Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 452 posts

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#61

Post by eecc »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
eecc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

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.

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...

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#62

Post by eecc »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #51
lallysingh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS isn't 90%+ of the phone market.

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.

So? Go buy an Android device. You’re blaming a manufacturer for being 100% of its own product market?!

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#63

Post by redog »

qweerty wrote: post #46

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.

Eat the rich?

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#64

Post by ericmay »

capableweb wrote: post #47
ericmay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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…

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.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#65

Post by sgerenser »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #44
atdrummond wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Most Ace Hardware stores are franchises. There’s 5000 of them in the US.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#66

Post by sbuk »

izacus wrote: post #55
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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!?!”

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#67

Post by eecc »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #42
Mindwipe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

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.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#68

Post by ohashi »

the-dude wrote: post #28
asah wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM and Microsoft already had their anti-trust run-ins in the 80s and 90s.

So what happened?

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#69

Post by izacus »

sbuk wrote: post #66
izacus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 M…

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.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#70

Post by zffr »

capableweb wrote: post #5

> 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 t…

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.

Post reply on HN