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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

#181

Post by simion314 »

g_p wrote: post #161
simion314 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You need register with a real name and credit card and pay 100$ to be able to publish anything on the app store. This was done on Windows too, you were not forced but any business would sign their application, otherwise they user would get a scary warning that the developer is not know. >As for code, they run relatively extensive automatic tests to detect whether private (banned/undocumented) APIs are used, I don’t…

In the EU there is a (little known) law that does as you suggest - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32... This regulation specifically looks at platform-to-business relationships, and requires actual disclosure of reasons, notice periods, etc. What we need to see are cases using this law (as it's pretty clear from article 4 what business' rights are), so it becomes too costly to trample over…

I am from EU, I will try and google more, my issue is with PlayStation and I could not find with my searches any way to appeal or get clarifications on what happened. I am not sure if sending an email on a generic contact email address with a link to the law will work.

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

#182

Post by mdeck_ »

eru wrote: post #18
varispeed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Italy, the judgements are not a source of law, so this ruling does not mean that a similar situation would have the same outcome in the future.

Yes, but in practice precedence has some informal weight even in civil law systems. (And in the same spirit, precedence can be overridden relatively easily in a common law system, too, the judge just has to find an obscure aspect of the new case that allows her to argue that the old cases don't apply.)

So, in reality, virtually identical to a common-law (US/UK-style) legal system.

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

#183

Post by dntrkv »

salawat wrote: post #91
ripdog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.

Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index. Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant fe…

How is searching painful? It's gotten better with almost every year.

I only see this sentiment here on HN, along with many other shitty takes about how pure the internet used to be. Are you talking about that era when opening the wrong search result would bombard your screen with millions of popups and install 20 toolbars on your machine?

Please tell me when this magical time of no spam in search results existed? 1995?

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

anoncake wrote: post #149
riffraff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is because they think the courts are politicized, not because the judiciary takes input from the government. In fact there has been a constant conflict between judges and government for the last 30 years.

Doesn't that mean the judiciary is independent, but biased?

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by ClumsyPilot »

spoonjim wrote: post #112
KMag wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I worked at Google on the indexing team from 2006-2010. During that time, I vaguely remember some announcement of a government-funded search engine project in France to beat Google. If I remember correctly, it wasn't the first time France tried a government-funded search engine. I suspect it's more a problem of network effects than it's a problem of money. Google just has so much data at this point that it's r…

The biggest blocker is talent. Who’s going to join the French Government’s Google at 1/3 the pay with no sushi in the cafeteria?

"pay with no sushi in the cafeteria?"

Look you mock french for many things, but food is not one of them

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

#186

Post by zepto »

swiley wrote: post #174
zepto wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if it gets noticed. True, but they are getting better at noticing. >> and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write. >Which are detected through analysis if they are common spyware. > Facebook got away with it for many years. You know about that because they were stopped . And since then Apple has tightened the rules and stepped up detection. >>The whole thing is a scam. >Clearly…

Noticing malware after it's installed based on a hash isn't any better than eg windows defender. The App Store doesn't help with that at all. >You know about that because they were stopped. And since then Apple has tightened the rules and stepped up detection. Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still. >No, because that would enable…

> Noticing malware after it's installed based on a hash isn't any better than eg windows defender. The App Store doesn't help with that at all.

False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender.

> Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.

That doesn’t change anything.

>No, because that would enable social engineering attacks once again.

> People still get tricked into installing CA certs which is just as effective since everything has to be done in a browser due to the App Store restrictions.

> So no this hasn't prevented social engineering attacks,

A false statement. Many kinds of social engineering attacks have definitely been prevented.

> it's only changed them

Here you admit that significant classes of attack have been prevented.

Your argument is that because not all attacks have been prevented, there is no value in preventing attacks.

This is an obvious fallacy.

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

#187

Post by Hamuko »

tyingq wrote: post #157
collaborative wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely easy, but it also is extremely easy to get permanently banned if they find out you "switched on" a hidden feature once the app got into production. A permanent ban can be very damaging, so one needs to make sure to be completely legit when it comes to app store submission reviews and app store ratings

I wonder how this works with webviews. Do they expect you to resubmit the same binary if a page displayed in a webview changes?

Isn't that how Fortnite did Project Liberty?

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

#188

Post by kyrra »

anoncake wrote: post #151
kyrra wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the difference between the US and the EU when it comes to monopoly lawsuits. The US has to prove that the behavior of a monopoly was harmful to customers/consumers. The EU has no burden of proof and can just take market size as a way to go after them. The general problem I see here is how you slice the market to say a given company has a monopoly. It sometimes feels like those going after large compa…

Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition. If lack of competition is not harmful to the customer, then competition is not beneficial. If competition is not beneficial in a given market, there is no reason for it to be a market to begin with and the monopoly should be expropriated.

> Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition.

I disagree. When you look at a company that is dominant in some part of the marketplace at a given point it time, you need to understand how they got there. The monopoly poster child Standard Oil rose-up when there used to be many more oil processing companies, but Standard Oil was able to do things for cheaper because they used more byproducts from the oil to create different products (which let them sell things like lamp oil for less). So sometimes monopolies rise-up because that one company is able to fill a market segment better than the competition.

The question then becomes, once they have a monopoly and others see this, how can potential competitors react. Can others copy (and improve) the same processing system that the monopoly has to produce a similar product for a similar price (maybe even less)? If so, then they can rise up and the original company will no longer be a monopoly. But if that original company takes steps to squelch the competition, you start getting into what the US has defined as "anti competitive" practices. These were developed because the past showed us that this leads to harming consumers.

We also have a lot of government granted monopolies. Copyright and IP law are time-limited monopolies on a given product. We have private business that operate on federal land (like national parks) that may be given a local monopoly within that region. Sometimes we make tradeoffs and grant monopolies.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

dalbasal wrote: post #52
oblio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete. Past a point, they should be regulated like an utility.

IDK if it's "past a point," but in some cases maybe. I'm torn on that though. EG, what would it actually mean if FB or twitter became "regulated like utilities?" Interoperability? Portability? IMO, these are pretty finicky problems for a regulator. I think it would likely look like the mandated personal data dumps we have today. Some clunky feature that few use, and don't change the structure of the market. Useful tr…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by elcomet »

ripdog wrote: post #85
dalbasal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if it's "past a point," but in some cases maybe. I'm torn on that though. EG, what would it actually mean if FB or twitter became "regulated like utilities?" Interoperability? Portability? IMO, these are pretty finicky problems for a regulator. I think it would likely look like the mandated personal data dumps we have today. Some clunky feature that few use, and don't change the structure of the market. Useful tr…

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.

Google Search could still show ads.

They would just be Google ads customers, like any other website, and they would get paid for displaying ads.

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