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Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

wsj.com

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#21

GNU Emacs also abuses its dominant position in the editor market by shipping all this bundled Lisp code. Over twenty years ago I was a making killing, hand over fist, selling a Usenet news reading add-on for Emacs. Then those anti-trust bastards included some Lisp code which does that, and I went down the tubes. I mean, what gave them the right , you know? It's as if not only did they disrespect my sense of entitleme…

I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post. It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software. If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company? My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't ne…

> I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post.

More like satirical.

I just returned to this tab 56 minutes after the fact, and wanted to delete the comment, but when I clicked the delete link, "1 point" flipped to "13 points". :)

My point is, why is something like GNU Emacs or GNU/Linux above anti-trust with regard to bundling? Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of the world's desktops. There wouldn't be any anti-trust hoopla regarding that distribution having a preferred web browser, no matter how deeply integrated.

Morally, the users of this platform would be just as locked in as users of Windows and IE. (Or Google Android and some Google Service app or what have you).

Anti-trust somehow only picks targets from which it can squeeze money. That's what it's about, not any morality of the situation or what is good for consumers. Those are just pretexts.

(The very fact that Russia is eagerly aping this concept speaks volumes).

Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#23
post #17
post #11

Filled in February 2015 and ruled in September 2015? Russian justice is very fast, and the results are really shocking and surprising

the main theme in Russia today is "replacing of imported goods and services with domestic ones". The strategy consists of 3 stages: 1. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services 2. ... 3. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers. right now the stage 1 is at full swing.

2. should read ??? because 3. will never happen (see China).

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#24

GNU Emacs also abuses its dominant position in the editor market by shipping all this bundled Lisp code. Over twenty years ago I was a making killing, hand over fist, selling a Usenet news reading add-on for Emacs. Then those anti-trust bastards included some Lisp code which does that, and I went down the tubes. I mean, what gave them the right , you know? It's as if not only did they disrespect my sense of entitleme…

I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post. It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software. If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company? My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't ne…

> that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress

How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work.

Thus, no author distributes their GPL'd software with an expectation that they will make a profit by keeping others from using that code.

So whether the main project continues to use their code or replaces it with other code of comparable functionality is irrelevant. In fact, most entities who buy into Linux do so (in part) to offload the maintenance expenses associated with that code base. So if the community picks it up, win. If the community does not, you 'break even' as you're in the same position of maintaining the code base internally as you would would have been if you'd not open sourced it in the first place.

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#25
post #17
post #11

Filled in February 2015 and ruled in September 2015? Russian justice is very fast, and the results are really shocking and surprising

the main theme in Russia today is "replacing of imported goods and services with domestic ones". The strategy consists of 3 stages: 1. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services 2. ... 3. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers. right now the stage 1 is at full swing.

They have GLONASS.

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#26
The jurisdiction bias aside, Google has been indeed busy deploying an array of devices to disguise the AdWords monopoly behind an alphabetical soup of projects and products. The more your hear about self-driving cars, the less attention you're paying to Paid Clicks market share.

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#27
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main theme in Russia today is "replacing of imported goods and services with domestic ones". The strategy consists of 3 stages: 1. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services 2. ... 3. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers. right now the stage 1 is at full swing.

2. should read ??? because 3. will never happen (see China).

This seems like a non sequitur. Care to elaborate more on China's current state and how it's analogous to Russia's future?

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#28

Can someone post a non-paywall link?

I got around it just by Googling a good chunk of the URL -- google-found-guilty-of-abusing-dominant-market-position-in-russia -- and clicking on the top result. WSJ doesn't paywall traffic coming from Google apparently...

Re: Google Found Guilty of ‘Abusing Dominant Market Position’ in Russia

#30

Let's see Yandex can indeed fork Android and deliver a device in Russia without Google apps..what anitrust issue here? Maybe Yandex anticompetitive desires?

Google makes it impossible for a single manufacturer to ship both google services android and yandex flavor adroid.

Or any other custom android; just ask Samsung, Google pressurized them to drop their own ecosystem.

This is anticompetitive if you ask me.

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