marketplace to be extra
| competitive, their data on retail has them introducing
| first-party products that compete with suppliers selling
| through their platform by focusing on high-margin items.
|
| The better question is whether or not this kind of
| behavior needs regulation, or needs regulation yet. I'd
| argue yes having read the story from the diaper.com
| founder and Bezos' laughable diversion.
|
| As for ease of switching, I think e-commerce can't be
| directly compared as the driving user behaviors are
| different. I could argue it's easier with a big box store
| because I could just drive to a different one, use my CC
| and move on whereas in e-commerce I have yet another
| account to manage, I have to make sure I'm not getting
| scammed, etc.
| nradov wrote:
| We can't regulate competition in online retail over
| concerns about what might happen in the future based on
| an analogy to a completely different market.
| bko wrote:
| > The growth trajectory for e-commerce won't change and
| big box retail won't encounter a meaningful resurgence.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure about that. I like the convenience
| of online shopping, but I also like convenience of
| immediately taking possession and curation. I'm price
| sensitive of course. I buy most of my electronics from
| Best Buy. Their prices are almost always the same as
| Amazon and if they're not its trivial to ask for a price
| match, which they always do.
|
| Obviously Best Buy or other retailers can't stock
| everything, but they can stock a lot of the things I want
| to buy in Electronics. And they leverage Amazon search,
| ratings and price. They're just more convenient. They
| have been doing very well over the last decade.
|
| I think people extrapolate too much of the current
| trends. Physical retail has been around longer than
| Amazon and will likely be around when Amazon is gone.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Search result positioning is equivalent to physical
| placement in brick and mortars. Are you going to start
| legislating where exactly Whole Foods or Target can place
| its house-brand items? Should Starbucks be forced to
| reorder its menu items in descending order of popularity?
|
| There's basically nothing on Amazon that can't be purchased
| elsewhere online, so to say that the answers to the above
| questions can change because lots of people choose to buy
| from Amazon doesn't ring of "protecting the consumer". If
| anything, the fact that so many people choose to shop there
| makes me think the consumers have spoken and they like the
| deal they're getting.
| ABCLAW wrote:
| >Costco/Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe's/grocery
| stores all sell their own brands next to competing brands in
| their stores.
|
| These are almost all 'control brands'; similar or identical
| products from the same suppliers, but they don't have
| marketing spend allocated to them. The delta in sales between
| the control brands and the 'brand-name' ones allows you to
| calculate goodwill.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Not in my experience. Except for very well known brands
| like Coca Cola and Mars, the store-brand products are
| always front and center in all shelves, and all in-store
| marketing (flyers, catalogs, promotions) is for the store
| branded products. This is for Carrefour, Franprix and
| Monoprix, not sure how it is in the US.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Target creates knock offs (Up+Up brand) for almost all
| the household products they sell. They're placed directly
| next to the item from the known brand, such as
| Neutrogena. I would say if anything, the known brand item
| is more front and center, but it's impossible to ignore
| the adjacent facsimile that's 2/3 the price.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| FYI, "knock offs" has the same meaning as counterfeit.
| Target sells "generics" under their Up+Up brands.
| basch wrote:
| knockoff means imitation https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/knockoff https://www.collinsdictio
| nary.com/dictionary/english/knockof...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I've never seen it used in a context other than trying to
| pass an item off as something else. I would be surprised
| to hear someone refer to a generic version of something
| as a knockoff.
| darksaints wrote:
| All of those companies buy their inventory and take on the
| full risk of potentially not selling it. They're retailers,
| not marketplaces.
| gruez wrote:
| Not sure about the other stores, but that's not always true
| for walmart, which has at least some goods on consignment.
|
| https://blog.softwareag.com/in-future-retailers-may-be-
| missi...
| darksaints wrote:
| Consignment is still a stocking risk. They are on the
| hook for holding costs.
|
| Amazon doesn't do shit with marketplace inventory.
| Sellers are either stocking it themselves, or they are
| explicitly paying amazon to hold it in their inventory.
|
| The difference matters because retail stores always have
| an incentive to sell the things they stock. Even pure
| consignment stores will refuse to consign items that they
| don't think they can sell. Amazon has zero incentive to
| sell marketplace merchant stock, as they bear zero cost
| to not sell it. So anytime they start to compete against
| their merchants, they can effectively hide competitors
| listings in a back room out of sight and never have to
| deal with the consequences of doing so.
| com2kid wrote:
| For an increasing number of product lines, Walgreens is
| selling only their house brand.
|
| Last time I needed one, I was unable to buy an effective
| bandage wrap in person, I had to order online. My local
| Walgreens only had their own house brand "self stick" type
| that doesn't really stick at all.
|
| Went to buy some wrist braces, again, only their house brand.
| Many styles of wrist braces exist, they sold one type, the
| type I didn't want.
|
| For some house brands, such as Costco, they provide a huge
| competitive force in the marketplace. An example is Costco
| Diapers, which are rated really well, and basically establish
| a price at which other "name brands" have to complete. There
| is a possibility that they are creating a downwards pressure
| on the price of diapers overall. (Or that they are colluding
| to ensure prices don't fall too far, huh, never thought of
| that angle before!)
|
| My local grocery store's brand is generally untrustworthy. I
| hate it when they are the only option for buying something.
| The 3 times I have tried their yogurt coated pretzels I have
| gotten an upset stomach, and I normally have an iron stomach
| that allows me to eat street food around the world with
| aplomb.
|
| Funny enough their house brand "sweetened flavored sparking
| water" is really my preferred brand, so they get it right
| some of the time.
|
| But from one perspective, isn't this argument hypocritical of
| us? If I go to a baker, I kinda expect everything in the
| bakery to be "store brand", and in fact many bakeries been
| scandalized for not selling their own goods! Heck if I go to
| my local farmer's market I expect what the farmer sells what
| they grew, and again if they are just reselling produce,
| social media scandal!
|
| This entire idea of stores being a "marketplace" for multiple
| brands is only a recent aberration.
|
| So maybe what are seeing is just things are just slowly
| returning to a world where everything is "store branded".
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _This entire idea of stores being a "marketplace" for
| multiple brands is only a recent aberration._
|
| Replace marketplace with platform, anyone who calls
| themselves a platform and competes on the "kill all
| competitors" level should be regulated as common
| carrier/public space.
|
| There are numerous ways to identify platforms vs
| marketplaces and not all of them are related to total
| market penetration. But I think the legislation should look
| in that direction, give the FTC the power to declare a
| company a platform in its space and then allow it to
| regulate that company in the same way utilities are
| regulated but obv updated for the internet age.
|
| I think the biggest hinderance to this sorta thing is that
| all law makers are increasingly biased and refuse to
| acknowledge their favor. They pretend instead that they are
| in fact impartial and any appearance to the contrary is
| simply necessary due to the importance of the issue at
| hand, or the extremists involved ("I'm really a centrist,
| they're just nazis, so I appear to be far left" and vice
| versa).
| starfallg wrote:
| Antitrust legislation usually kick in when there is a
| dominant participant in the market that is abusing their
| position. So shops having their own-brand products competing
| with products from vendors is fine until the company in
| question has an effective hold on that market.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > It takes considerably more effort to go to a different
| store than going to a different website.
|
| Not if the different website becomes hard to find because
| first pages of Google's search results are sold to better
| bidders.
| basch wrote:
| googles front page for any term is already "what we think
| is best." it's their discretion, their opinion, they have
| no obligation to be fair.
|
| if somebody paid for rank, the FTC requires them to
| disclose the sponsorship.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Should Costco/Walmart be allowed to sell products along
| competing ones in their own marketplace? No! Of course!
|
| I'd like to see how well they would perform on Target/Best
| Buy shelves, they probably wouldn't sell at all. Therefore
| the only origin for their success is an abuse of marketplace
| ownership, and it has distorted the market, and therefore has
| harmed consumers by simply reducing quality brand's ability
| to scale, by imposing higher shelf costs for the same brand
| exposure, and therefore fewer sales.
