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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

#261

Post by [deleted] »

JI00912 wrote: post #219
anoncake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Depends why there is a lack of competition. Are there barriers of entry to the market? Were they put up by the company? Or do they just have such an awesome product at a great price they no one can offer a better / commutative alternative?

[deleted]

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

#262

Post by reader_mode »

buran77 wrote: post #256
jimnotgym wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple did not allow bitcoin apps This is what is wrong with walled gardens, laws should be made by lawmakers, not Apple.

Who said anything about laws? Apple's rules are no different from HN's rules. And for that matter, your house rules. They're arbitrary decisions to the liking of the respective party. They just have to not be against the law themselves. If they are problematic the solution isn't to generically "ban rules" (saying it out loud already hints at the "value" of this proposition) but to change the law to prohibit certain r…

This is a super naive analogy - HN doesn't serve close to 50% of the US market, nor is it a platform through which billions of dollars transact. If it did very different rules apply, rightfully so, scale matters, market position matters - from Apple profit margins it's obvious they are abusing monopolistic position.

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

#263

Post by Siira »

dalbasal wrote: post #64
Siira wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So please explain why the licenses need to cost a fortune? Simple Bayesian thinking will tell you what the real motive is, and what is being used as the coverup motive.

There is no "real" motive, only history. One thing led to another. Now we are here.

Your theory has zero predictive powers, unlike mine.

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

#264

Post by zepto »

swiley wrote: post #255
zepto wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies buy out smaller software projects and add spyware to them fairly often (on the iPhone this usually happens via dylibs rather than the App publisher purposefully doing it.) Yes. and Apple has removed one of the only ways to catch this without an adequate replacement. No - these can be scanned for during app review. > The effect is much worse overall security. No, consumer software outside the App Store is…

I would be willing to bet money that there is more malware on the App Store than in the official Debian Repos.

So what? There is more malware in the App Store than on floppy disks for the Atari ST too.

The Debian repos are not a software store.

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

#265

Post by zepto »

swiley wrote: post #245
zepto wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to be included in a group of iPhone users that use iMessage you must own an iPhone. This is true but also meaningless. If you want to be included in a group of Android users who use Facebook messenger, you must own an Android device. If you want to be part of a group of Windows users who use signal, you must own a Windows machine. All three are true, but presumably you can see they have absolutely nothi…

Those numbers came from Apple, lets pull them apart: >App Store stopped more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020 They never justify or source this, they literally just pulled it out of their ass. >Apps rejected for containing hidden or undocumented features A lot of those are probably development tools that users legitimately wanted. >Other rejected apps Good job they blocked some stupid…

> They never justify or source this, they literally just pulled it out of their ass.

You do realize they have the data, right?

>Apps rejected for containing hidden or undocumented features A lot of those are probably development tools that users legitimately wanted.

You never justify or source this, you literally just … … I think you know how this goes.

>Other rejected apps > Good job they blocked some stupid obvious scams. The web is full of these so the users careless enough to fall for them will still get scammed.

No, people trust the App Store more than they trust the web. That’s the whole point.

> I don't see how that justifies the ridiculous situation they've created.

The situation where consumers are happy to pay for software because someone is weeding out scams?

>credit card numbers are never shared with merchant. The whole point behind credit cards is that you don't care if someone steals the number. Otherwise everyone would be using PKI instead of shouting an ID number at eachother. So yeah, thanks I guess for saving some banks money but that does little to help the end user.

I guess you’ve never had a card stolen or been the victim of fraud. Eventually you can get your money back in most cases, but it can take a long time and be a huge hassle.

Again you argue against beneficial protections for no apparent reason.

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

zepto wrote: post #130
bsdubernerd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a quick reminder to everybody else that walled gardens don't actually help the consumer. They only arbitrarily restrict choice, they don't actually improve security (if any, that's provided by the sandboxing, not by the store "review"). If this company (ENEL) wasn't a huge state-wide electric company (inheriting their power and ties from the previous state-owned monopoly) how many chances do you think they had to…

> And a quick reminder to everybody else that walled gardens don't actually help the consumer. This is not supported by the article at all. > They only arbitrarily restrict choice, This statement is total bullshit. Even if a few scams get through, and even if Google has abused its store, it’s not only arbitrary . > they don't actually improve security (if any, that's provided by the sandboxing, not by the store "revi…

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by andrepd »

buran77 wrote: post #256
jimnotgym wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple did not allow bitcoin apps This is what is wrong with walled gardens, laws should be made by lawmakers, not Apple.

Who said anything about laws? Apple's rules are no different from HN's rules. And for that matter, your house rules. They're arbitrary decisions to the liking of the respective party. They just have to not be against the law themselves. If they are problematic the solution isn't to generically "ban rules" (saying it out loud already hints at the "value" of this proposition) but to change the law to prohibit certain r…

Yes, but the point is that Apple doesn't allow you to not accept their house rules and install apps some other way on """your""" device.

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

#268

Post by anoncake »

JI00912 wrote: post #219
anoncake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Depends why there is a lack of competition. Are there barriers of entry to the market? Were they put up by the company? Or do they just have such an awesome product at a great price they no one can offer a better / commutative alternative?

There are always barriers of entry. I don't know of any monopoly that exists where those barriers are low.

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

#269

Post by salawat »

dntrkv wrote: post #183
salawat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? 199…

It wasn't a case of no spam; but rather predictable spam.

After a while you'd start to recognize the Web rings. The "just link" pages became extremely obvious after a while, and you could generally reliably get the same results regardless of where you searched from or what you were doing when the time came to search. You had far fewer syndication mills, and you could even find resources reliably.

The net was a reasonably navigable thing even to children doing school research. Nowadays, I have to explain to kids all the myriad pitfalls that exist nowadays, when they look up something, ho back a bit later, and can't find their resource anymore.

And that's just the bloody legit stuff. When you talk malware, we're in a completely different world nowadays.

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

#270

Post by user-the-name »

Siira wrote: post #51
dalbasal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and the last line of defense is removing a bad app to prevent further harm. Drivers licenses aren't only about competence. Sure, there's a test. But, there's also the ability to revoke a license.

So please explain why the licenses need to cost a fortune? Simple Bayesian thinking will tell you what the real motive is, and what is being used as the coverup motive.

Is $99 a year really "a fortune"? It's less than the price of a Netflix subscription.
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