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Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

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Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#131

Post by jjaammee »

oblio wrote: post #109
bagacrap wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because our utilities work so well and don't function at all like monopolies

Utilities are super heavily regulated. I'm not sure for the US, but for example frequently they can't enter new markets, so they can't leverage their monopoly to crush competition in other markets. And regarding working well, aren't a lot of people in favor of municipal broadband (an utility) vs Verizon & co. (oligopoly, not even a full blown monopoly)?

California PGE which provides electricity and gas to big portion of public is a moving train wreck. It's corrupted and dangerous. Pipeline explosion, electricity transmission line caused fire burn a whole town happened with worrying frequency. Heavy regulations don't prevent big bonus to executives and degrading infrastructure.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#132

Post by cblconfederate »

dalbasal wrote: post #26

The way antitrust is working in recent years is kind of ridiculous. Google in Europe is becoming a rich case study in antitrust meh. You find that adwords engages in a blatant "monopolistic abuse" in some specific sense. In the Adwords EU case for example, Google was both monopsonising (google search) and monopolising search advertising. But, the actual violations are specific, like exclusivity requirements and other…

Google doesn't really have a choice. Their monetization model rests on providing increasingly complicated dashboards to lure advertisers into believing their money is well spent. As long as they haven't found an alternative model they will just blindly pay up and redo

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#133

Post by oblio »

bassdropvroom wrote: post #110
mupuff1234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me wonder how easy it is to just hide certain features during the review process.

VW should hire this person!

https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#134

Post by zepto »

bugfix wrote: post #120
mupuff1234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me wonder how easy it is to just hide certain features during the review process.

It is actually pretty easy. As long as you don't use any private APIs, you can completely change the behavior of your app after the review by changing server side settings.

Yes, but if they catch you, you’ll get kicked out of the store altogether.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#135

Post by zepto »

philistine wrote: post #117
sneak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be both to work; the sandbox would fail in a day if there were no review/revocation system.

I'd argue only the revocation is needed. macOS is moving towards that model: every app requires notarization, Apple provides it without asking questions, but reserves the right to revoke the running privileges of any app. This makes so much more sense.

How does it make sense to allow scams to do their damage before shutting them down?

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#137

Post by Karunamon »

MikeUt wrote: post #73
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Apple has invested heavily in automated review methods over the years. b) I don't know what qualifications you think an app reviewer needs. They are not looking through the code but simply playing with the app on a range of devices. c) It is only a few hours for updates. Initial app submissions often take days/weeks and are very thorough.

All that "heavy investment", and they don't catch even the most obvious scams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26888190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504158

This may be a hot take, but I have a problem with the way that first article equates "extremely overpriced" with "scam".

A scam is when you've been deceived or defrauded.

If you consent to pay $10 a week for an app that doesn't provide what it claims to, that's one thing, and that should be actionable. But if it does what it claims to, not liking the price does not equate to being a scam.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#138

Post by zepto »

zimbatm wrote: post #86
simias wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we judge by the result these app store seem to do fairly well security-wise, no? Compared to Windows as a case study of what happens when you let users install anything they want from untrusted sources, it seems that the app stores do fairly well at culling obvious malware. At least that's what I experienced comparing the number of time I had to cleanup a friend or family member's computer filled with malware and…

A large part of the stability can be attributed to sandboxing. This is what prevents apps from gaining unprivileged access and destabilizing the system. This is the time where relatives will call you. What you don't see, is all the apps that steal the user's data. Curation obviously helps but it's difficult to measure to what extent.

> A large part of the stability can be attributed to sandboxing. This is what prevents apps from gaining unprivileged access and destabilizing the system. This is the time where relatives will call you.

True

> What you don't see, is all the apps that steal the user's data.

Exactly this. Apple now has policies against fingerprinting etc. which can’t be prevented by sandboxing.

> Curation obviously helps but it's difficult to measure to what extent.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/05/app-store-stopped-ove...

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#139

Post by zepto »

swiley wrote: post #47
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Apple has invested heavily in automated review methods over the years. b) I don't know what qualifications you think an app reviewer needs. They are not looking through the code but simply playing with the app on a range of devices. c) It is only a few hours for updates. Initial app submissions often take days/weeks and are very thorough.

Your definition of "thorough" and mine are very different. I highly doubt they could do a meaningful review without the complete source code for the app. It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write. The whole thing is a scam.

> It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review

Which leads to the account being banned.

> and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write.

Which are detected through analysis if they are common spyware.

>The whole thing is a scam.

Clearly not.

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