|
| Although it's not a _monopoly_ -- and another law should be
| drafted against competing on a marketplace you own.
| basch wrote:
| >I'd like to see how well they would perform on Target/Best
| Buy shelves
|
| I don't understand that comparison at all. Do you know what
| percent of the Target floorspace is Target owned brands? Or
| Ikea?
|
| Imagine being a store that sells its own product, AND wants
| to augment their own product with some third party
| products. Like a sweatshirt company that also throws
| sunglasses on a rack. They arent really "making" either of
| these things. In one case they are throwing some branding
| over a product and having having it manufactured by
| contract. The other they buy generic wholesale. Because
| they want to sell both branded and unbranded goods they
| shouldnt exist? That would shut down nearly every retail
| business in the country overnight.
|
| Where has the idea of a neutral marketplace ever been
| realized in brick and mortar America?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Should Costco/Walmart be able to sell their own brands on
| their own website? Should retailers who sell other brands
| be able to sell their own brand at all?
|
| > and therefore has harmed consumers by simply reducing
| quality brand's ability to scale, by imposing higher shelf
| costs for the same brand exposure, and therefore fewer
| sales.
|
| How come brand name items cost more on the brand's website
| compared to Walmart's brands on Walmart's website? There is
| no shelf cost online.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Isn't it because resellers like Walmart always require
| lower prices than what the brand sells publicly,
| otherwise brands would always undercut all their
| resellers? It is the case with electronics, I don't know
| for food.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I doubt it, that would be ascribing immense sway to
| Walmart over other enormous companies like Procter and
| Gamble, Unilever, etc.
|
| What is more likely is this is a simple example of price
| discrimination or price segmentation. Theoretically, you
| can earn the most money by selling each item at the
| maximum price the buyer is willing to pay. But if the
| buyers all have varying levels of income or willingness
| to pay, how do you scale this? Obviously, you can't
| barter with every single person for every $5 bottle of
| lotion.
|
| What you can do is create various brands, and maybe
| differentiate the products slightly, or maybe not.
| Similar to binning with silicon chips where the chips
| with higher probabilities of performing better and longer
| get sold for higher.
|
| So Walmart can go to Johnson and Johnson and say hey,
| you're selling Lubriderm for $5, make me some lotion
| that's similar or lower in quality (but still acceptable
| to Walmart), and we'll sell that for $4. Now, J&J get to
| sell their $5 lotion to people willing to pay $5, and a
| cheaper line to people wanting to pay less, but they
| don't have to lose the people paying $5.
|
| And they do this in many, many layers. P&G, Unilever,
| J&J, and others all have countless brands they use to hit
| various price points. And the products may be the same,
| or may be marginally less in quality. And maybe it
| behooves some people to pay more for the extra assurance
| of quality.
| kelnos wrote:
| I feel like this ship sailed many many decades (centuries?)
| ago. Pretty much any store aside from small mom-and-pops
| will have their own brand of commodity items that they sell
| alongside third-party brands. Complaints about those seem
| to be pretty rare.
|
| I think the difference is that the playing field is more
| level. Most stores that I've seen won't make it harder to
| buy the name-brand version or easier to buy the store-brand
| version (aside from the store brand often being cheaper).
| They tend not to really market the store brand, so the
| name-brand version generally has advertising behind it and
| is often seen as superior, even when it really isn't. The
| two versions sit side-by-side on the shelves without
| preferential placement to either.
|
| Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon gives
| preferential treatment in search results to stuff that
| gives them a better margin, regardless of whether or not
| it's a better product or a better value.
|
| I don't necessarily agree that they wouldn't sell outside
| their own store, though. I generally look at the store
| brand as the usually-cheaper "generic brand". For example,
| if I'm looking for cold medicine, I'll never buy NyQuil,
| because the equivalent store brand is more or less the
| exact same thing and is cheaper. But I don't really care
| _which_ store brand. If the CVS-branded version somehow
| ended up in a Walgreens, I 'd still buy it. (Obviously CVS
| would never sell the Walgreens version, but... yeah.)
|
| (Speaking of mom-and-pops, I actually find it annoying when
| I need cold medicine, walk into my local corner store, and
| only find NyQuil rather than the generic
| CVS/Walgreens/whatever store brand. The corner store
| usually sells NyQuil at an even higher price than the chain
| pharmacy would, and there's no alternative.)
| mindslight wrote:
| > _It takes considerably more effort to go to a different
| store than going to a different website._
|
| That seems like it must be true - Going to Lowe's instead of
| Home Depot takes getting to know a different store layout,
| and likely at least an extra half hour if you still have to
| go to HD.
|
| But evidently, by the way people talk about ordering
| everything from Amazon (despite its numerous problems) and
| look at you like you have three heads if you talk about going
| to even say just _Target_.com, there seems to be some
| counterintuitive hurdle for switching websites that 's
| actually worse than for physical stores. Perhaps because web
| widgets are so un-affordanced that figuring out a new one can
| actually be hard, or that the majority of orders are
| reorders, or the smaller stakes dopamine feedback from
| getting what you need while sitting down, or the dark forest
| feeling makes people extremely conservative. Whatever it is,
| it exists.
|
| Of course there are also plenty of people who have no problem
| switching between online stores at the drop of a hat. I'd
| posit that these people have a model of buying based on
| manufacturers, viewing the web stores as mere means to some
| ends, and understand credit card chargeback policies. For
| example I buy a decent amount of stuff from Zoro (whose
| descriptions can be lacking), and so I often end up
| referencing manufacturers' catalogs directly. Which are
| fantastically informative and easy to read (single PDF, well-
| specified comparison tables, no middle clicking dozens of
| search results, no page load lag, no flipping between tabs to
| spot a minute difference hidden by web chaff, no
| surveillance, etc), but I'm certainly paying a fixed effort
| overhead to get to that point.
|
| Whatever the case for such stickiness is, I think one of the
| best tech reforms possible would be to mandate open APIs. As
| Amazon (et al) are _stores_ , then their business is selling
| specific products for specific prices. This data should be
| openly available such that it can be retrievable by _every_
| user agent (no CAPTCHA harassment), and ideally, orders
| placed through the same system. This would enable price
| competition as well as _UI_ competition, rather than the two
| being bundled as they are now.
| zepto wrote:
| > But evidently, by the way people talk about ordering
| everything from Amazon (despite its numerous problems) and
| look at you like you have three heads if you talk about
| going to even say just Target.com, there seems to be some
| counterintuitive hurdle for switching websites that's
| actually worse than for physical stores.
|
| I think there is truth to this since I personally for a
| long time would go to Amazon for everything. Over time I
| have shifted to using them less and less.
|
| However I think it's just a matter of consumer maturity.
| Apple Pay has done a lot to make it easier for me to buy
| from 3rd party websites. There is a lot of money to be made
| in services to help the rest of the web be more competitive
| to Amazon. We are just at a certain stage in the cycle.
|
| That's what concerns me about getting the government
| involved. These 'monopolies' have arisen very quickly - on
| the order of a decade. Things can change in the marketplace
| just as fast.
| mindslight wrote:
| We can look at general principles and see problematic
| couplings and incentives. In fact we could do this ten
| years ago before the problem grew so large, but there was
| no political will.
|
| For example, by bundling product sales and web UI, what
| Amazon (et al) are doing is making it so that customers
| have to use Amazon's software to shop Amazon (and
| conversely they're prevented from using software of their
| own choice). Of course Amazon's software hasn't been
| designed to benefit the user, but has been designed to
| benefit Amazon - eg "dark patterns". Hence my call to
| unbundle the two by mandating API access. A public API is
| straightforwardly in Amazon's capabilities (it's
| literally just making a version of their website in a
| predictable format without all the extra crap), and would
| tie right into your "services to help the rest of the web
| be more competitive to Amazon".
