Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is mostly US audience. EU = bad US = good
But weren't people here supposed to be intellectually curious, and have the cognitive tools to overcome things like instinctive tribalism?
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Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
471–480 of 631 posts
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.
They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.
Maybe I should have said "_don't_ need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution" rather than "need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the _least_", but I think we agree.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use Android without Google
In practical terms, you can't without switching to another company with an android variant that is just as bad.
In practical terms, you can simply not log into a Google account on any Android device, including those made by Google, and Google will get less data about you than Apple does on iOS.
The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
This worries me beyond anti-competitive stuff. If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
Similar to how Google merged with DoubleClick and threw out the whole "don't be evil" policy. My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
> My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this decision. But I also like that I can cancel all my IAP subs in the settings quickly. Maybe stripe could set up consumer accounts to do the same.
And under this decision, you will be still be free to only subscribe to apps that go through Apple and allow you to cancel that way
Hmm. I'm already considering switching our app to stripe only to ease billing reconciliation. Managing users who made in app purchases who want regular web access as well has been a pain.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history: > Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we hav…
It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.
The 30% number was taken very positively when the Apple app store launched. It was much lower than what software companies typically budgeted at that time for marketing and distributing a new product.
Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
To you and me, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if is intended to scare people who like and want the safety of the apple ecosystem and perceive everything as outside of it as dark web. Come to think of it, that is kinda how I see dark web.. is there a scarier place on line than that?
You're posting on HN and you think regular websites are the "dark web"? Do you think HN is the dark web?
Hm. Maybe I did not phrase it correctly. I was presenting two perspectives: one of a user, who thinks net outside walled garden is dangerous and user who regularly traverses non-walled garden that the first user perceives as dark net. That was followed by: is there a place darker than dark net:D
Apologies, there are times I do not express myself as clearly as I would want to.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#478> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
Whatever your opinion of Steve Jobs, he was a leader and would never have let things get this far. Now leadership is just mediocre and apple products look nice but are shallow nerfed computing experiences.
The one who blocked Adobe Flash and Google Voice? Steve jobs was the one to bring app store gatekeping and developer restrictions to IOS.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with. Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act. Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by…
This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it. In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted. Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size crit…
Yes, it is a frequent problem, but efforts should be made to limit it.
It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.
There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.
Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.
Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.
Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lawyer here - that's not how these things work. This is definitely non-compliant. Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does. You…
Let's cut to the fundamental argument here. Government should NEVER be allowed to dictate your state of mind and should NEVER be allowed to dictate based on feelings instead of facts. If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's…
The law isn't some objective truth. Reckless endangerment, harassment, etc. don't have every form of those outlined. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck.
If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I have contracted for companies that have had legal judgements similar to, but not exactly, like this, and they erred on the side of caution. Everything went through legal. And yes, that can mean not doing stuff your competitor does because you stepped too far over the line. Oh well, you fucked up big time and now you have a magnifying glass on you.
But Apple is too stupid or too bold to have an ounce of sense here.
The idea that people can follow laws based upon 'feelings' but billion dollar corporations can't is ridiculous. Fuck them, they 100% knew what they were doing.