|
| Facebook et al are doing the same thing with regards to
| Metcalfe's law, and a similar remedy would be
| appropriate.
|
| Not that I think any specific legislation will be
| anything resembling sensible reforms. Hell, we'll be
| lucky if it doesn't end up being a _boon_ for big tech.
| zepto wrote:
| > Amazon (et al) are doing is making it so that customers
| have to use Amazon's software to shop Amazon
|
| This is true of almost all online stores and nobody is
| proposing legislation against it, so it's not at all
| clear what you are saying.
|
| Government mandating APIs seems like a fatally
| destructive move against software freedom forever.
| mindslight wrote:
| I'm proposing it and saying it would be a better remedy
| than whatever regulatory-capture-ripe "reform" they're
| proposing is.
|
| I actually _like_ house brands of stuff, when compared to
| the thousands of gensym brands. The problem isn 't
| marketplace companies privileging their own brands - it's
| with singular companies owning the marketplace to begin
| with.
|
| Humans are creatures of habit, and the way to make it so
| we aren't in the habit of just buying everything from
| $Amazon is to replace that with the habit of buying
| things through non-affiliated aggregators. I'd rather
| have one familiar UI showing me (Amazon Basics, Zoro
| Select, HDX, etc), than multiple UIs each showing me the
| same "competing" gensym brands.
| zepto wrote:
| Why not just outlaw dark patterns in general as deceptive
| practices?
|
| All this focus on fixing particular companies or
| government mandating software architecture seems like it
| just gets the government more and more invovled while not
| doing anything to prevent the actual abuses.
| mindslight wrote:
| It's impossible to formally define dark patterns,
| especially when trying to except traditional dark
| patterns (recurring sales, coupons, strategically placed
| roasting chickens, etc).
|
| And so any attempt to do that will necessarily "get the
| government more and more involved". Either through some
| administrative body that decides whether a certain thing
| is a "dark pattern", or through judicial remedies ("Here
| is your 57 cent media credit because Amazon lied about
| shipping cutoff times. They admit no wrongdoing but
| promise to never do it again").
|
| Meanwhile mandating APIs isn't mandating "software
| architecture". It's merely just a different form of the
| website that has a predictable structure. Amazon could
| even choose whatever structure they want, as long as it
| is documented and versioned.
|
| Both approaches aren't mutually exclusive, so I'm not
| arguing against the former. I just don't hold out hope
| for it to create meaningful reform - centralized bodies
| are just as likely to bless abusive practices.
| zepto wrote:
| > Meanwhile mandating APIs isn't mandating "software
| architecture". It's merely just _a different form of the
| website that has a predictable structure_.
|
| That is software architecture.
| mindslight wrote:
| That's like calling a bike shed "civil engineering". I
| don't know what point you're making with the term
| "software architecture" other than trying to make it
| sound burdensome.
| zepto wrote:
| My point is that once you mandate that, then forever all
| stores must be architected around providing this web API,
| based on technology assumptions frozen in law.
|
| Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a
| central website, just as an example, would be illegal.
|
| This is just one example of how the future would be
| encumbered forever based on a 90's software architecture
| becoming enshrined in law.
|
| The web as it is today is not some endpoint in software
| evolution.
|
| A Government mandated API is literally the government
| regulating software architecture.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| How can grocery stores be allowed to own food brands when
| they're also marketplaces! How can Aldi be allowed to sell
| competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the
| actual marketplace?
| umvi wrote:
| Walmart sells walmart brand generic stuff don't they?
| [deleted]
| Black101 wrote:
| Another problem with Google is their popups... I.E.: If you are
| not using Chrome, and visit Google.com, they will let you know.
| That is how they got so many people to switch to it.
| verdverm wrote:
| fwiw, I just started using MS products again and they do the
| same thing. I'm not switching because I tried them and Google
| still has superior products
| Black101 wrote:
| It never made me switch to Chrome (still use Firefox), but
| I think that it made a lot of people switch... by having a
| daily popup telling them that they are using the wrong
| browser.
| SuchAnonMuchWow wrote:
| no, what made people switch was that chrome is the
| default browser on android
| verdverm wrote:
| Firefox slowness sent me there and Chromes account
| management is what keeps me there
| [deleted]
| twobitshifter wrote:
| You think chrome is superior to the new Edge Browser which
| is based on chromium?
| marderfarker2 wrote:
| Maybe they rank higher because their product is superior? I
| mean is there really anything better than Google Earth?
| tarboreus wrote:
| Right, and Froogle was the best shopping service in 2004.
| That's why we all still shop on Froogle to this day.
| egman_ekki wrote:
| The actual Earth is, arguably, a bit better, imo.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Weird, I typically get websites in my search results, how
| do I enable celestial bodies?
| kthartic wrote:
| I don't think that was their point. Why is Google Earth
| ranked higher than, oh I dunno, Earth?
| sgc wrote:
| Google earth is just one more website about the earth, and
| you can't get the real thing through your tiny tubes. If
| more people searching for earth want to use that website to
| explore the real earth rather than say, read the wikipedia
| article about the earth (and most obviously more people use
| GE than visit that one page on the wiki), it is correct for
| it to be ranked higher according to most typical search
| algorithms. OPs point is perfectly valid, it's just not a
| great example.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Key word in your statement being "maybe". No one knows for
| sure if they're exploiting their advantages or not. That's
| really the biggest issue: the lack of transparency. I think
| if companies want to participate in their own marketplaces,
| they need to be required to publish all data they have that
| could potentially give them an edge. This obviously isn't
| possible in many cases, so companies will just not go through
| the trouble.
| eecc wrote:
| > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on
| their mobile devices? We already went through this with
| Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
|
| Nope, total Apple and Oranges.
|
| Forbidding other HTML rendering engines on iOS, prevented other
| massive players (Google) from forcing their browser platform
| onto Apple's user base and Electron-ized Apple's ecosystem
| making iOS a marginal runtime.
|
| Or worse, Adobe could have spun their own Adobe Flash app "now
| with web access too!".
|
| It's not competitive advantage, it's strategy
| pjc50 wrote:
| You're pitching the prevention of certain competitive
| products as a good thing, which it may have been for Apple,
| but it is absolutely not for the consumer.
| eecc wrote:
| You think so? So please elaborate on how having your
| platform marginalized to a mere window decoration around
| the ubiquitous, 100% dominant UI toolkit (Crome) is better
| for the consumer.
|
| Besides, there's plenty of choice on the market, unless you
| want to complain about a car manufacturer selling only
| their own models...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Platforms _should_ disappear into the background. The
| great benefit of the web is that it presents roughly the
| same UI everywhere across all manner of devices and
| browsers. (The big downside of course is that it 's not
| _exactly_ the same).
|
| > car manufacturer selling only their own models...
|
| My car doesn't tell me who or what it's willing to
| transport. Yet.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Agreed, but many people are arguing that browsers should
| be able to alter the system outside the browser (e.g
| desktop shortcuts and notifications).
|
| I think that these things should remain under the control
| of the operating system.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > browsers should be able to alter the system outside the
| browser (e.g desktop shortcuts and notifications).
|
| I've not seen the argument about desktop shortcuts?
|
| Notifications are one of those features which has already
| been added and is a nuisance in 99% of cases, but I can
| see there being one or two use cases where a website
| sending notifications without requiring a full native app
| (and approval process!) is worthwhile.
|
| The "should this hardware be available to the browser"
| fight happens for every feature.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > unless you want to complain about a car manufacturer
| selling only their own models
|
| It does seem like you get it wrong on purpose.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > It's not competitive advantage, it's strategy
|
| It's 100% competitive advantage. The main driver of Apple's
| lack of support for Flash was to damage the web's ability to
| distribute DRMed video and force it into apps on iOS, where
| Apple could rent seek a 30% commission from subscription
| fees.
| briandear wrote:
| Nonsense. There is extensive writing on the subject
| including internal memos from Steve Jobs on Flash -- and
| you are 100% incorrect.
| eecc wrote:
| Can you elaborate and link to sources plz?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the App Store
| was not even around for the first iPhone.
|
| Perhaps the decision to not include flash could have been
| due to performance/battery?
| eecc wrote:
| Precisely. Jobs didn't want to be at the mercy of anyone
| else's priority, strategies or convenience.
|
| Remember: Adobe was dragging its feet on MacOS because
| why bother, Windows PC _is_ the market, iPhone was mostly
| welcomed as a "won't fly" and Flash for iOS would have
| been another drama of unfixed vuls, shoddy performance
| and battery drain. (I guess everyone forgot or wasn 't
| still around, reminder:
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-
| faile...)
|
| Not unreasonable to imagine Google making Chrome engine
| prio 1 on Android and "perhaps later" on iOS.
|
| You can imagine how well Jobs took that.
| jiofih wrote:
| How different is that from Microsoft and IE?
| yuri91 wrote:
| it is worse... at least you could always install a
| competing browser engine on Windows if you wanted
| lallysingh wrote:
| iOS isn't 90%+ of the phone market.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| IOS is 100% of the iPhone market though, given that
| unlike Windows in the PC market, Apple disallows
| installing an alternative OS, and an alternative app
| store in addition to disallowing alternate browsers.
| eecc wrote:
| So? Go buy an Android device. You're blaming a
| manufacturer for being 100% of its own product market?!
| xxs wrote:
| The percentage of usage is actually unimportant (at least
| in the EU, I know it's not an EU news piece)
| jiofih wrote:
| In some markets it's pretty close (US teenagers for
| example).
| tobylane wrote:
| Is there a relevant law or court case that takes sectors
| of consumers into account? That one could be more
| relevant because they are vulnerable, or less relevant
| because the devices are bought in their parents name.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| As a teenager I felt pushed out of conversations because
| I was an Android user, and got written off as a green
| bubble.
| salawat wrote:
| That's the most ridiculous division known to man.
|
| You don't use the right back end, therefore you aren't
| cool.
|
| It's absolutely absurd. I mean, about on par for
| teenagers, but gah... I can picture the conversation
| about "Your "friends" are complete morons, and you
| shouldn't feel ashamed or ostracized at what is probably
| one of the most silliest social signaling practices on
| the planet."
|
| It hurts being an engineer sometimes. These networks are
| marvels of human ingenuity, and people take them and use
| superficial differences in UI and completely miss the
| point.
|
| God bless. I keep thinking UX/UI can't get any worse, but
| what humanity takes out of it never ceases to amaze.
| lallysingh wrote:
| > That's the most ridiculous division known to man.
|
| Ha! They're teenagers. They will invent new divisions as
| needed.
| capableweb wrote:
| How does preventing competition in a specific application
| category lead to Apple preventing Google from "forcing" iOS
| users to use Chrome? Not sure I follow your argument here or
| how allowing browsers would somehow make it possible for
| Google to automatically install Chrome for iOS users.
|
| Imagine if Google suddenly made their Chrome browser behave
| differently on Google websites compared to others, like 0.5
| the performance for no reason. This could be seen as a
| strategy to increase engagement on Google properties, but I'm
| fairly sure most of us would see it as an attempt on
| monopolizing the web in Google's favor. Why is it different
| for Apple and browsers? They are intentionally making it
| impossible to create competitors to their own browser, for no
| technological reason besides "we don't want that".
| eecc wrote:
| They are intentionally protecting their ecosystem from the
| thread of an incumbent strangling their growth and
| marginalizing their strategy.
|
| From a market dominant position it would be Antitrust
| material. Not in this case:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-
| sha...
| airstrike wrote:
| Now find the same chart for the US only
| eecc wrote:
| Why? I'm European, what's so special about US market?
|
| (rhetorical question, I know)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| iOS has more than 60% of the US market.
| eecc wrote:
| I guess you weren't there when Flash was the thing.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| > Imagine if Google suddenly made their Chrome browser
| behave differently on Google websites compared to others,
| like 0.5 the performance for no reason.
|
| I don't have to imagine. https://tech.co/news/google-
| slowed-youtube-firefox-edge-2019...
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Not to mention the 2010's where Google only allowed
| products (such as hangouts) to run on Chrome.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _Is that really a fair ranking? We don 't even know,_
|
| We _kinda_ know because people keep using Google. If people
| thought the results weren 't good, they would switch to bing.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The terms "fair ranking" and "good results" are not
| synonymous. We _do not_ know if Google provides a fair
| ranking.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| > We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but
| suddenly it's different?
|
| What happened was that the DOJ did everything they could to get
| Microsoft broken up. They got pretty much the entire country on
| their side, and during the trials they extracted some hilarious
| quotes from Microsoft and Bill Gates, like arguing about the
| definition of the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby"
| email. Details emerged about their "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish"
| policy and their plans to try and bulldoze the free software
| movement.
|
| Popular perception of Bill Gates and Microsoft at that time
| sunk to an all-time low [0], picturing Gates as a greedy global
| capitalist, and Microsoft as a cartoonishly evil company. There
| was no small fix, the only option left was to to shatter
| Microsoft into multiple pieces, the way Bell Labs had gone.
| That's what the final ruling said.
|
| Then George W. Bush comes in, clears out basically the entirety
| of the DOJ, guts them to a fifth of their size, and tells them
| "never do that again". The case then went to appeal, where it
| was reduced from a mandatory break-up to a small fine.
|
| The DOJ never went after big tech again. Bill Gates resigned as
| CEO, and decided to go into philanthropy to clear their image,
| like many capitalists do.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, looking just at your final paragraph (as I agree
| strongly with everything you said, but feel a need to note
| that it wasn't all a _complete_ waste of time): Bill Gates
| was effectively forced out of his own company after nearly
| driving the company to destruction by provoking a judge with
| his arrogance, and the Microsoft that was left after this
| mess--notably run by Steve Balmer--had a very difficult time
| hiring strong talent or having any reasonable strategy for
| its offerings, and as such was no longer organizationally
| able to maintain some basic technologies that had become
| mired in the antitrust case (such as Internet Explorer, which
| was trivially disrupted by Chrome, and is now effectively
| gone).
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Shouldn't this also affect cable companies and what not?
| mLuby wrote:
| I hope whatever comes out of this doesn't end up creating a
| regulatory moat around big incumbents that start-ups can't muster
| the resources to cross.
|
| Only government regulation is powerful enough to counteract
| capitalism's natural tendency toward aggregation.
| [deleted]
| dbetteridge wrote:
| "A year after initiating the investigation, we received testimony
| from the Chief Executive Officers of the investigated companies:
| Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai. For
| nearly six hours, we pressed for answers about their business
| practices, including about evidence concerning the extent to
| which they have exploited, entrenched, and expanded their power
| over digital markets in anticompetitive and abusive ways. Their
| answers were often evasive and non-responsive, raising fresh
| questions about whether they believe they are beyond the reach of
| democratic oversight.
|
| Although these four corporations differ in important ways,
| studying their business practices has revealed common problems.
| First, each platform now serves as a gatekeeper over a key
| channel of distribution. By controlling access to markets, these
| giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy. They
| not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by
| charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and
| extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely
| on them. Second, each platform uses its gatekeeper position to
| maintain its market power.
|
| By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they have
| surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals, and
| have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive
| threats. And, finally, these firms have abused their role as
| intermediaries to further entrench and expand their dominance.
| Whether through self-preferencing, predatory pricing, or
| exclusionary conduct, the dominant platforms have exploited their
| power in order to become even more dominant."
|
| Well they're not wrong...
| ma2rten wrote:
| Where did you copy that from? I don't see the report linked
| anywhere.
|
| EDIT: I found the link further down the thread
| https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP...
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Yeah sorry had intended to reply on that comment. Oh well!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they
| have surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals,
| and have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their
| competitive threats.
|
| Is this accurate? I would think control of the infrastructure
| is with companies like Comcast/ATT/Verizon/Verisign/ and others
| who you can't bypass by typing in different characters into the
| URL bar.
|
| Would it be more accurate to write the big tech companies have
| control of the network of users?
| indigochill wrote:
| Comcast and friends are essentially utility companies. If the
| internet is "a bunch of tubes", they keep the tubes clear.
| They don't get involved at the content layer. Comcast may be
| a crappy provider in many ways, but they've never made the
| news for politically-motivated network traffic filtering.
|
| FAANG on the other hand all get their hands dirty in deciding
| what content people get to see and what not, which would
| largely be a non-issue if there was mainstream competition,
| but there isn't, so rather than change their behavior and
| support/make/demand alternatives, consumers (including
| politicians) want Big Brother to step in, somehow forgetting
| that rarely solves anything and will simply consolidate more
| power with those who already have it.
| shockeychap wrote:
| Agree. Big Brother is just as corrupt and just adds another
| element to the smoke and mirrors presentation.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| PG tried to say that "tech" was focused on building better
| mousetraps, but that's hogwash. THIS is precisely the play that
| all VC's are after now: find a channel, throw billions at it,
| run everyone else out of the space, and monopolize it. When
| people talk glowingly about "unicorns," this is what they're
| really saying: monopolies.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This is well known. The thesis of Peter Thiel's Zero to One
| was precisely about how a tech company's ultimate goal should
| be about creating a monopoly. An op-ed by Thiel in the WSJ
| talk about exactly this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-
| thiel-competition-is-for-...
| therealbilly wrote:
| Does anybody seriously expect anything to change. On Capitol
| Hill, they are going to posture and make grandiose statements.
| Later in the day, everybody will meet at one of those fancy
| beltway pubs and get all cozy.
| hnunionthrow wrote:
| At the expense of whataboutism, I'd love to see some kind of
| legislation against themselves as opposed to trying to bring
| these business entities under their heel. Something along the
| lines of: "GOP and Democratic party hold a duopolistic power over
| significant portions of our political representation options.
| This duopoly moment must end" (borrowed from the article and
| replaced appropriately).
|
| Every business that they are trying to "crackdown" against faces
| varying levels of competition in almost every space they are in,
| and consumers either have numerous options to choose from to get
| a particular service, or the default that they end up using on is
| actually the best among the available alternatives.
|
| God forbid politicians focus on taking action against actual
| monopolies as opposed to these stupid theatrics.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| A lot of this just looks like punishing success to me. Or rather
| success combined with a lack of political involvement aka
| donation.
|
| If it cares about monopolies go look at comcast or Disney or big
| chunks of agriculture or Boeing etc. If the house really cares
| about privacy, it should look at the patriot act. If it cares
| about workers, go look at Walmart.
| swebs wrote:
| What market is Disney a monopoly in?
| [deleted]
| thrav wrote:
| Soon to expire copyright material (stories, characters, etc.)
| that they then block from ever entering the public domain.
|
| https://nyunews.com/opinion/2019/10/01/disney-public-
| domain-...
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I'm not sure there's any chance that the US government
| comes down on the side of "You know this monopoly power we
| (the US government) explicitly grant and protect by
| default? You can't have it any more"
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Disney owns considerably less than 1% of soon to expire
| copyright material, so no.
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Disney took 45% of the US box office in 2019. Much more if if
| you narrow it to kids media. There are few competitors in
| either market so it's an oligopoly. You can see the effect in
| spiraling prices.
|
| Amazon only managed 35% of ecommerce. There are a lot of
| other companies trying to eat their market (Ebay, Shopify,
| Ali). Hence prices there stay low.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There's also a much lower barrier to entry in online
| retail.
|
| Technically, the barrier to kids' media is low too, and
| there's tons of it, for free even, but it's mostly garbage.
| What Disney has is a curated, higher quality (according to
| the market) product.
| briandear wrote:
| They own the Disney Theme Park Market. Vendors have to get
| approved to sell in Disney parks, a commissions gets paid to
| Disney for each sale, and Disney doesn't allow Universal
| Studios products in any of the Disney park stores.
| capableweb wrote:
| > A lot of this just looks like punishing success to me
|
| I guess if you think "success" means companies ending up as
| monopolies, I guess you're right. In general, capitalism
| gravitates to a "winner takes it all" situations as with more
| capital, you can also capture more of the market. But we also
| generally prefer to have many players in the market so
| competition still exists.
|
| All this work here is trying to prevent monopolies from
| forming, because currently the US is very much lacking in any
| tooling to prevent monopolies, as we see in a lot of
| industries, not just technology.
|
| A step in the right direction it seems to me.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The standard in most places (US included) is that monopolies
| (and duopolies etc) are allowed. But they are not allowed to
| abuse their positions.
|
| That leaves us with 2 issues I think:
|
| 1. If people want competitive markets, that's fine but that's
| a new policy, and big tech is a bad place to start because
| it's much more competitive than many many other markets. You
| can pick 1001 other stores than amazon, but you will be
| paying with Visa or Mastercard...
|
| 2. We need to regulate a lot of new utilities. Are you sure
| you want the FCC deciding what innovations are allowed in
| search or social media? Aren't there massive free speech
| issues there?
| aviraldg wrote:
| Not looking forward to a future where the US sabotages its best
| tech companies and we all end up working for Alibaba, Tencent or
| Baidu (or founding startups with the aim of being acquired by
| them.)
| potatoman22 wrote:
| What's wrong with Chinese tech companies?
| eric-hu wrote:
| Chinese tech companies have to toe the line of the CCP. A
| long, drawn out example is being made of Alibaba and Jack Ma
| precisely for not toeing the line last fall.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Some of us don't want to work for the CCP.
| eunos wrote:
| Eh China already made an example of Ali anyway (2.8B fine).
| ashneo76 wrote:
| Can the precedent from this be applied to AT&T and comcast??
| bradlys wrote:
| Sure would be nice but I don't see it happening. This seems
| like political theater more than anything.
|
| You're going to need to get an entirely new electorate to get
| anything real happening.
| alexarnesen wrote:
| Below is the CV of most of the authors / contributors.
|
| I could only find one person with a technical background that is
| at least computing-adjacent.
|
| (I didn't produce this research, I commissioned it, so there may
| be factual errors.)
|
| Link to full research:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kbpQgU5YQSOmyyhOUCkmjCrrj4C...
|
| SUBCOMMITTEE ON ANTITRUST, COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW
| PROFILES
|
| _Technical staff: Anna Lenhart_
|
| Anna Lenhart: Technologist - B.S. Civil Engineering and
| Engineering Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University (2011) -
| M.P.P., Science & Technology Policy (Artificial Intelligence),
| University of Michigan (2018)
|
| _Non-technical staff: everyone else_
|
| Slade Bond: Chief Counsel - B.A. History, Mary Washington College
| (2008) - J.D., University of Kansas School of Law (2011) - LL.M.,
| Intellectual Property and Information Privacy, The George
| Washington University Law School (2012)
|
| Lina Khan: Counsel - B.A. Political Theory, Williams College -
| J.D., Yale Law School
|
| Phillip Berenbroick: Counsel - B.A. Political Science, Tufts
| University (2004) - Law, University of Virginia School of Law
| (2008) - JD, Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
|
| Amanda Lewis: Counsel on Detail, Federal Trade Commission - B.A.
| Political Science; Latin American Studies, New York University -
| J.D. Law, Columbia Law School
|
| Joseph Ehrenkrantz: Special Assistant - B.A. English and
| Government & Politics, University of Maryland (2014) - J.D. Law,
| Georgetown University Law Center (2020)
|
| Catherine Larsen: Special Assistant - B.A. Political Science and
| Government, English, University of Nebraska (2014) - J.D. Law,
| New York University School of Law (2020)
|
| Joseph Van Wye: Professional Staff Member - B.A. Political
| Science and Government, Brown University (2015)
|
| COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY PROFILES
|
| _Non-technical staff: everyone_
|
| Perry Apelbaum: Staff Director and Chief Counsel - Bachelor
| General Studies, University of Michigan (1981) - J.D. Harvard
| University, 1984
|
| Aaron Hiller: Deputy Chief Counsel - BS Biology & BA Philosophy,
| University of North Carolina (2003) - J.D., MPP, Georgetown
| University Law Center (2007)
|
| Shadawn Reddick-Smith: Communications Director - B.S.
| Communications and Public Relations, Towson University
|
| Jessica Presley: Director of Digital Strategy - Penn State
| University
|
| Madeline Strasser: Chief Clerk - B.A. International Politics,
| National Security Policy Studies, Penn State University (2017)
|
| Amy Rutkin: Chief of Staff
|
| John Williams: Parliamentarian - B.A. University of Virginia
| (1988) - Ph.D. Medieval History, The University of Chicago (1995)
| - J.D. Georgetown University Law Center (2001)
|
| Daniel Schwarz: Director of Strategic Communications - B.A.
| Political Science and Jewish Studies, Indiana University (2008) -
| MSc Politics and Communication, London School of Economics and
| Political Science (2011)
|
| Moh Sharma: Director of Member Services and Outreach & Policy
| Advisor - B.A. and M.A. Economics, University of Connecticut -
| M.S. Global Affairs, New York University - J.D., City University
| of New York School of Law
|
| John Doty: Senior Advisor - B.A. History, Middlebury College
|
| David Greengrass: Senior Counsel - BA Government, Wesleyan
| University (1998) - JD, Law, American University Washington
| College of Law
|
| Arya Hariharan: Deputy Chief Oversight Counsel - BA Law and
| Society, International Studies, American University (2007) - JD,
| The College of William and Mary - Marshall Wythe Law School
| (2012)
|
| Matthew Robinson: Counsel - B.A. Yale University (2003) - JD New
| York University School of Law (2012)
|
| Kayla Hamedi: Deputy Press Secretary - B.A. Political Science and
| Government, The George Washington University (2015) - M.A.
| Political Management, The George Washington University
| graderjs wrote:
| If this went through, what second order effects would there be
| that could be business opportunities? Particularly for a
| bootstrapped or small startup to get into.
| pyrophane wrote:
| > Despite their ire, most Republicans have not backed the
| report's proposed changes in antitrust law but instead discussed
| stripping social media companies of legal protections they are
| accorded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The
| law gives companies immunity over content posted on their sites
| by users.
|
| Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-
| Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't
| understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address
| that. Is the idea that any proposals would require moderation
| practices that follow certain standards set out to avoid
| "political bias?" I can't understand this push as anything other
| than a punitive measure to hurt tech companies.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| They wanted to hold speech to account for things they didn't
| like. Right now they can't.
| root_axis wrote:
| One thing repealing section 230 would definitely do is bring
| big tech business operations to a screeching halt. Republicans
| are betting on the fact that big tech would be willing to do
| _anything_ to avoid that outcome.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > One thing repealing section 230 would definitely do is
| bring big tech business operations to a screeching halt.
|
| Not all big tech business, just the no-prior-review
| dissemination of user-generated content.
|
| _EDIT_ : At least, without some kind of financial protection
| against publication liability, such as the user providing
| indemnification with proof of adequate liability coverage.
| So, things like say Github Enterprise would still exist but
| probably be more costly once all associated costs are take
| into account, but free-of-charge individual accounts would
| either not continue or, if MS could subsidize them from
| Enterprise profits and saw value in having them, they'd be
| much more aggressively scanned for "bad" content and
| summarily deleted if there were any signs detected. And the
| same kind of calculus would apply all over the net.
|
| It would definitely narrow the voices that have reach, both
| in number and ideological distribution.
| root_axis wrote:
| You're right, I should have said "social media" instead of
| "big tech".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| While I quibble with your original presentation, the
| impact is _much_ bigger than "social media" as usually
| understood; see my edit. While it wouldn't kill big tech,
| it would radically transform big tech _and every person,
| business, and other entity that interacts with it_.
|
| It _might_ not be the single biggest economy-slowing
| piece of legislation adopted in the history of the US,
| but...ok, yeah, it definitely would be.
| vharuck wrote:
| >Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been
| "anti-Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't
| understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address
| that.
|
| It's a meaningless flag to gather behind, not something they
| ever wanted to actually do. They can shout their support
| because they know the Democrats will stop it and thus fall into
| the "bad guy" role. It's a wedge issue now.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Depending on what happens the net outcome of repealing 230
| might actually hurt conservatism on online platforms, since
| right now Twitter, Youtube, Facebook et al are not party to
| things like the billion dollar Dominion lawsuit against Fox
| News and Newsmax.
|
| Those news networks have deplatformed Mike Lindell because him
| actively spewing conspiracy theories on the Dominion voting
| machines undermines their defense in that lawsuit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been
| "anti-Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't
| understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address
| that.
|
| The idea is to return to the non-online liability regime where
| reduced (distributor, notice-based) liability for unlawful
| content generally requires the _absence_ of involvement in
| crafting /altering/moderating content (though it does allow
| binary select/not-select, including with an ideological bias.)
| 230 allows immunity to publisher (on its face, and as applied
| by the courts even distributor) liability so long as its terms
| are met.
|
| This probably _wouldn't_ help the cause Republicans nominally
| seek to advance with it (though it would help the cause of
| narrowing political engagement that they are pursuing through
| every other means, which suggests an alternative motivation to
| the public one), since while it might encourage providers to
| not moderate content from users while continuing to allow them
| to distribute material on the site, it would _encourage_
| blanket bans like the one Trump received, at a minimum, or
| shutting off public access entirely; its dubious that free
| public distribution, even with ad support, is viable online
| with distributor liability generally applied , and its clear it
| is not with publisher liability generally applied. Responding
| to notice of unlawful content on more than a best-effort basis
| (as distributor liability would require) is very hard to scale,
| and preemptively preventing it entirely as publisher liability
| would require absolutely does not scale.
| shockeychap wrote:
| Given the volume and profitably of tech trading by members of
| Congress (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821601) I
| have ZERO confidence that any useful legislation will come of it.
| It will just be a bunch of earnest and disingenuous theatre by
| the very people profiting from a bunch of companies who make
| Microsoft circa 1995 look like a kitten.
|
| For my part, I think the fundamental business model of profiting
| from user engagement (where screen time is money) is toxic, and
| we can't fix anything until we find a way to effectively
| eliminate it.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| They could just as easily profit from shorting tech etc. True
| whales make money on the up and down.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Shorting is much more legally risky. SEC basically doesn't
| view shorts as investors, and that has interesting outcome.
|
| The don't care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and you
| profit from it, as other investors also profit.
|
| But causing stock to go down opens you to much higher
| liability, for hurting investors. And if you profit of it via
| short, you're in much more legal risk.
| gruez wrote:
| >The don't care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and
| you profit from it, as other investors also profit.
|
| They clearly do, as we've seen with musk's "funding
| secured" tweet.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Do they? He got financial slap on his wrist, didn't have
| to admit to any wrong doing, kept absolute power in the
| company, ignored any corrective actions of the
| settlement, and continues to pump stock on weekly basis,
| to a place that made him one of the richest people in the
| world. And in the free time he's pumping other meme
| investments, just for fun.
|
| SEC vs Musk is perfect example of how powerless/not
| interested in pumping stock schemes regulators are. Until
| stock start to go down, then they get more power.
| brigade wrote:
| On the other hand, did Musk ever get in trouble for his
| "stock price too high" tweet?
| shockeychap wrote:
| Fair point, but there's less predictability (both in timing
| and valuations) on the way down. It's also harder to disguise
| the insider nature of shorts based on upcoming legislation.
|
| On top of that, these companies spend millions on lobbying
| and have SO MUCH INFLUENCE among DC insiders that reform
| doesn't have a chance. It's more corrupt than anything
| Hollywood ever made about Big Oil.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I'll agree with your second point. How can we begin fixing
| it?
| leppr wrote:
| Have citizens participate in writing legislation instead
| of deferring to a small entrenched elite?
|
| I believe our elders called it Democracy. Nowadays they
| call it decentralization.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I believe our elders called it Democracy.
|
| Direct government by the people is sometimes called
| demarchy, in contrast to democracy.
|
| "The rule of the people has the fairest name of all."
| kenny87 wrote:
| Very nice to see to genuine interest on HN in solving our
| Democracy's problems, instead the general cynicism,
| apathy and self-interest we all too often see. But to be
| fair, I think it's first important to realize that we are
| discussing historical forces. The kind of movements that
| we all read about in school, are happening now. And I
| think when we look at history we'll see that social
| forces strong enough to reform empires have always
| started in the marginalized communities. Our role here is
| to become active participants, on a day-to-day basis, in
| these communities and aid them, both technically and
| morally, in building -- and here is the key concept --
| decentralized quasi-autonomous [1] communities. No amount
| of reform, sorry being a cynic, will "fix" Washington and
| its relationship with "corporate capitalism". The Supreme
| Court settled this question, campaign money is "free
| speech". [2] But we can build new social structures in
| the gaps. It happened about 2,000 years in empire built
| in Rome. Why not today?
|
| [1] http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/decentralizati
| on/admi... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
| shockeychap wrote:
| I'm not sure, but I think we have to start with
| Congressional reform. I don't generally subscribe to the
| notion that legislating should be a lucrative, lifelong
| profession.
|
| I think term limits, pay reduction, and abolishment of
| the Congressional pension would be an excellent start. It
| would eliminate some of the career aspects of legislating
| while forcing lobbyists to regularly deal with new
| people, somewhat limiting their influence.
|
| However, getting this would require Congress to vote on
| something that's against their own interest.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| If you make getting into politic an even less certain
| career, you're going to limit it more and more to the
| independently wealthy.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I think Congressional term limits would be one of the
| easiest fixes for the current state of affairs.
| Overturning Citizens United and repealing the 17th would
| be great steps too. However, I think we should pay
| Congress people at least $1M/yr. Pay them like Fortune
| 100 CEO's. Make it so they don't even CARE about playing
| games with insider trading. If we want to run this
| capitalist country like the capitalists we think we are,
| then scrap the notion that Representatives were supposed
| to be farmers that went and represented their districts
| for a couple of sessions, and then went back to work. Pay
| them in a way that attracts truly talented people,
| instead of the usual suspects who have just enough
| intelligence to recognize that they have just enough
| EMOTIONAL intellect to handle the campaigning and the
| backroom dealings. Of course, then we get into the
| argument about whether the average Fortune CEO is really
| any more talented than the average representative, but
| you get the idea.
| shockeychap wrote:
| The tone of this is a little hard to read, so forgive me
| if I've misread anything.
|
| I mostly agree with the other changes, except for
| increasing pay as a means of eliminating the motivation
| to play games. If there's one thing we've seen play out
| over and over, it's that excesses and greed just beget
| more greed. Look at the number of executives, financial
| managers, and politicians who already had vast wealth yet
| STILL engage in shenanigans. Furthermore, the job of
| legislating is an elected one, which means it will always
| go to those who are best able to convince the most people
| to vote for them (frequently by promises and pandering),
| not those who will do the best job. Now, I don't think
| legislators should get pauper's pay, but I also think we
| should do what we can to limit it's use as a career path
| for power and wealth.
|
| I have no problems with capitalism. If the market has
| healthy competition and the referees (regulations and the
| courts) are fair and transparent, capitalism is good.
| Unfortunately, many of those elements have gotten worse
| in recent decades. We regulate more than ever, but it's
| the small businesses who suffer the burden and have no
| real voice in DC.
|
| Capitalism done right means that I'm not upset by Wal-
| Mart's success, as it's kept in check by other companies
| like Amazon and Target. If you think anybody is
| invincible, take a look at what happened to Sears,
| K-Mart, and Toys-R-Us. Capitalism done wrong means that
| big companies use regulations and unfair referees to keep
| out competition. The power wielded by FAANG today dwarfs
| anything Microsoft ever had.
| bradlys wrote:
| The people you want running the country aren't likely
| people who are willing to get paid minimum wage too.
|
| You want the best? Usually have to pay more. People in
| congress are barely paid anything as far as the private
| market goes. (<$200k/yr and that's while having to live
| in two places and frequently travel between them)
| Considering how many have law degrees and other
| professional degrees, being a congress person certainly
| is a step down in terms of certain income. They just make
| up for it with should be illegal forms of market
| manipulation. (And other things)
| shockeychap wrote:
| I don't want legislators who think they're "running the
| country". That's the first problem. Rulemaking should
| never be construed with "running".
|
| Secondly, I've never had any illusion about trying to
| attract "the best" in Congress. It's an elected position,
| both the House and Senate, and so it will merely attract
| those with aspirations of power and wealth who are good
| at campaigning. Oftentimes we also get people who forge a
| decades-long career by leveraging the access to power and
| influence they have in such a position. This last part is
| toxic, and won't be fixed by increasing pay.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You can profit when a stock tanks too.
| undefined1 wrote:
| wow, you're not kidding. what are the chances they are going to
| bite their main investments _and_ key donor class?
|
| "About 98% of political contributions from internet companies
| this cycle went to Democrats"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-electi...
|
| https://observer.com/2020/11/big-tech-2020-presidential-elec...
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/30/21540616/silicon-valle...
| hn8788 wrote:
| Obama's campaign manager said that Facebook flat out told
| them "we're on the same side" when they allowed them to abuse
| the same API Cambridge Analytica did.
| yao420 wrote:
| Facebook, like all corporations, play every politician.
|
| What do you think Trump and Zuckerberg talked about when
| they would have dinner at the White House?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I suspect that France has their own version on this (years in the
| making) and will act in alignment with the USA as the fines and
| oversight begin to form.
| Inspiringer wrote:
| I believe it is in United States interest to let Big Tech do
| whatever they want to complete with China.
| williesleg wrote:
| Just a shakedown.
| roenxi wrote:
| I support anything that makes life harder for the FAANG style
| companies - I'm just never going to believe that the US house
| will do what this article signals they do.
|
| Facebook and Twitter are profound influences on politics. I look
| on the politically aligned mainstream news, practices like
| gerrymandering, the general state of political discourse, do some
| quick joining of dots and ... well. Political involvement isn't
| going to move the situation in a direction I like.
|
| FAANG is bad. I'll be on the record as saying whatever comes out
| of the House will be proven worse in time.
| izacus wrote:
| I'm not an american so can you explain if Facebook and Twitter
| actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media
| like Fox News?
|
| (At least in our part of the world that media seriously
| outstrips any kind of influence FB and Twitter yelling has.)
| mlac wrote:
| I'm providing the numbers below for context, but cable news
| has a lot less daily active users than Twitter or Facebook.
| In my view, though, the daily news watchers are much more
| entrenched in their views, less likely to change, and believe
| strongly that the rest of the country watches the news like
| they do. I've had family members on both sides of the isle be
| extremely passionate and get physically worked up that the
| world was ending because they relied on cable news as their
| source of truth. The Fox follower was miserable when Obama
| was in office and the MSNBC follower was miserable more often
| than not when Trump was in office.
|
| "Over the first full week of 2021 (Jan. 4 through Jan. 10),
| CNN ranked first among cable networks (roughly 2.8 million
| viewers per day; 4.2 million in primetime) followed by MSNBC
| (2.3 million per day ;3.8 million in primetime) and Fox News
| in third (1.7 million per day; 3.2 million in primetime)."[1]
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-
| news-v...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that
| almost every article or news segment of importance is talking
| about, and quoting, Tweets. Whether Twitter has more
| influence than cable news now, I don't know, but it has
| embedded itself like a tick into the news rubric.
| slibhb wrote:
| Since Trump was banned from Twitter have you heard anything
| that he has said?
|
| Whether or not you use Twitter and Facebook, that's what
| journalists spend their time doing, so one way or another
| it's affecting the news.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| This seems like a massive problem. Instead of going out and
| getting a story, they let trendy topics on Twitter &
| Facebook dominate? Well that doesn't seem like their job to
| me --- it seems lazy and self-serving.
|
| Not sure what else to expect; they're human after all.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| The camps are Facebook/Twitter/MSM (far left/Marxist),
| Youtube (left), NTD/Joe Rogan/Rubin (center), Fox (center-
| right.)
|
| Leftists do not watch center or center-right, so they don't
| know anything about Jan. 6 facts, Hunter Biden, election
| fraud, #blm fraud, CCP non-kinetic warfare or political
| Islam.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's hard to measure. It's part of a network of feedback
| loops. There's no good way to single out any piece of it.
|
| Fox News pumps legitimacy into it. It's explicitly partisan
| but done in the style of a conventional news broadcast. That
| helps normalize and smooth the echo chamber that comes from
| the generalized outrage machine of social media. That allows
| the extreme wing and the supposedly moderate wing to coexist,
| while slowly shifting the Overton window away from the latter
| and towards the former.
|
| So there's no way to say which is more important. They use
| each other, not always in ways that they like but ultimately
| towards keeping them pointed in the same direction. The
| combination is so much more effective than any of them alone,
| while simultaneously having enough redundancy that you could
| remove any one of them but quickly reroute around that
| damage.
| indigochill wrote:
| > can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have
| bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News?
|
| More people get their news from social media than from...
| let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's
| from people linking content from those sources, but the point
| being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social
| media than they are specifically checking their news media
| feeds.
| jiofih wrote:
| The top 10 tech companies have collectively acquired and shut
| down _hundreds_ of small, successful startups.
|
| I believe this is very detrimental to the web and the economy.
| Founders need to have that as an option for an exit though. What
| are the alternatives? Limiting ownership to 49%?
| granshaw wrote:
| The whole notion of starting a company, possibly ignoring
| profits, with a buyout as the endgame is frankly ridiculous,
| and emblematic of the excesses and war chests that these big
| corps yield.
|
| What happened to building a profitable company, or at least one
| close enough to ipo, and "making it" that way?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| There are people leading those companies, but they're so few
| and far between that you can probably list them off the top
| of your head in the tech space. When a successful company
| like GitHub can't pass up double-digit billions, then,
| really, what hope is there? Companies like Microsoft have
| $130B of cash on hand, and (almost) everyone has a price.
| They can go buy several more of those companies, and that's
| why we hear a new $20B buyout rumor every week. If you could,
| you would too. IMO, that's why we need to start capping
| company size/valuation. There's no social good in Microsoft
| owning all the things they do. It only benefits the
| executives at MS and large shareholders, and I think they're
| benefitting enough already.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > but they're so few and far between that you can probably
| list them off the top of your head in the tech space.
|
| I disagree. You can't name them because they aren't worth
| billions of dollars and they don't make any headlines.
| They're usually called "lifestyle" businesses on here, and
| while sometimes this site discusses them most discussions
| are about building the next Google.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > What happened to building a profitable company, or at least
| one close enough to ipo, and "making it" that way?
|
| Nothing, the option is still there. Just depends if you want
| to risk it and work your ass off, or accept the security of a
| lower reward now.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| >Founders need to have that as an option for an exit though.
| What are the alternatives? Limiting ownership to 49%?
|
| No they don't. To rephrase, you're suggesting that companies
| are entitled to getting bought out. That's ridiculous. Owning a
| company is a privilege, people who abuse that privilege,
| billionaires, should be stripped of that power. Corporate
| America is cancerous, consuming and destroying everything
| indiscriminately for vanity, numbers on a screen, and
| authoritarian control over the less privileged.
| zepto wrote:
| > Owning a company is a privilege.
|
| A privilege you think should be held by the government?
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Why would you assume I said that.
|
| Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs of
| all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and wants
| of consumers without causing harm. When Companies, and the
| people that own and operate them, cause harm, it is the
| obligation of government to remedy these problems through
| action, forceful if need be, against the offenders.
| Governmental failure to remedy problems results in
| vigilantism without fail.
| zepto wrote:
| > Why would you assume I said that.
|
| I didn't.
|
| > Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs
| of all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and
| wants of consumers without causing harm. When Companies,
| and the people that own and operate them, cause harm, it
| is the obligation of government to remedy these problems
| through action, forceful if need be, against the
| offenders. Governmental failure to remedy problems
| results in vigilantism without fail.
|
| What has this ominous generalization got to do with the
| question?
| ryan93 wrote:
| It's not a privilege. The company is their property.
| Political opinions you dont like on facebook is just
| something you are going to have to get over.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| You're talking past my arguments. Owning a company is a
| privilege just as much as owning guns are. Companies are
| registered with government and violators are prosecuted. Do
| I need to link to articles about children getting their
| lemonade stands destroyed by cops or what?
| ryan93 wrote:
| Point taken. I just personally feel like the reasoning
| for taking a company needs to be insanely strong. A lot
| of current talk on both sides feels very partisan.
| jonas21 wrote:
| You've gotta be kidding. 99% of companies in the U.S. are
| small businesses, and over half of those have annual revenue
| under $500K (that's revenue, not profit). In many cases,
| small businesses offer immigrants a pathway to the middle
| class, despite lack of credentials, connections, or English
| skills. Are you saying they shouldn't have the right to sell
| their business? You talk about "authoritarian control," but
| what could be more authoritarian than denying people basic
| property rights?
|
| And even if you limit discussion to only tech startup
| companies, taking away the option of selling the company in
| the future completely changes the risk calculation. You'd end
| up with fewer companies getting started, which would entrench
| the big players even more.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's an interesting intersection of monopoly and The Tech
| Recruiting Problem which Cory Doctorow highlighted in a
| Exponential View (HBS) podcast.
|
| Acqui-Hiring is the new recruiting model.
|
| _Very_ roughly paraphrased, assessing tech talent has become
| so painfully difficult that the most effective model is
| essentially to assign a class assignment to a set of founders,
| along with a few million in seed capital, to build some Minimum
| Viable Proof of Talent. The seed funders act as matchmakers to
| the buying (typically: tech monopoly) firm, and take a finder
| 's fee. The project is shut down (it's done its work of
| demonstrating competence), and the team is brought into the
| acquiring firm.
|
| https://hbr.org/podcast/2021/01/big-tech-and-a-decade-of-ant...
| qweerty wrote:
| The answer is to put traitors in federal prison where they
| belong.
|
| The subversion of our democracy should not be taken lightly and
| attempts at regulatory capture must be met with harsh punishment.
| Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, and many more need to be incarcerated
| for the rest of their lives, which may seem harsh, but it's
| better than what most traitors get.
| redog wrote:
| Eat the rich?
| ObserverNeutral wrote:
| They will break them up. Mark my words.
|
| People are tired, their products and services are becoming more
| and more pushing on a string with regards to quality of life.
|
| The iPhone is more than 10 years old and nothing new came after
| that.
|
| At the same time people see these mega organizations which are
| more powerful than nation states, with people like Bezos worth
| 200B.
|
| When companies are worth 2T with founders worth 200B, the whole
| "what have you done for me recently" thing becomes pretty
| extreme, very quickly.
|
| If they want to avoid being broken up they have to at least bring
| about nuclear fusion or landing on Mars (maybe that's why Bezos
| is doing Blue Origin).
| d33lio wrote:
| RIP all my QQQ shares
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