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

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

#61

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jontcalho wrote: post #55
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about dominant position. Having the sort of stifling monopoly that Google has opens it up to additional regulation, just like Microsoft was before it. Apple is a niche market still, to this day, and isn't under as much scrutiny.

First the term "stifling monopoly" is loaded, and they definitely don't have it in Russia. 2nd they can't have a "stifling monopoly" since they are just another node on the graph, you don't need them to "internet", there is always another site, another app.

See my response to other commenter on parent comment.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #58
guard-of-terra wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Last time I checked my Samsung tablet I could still go to the Samsung app store to install apps. Where is this pressure you speak of that made the Samsung store app go away?

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by kazinator »

marcosdumay wrote: post #44
kazinator wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applicat…

> Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons. Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.

Or maybe it's so competitive, working on such thin margins, that they don't want to put resources into forked distros.

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

#64

Post by guard-of-terra »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #58
guard-of-terra wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Last time I checked my Samsung tablet I could still go to the Samsung app store to install apps. Where is this pressure you speak of that made the Samsung store app go away?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9068334

"It's not just pressure. They outright cut you off. You cannot ship Google Androids and non-Google Androids. It's part of the MARA."

I think just having your own store is okay as long as you don't bundle their competitors and don't exclude google play and you are big enough to put some weight.

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

#65

Post by guard-of-terra »

aianus wrote: post #59
chlestakoff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"'Yandex', whatever that is" - Yandex is a $10B public company, a legitimate innovator and the top internet player in Russia. Ever heard of that country, or is it yet another "whatever that is" for you?

If they were so great they wouldn't have to force themselves onto consumers by bundling their crapware into carrier sponsored phones. Not to mention $10B is probably less than the amount Google alone has spent developing and promoting Android. Please explain how their direct competitor should be entitled to piggy back on that work for free. Edit: apparently they even have their own 'Yandex Browser' based on Chromium.…

"Please explain how their direct competitor should be entitled to piggy back on that work"

Nobody forced Google to release Android under open licenses and by doing so they certainly didn't get green light to abuse monopoly.

"I will open source my software and see that it only does me good" - that's not how it works.

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

#66

Post by frozenport »

chlestakoff wrote: post #48
frozenport wrote: post #29

Should we take what the Russian goverment says at face value, or is this part of a trend in Russian policy to turn away from the West? These are the same guys trying to ban Reddit and Wikipedia.

Yes, and the White House are the same guys running planting spyware in the American *ware products used around the world at unprecedented scale. Savvy?

USA government spying, therefore USA software bad is not an informed argument. Choose between Russian or US hegemony and society.

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

#67

Post by aianus »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #65
aianus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were so great they wouldn't have to force themselves onto consumers by bundling their crapware into carrier sponsored phones. Not to mention $10B is probably less than the amount Google alone has spent developing and promoting Android. Please explain how their direct competitor should be entitled to piggy back on that work for free. Edit: apparently they even have their own 'Yandex Browser' based on Chromium.…

"Please explain how their direct competitor should be entitled to piggy back on that work" Nobody forced Google to release Android under open licenses and by doing so they certainly didn't get green light to abuse monopoly. "I will open source my software and see that it only does me good" - that's not how it works.

Sure, Android was released under open licenses and Yandex is free to use it.

However, Play Store is not open source or released under an open license so if you want to use Android to spread your crapware you don't get to complain that Google doesn't want to license you their app store. They have no moral ground to stand on.

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

#68

Post by cannabis_sam »

kazinator wrote: post #21
click170 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution

This is like saying "suppose the US was a totalitarian dictatorship". It might be an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores reality to the point of being utterly useless in any practical sense. GNU/Linux is based around the idea of free software, which by it's very definition make it impossible to restrict it to one distribution. (This is not to say that the US will never become a totalitarian dictatorship, but rather that despite the huge flaws of the US political system, the features of totalitarianism are antithetical to the ideological basis of the current US political system.)

>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.

Even if you assume there is a correlation between anti-trust litigation and the resources of the companies exposed to this kind of litigation, that alone does not prove malice on the part of the government. The actual reason anti-trust litigation hits companies with money is that it's designed to fight monopolies . How many monopolies are going bankrupt, and how many of those who do, need government intervention to limit their damage on the overall economy...?

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

It really doesn't. Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, and has been since before the October revolution. That they're jumping on western concepts and adapting them to suit their need of political control doesn't say anything about the value of the ideas they're corrupting.

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

Let's consider a quote from your link: "Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does." This is trivially false since companies (i.e. people who have gone into business) have been cleared of antitrust charges. It's also an an excellent example of Ayn Rand's simplistic, and in my opinion, childish excuse for proper reasoning and logic. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to refute the rest of Ayn Rand's quotes in the article, in the hopes that it might cure some people of their objectivism.)

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

#69

Post by cannabis_sam »

kazinator wrote: post #21
click170 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution This is like saying "suppose the US was a totalitarian dictatorship". It might be an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores reality to the point of being utterly useless in any practical sense. GNU/Linux is based around the idea of free software, which by it's very definition make it impossible to restrict it to one distribution. (This is not to say that the US will never become a totalitarian dictatorship, but rather that despite the huge flaws of the US political system, the features of totalitarianism are antithetical to the ideological basis of the current US political system.)

>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. Even if you assume there is a correlation between anti-trust litigation and the resources of the companies exposed to this kind of litigation; that alone does not prove malice on the part of the government. The actual reason anti-trust litigation hits companies with money is that it's designed to fight monopolies . How many monopolies are going bankrupt, and how many of those who do, need government intervention to limit their damage on the overall economy...?

>The very fact that Russia is eagerly aping this concept speaks volumes. It really doesn't. Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, and has been since before the October revolution. That they're jumping on western concepts and adapting them to suit their need of political control doesn't say anything about the value of the ideas they're corrupting.

>Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html Let's consider a quote from your link: "Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does." This is trivially false since companies (i.e. people who have gone into business) have been cleared of anti-trust charges. It's also an an excellent example of Ayn Rand's simplistic, and in my opinion, childish excuse for proper reasoning and logic. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to refute the rest of Ayn Rand's quotes in the article, in the hopes that it might cure some people of their objectivism.)

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

#70

Post by fapjacks »

jasonlotito wrote: post #33
fapjacks wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should clarify that here I'm not talking about Microsoft's hardware like the Surface. I'm talking about being able to buy a computer from a manufacturer without having to pay $99 for an installation of Microsoft Windows that I explicitly do not want . Some effort was made to stop this practice (of MS paying manufacturers not to offer machines without Windows), but it clearly didn't go very far in solving the proble…

> I'm talking about being able to buy a computer from a manufacturer without having to pay $99 for an installation of Microsoft Windows that I explicitly do not want. You can. You are not limited to specialty outfits as well, nor are you required to pay a lot for it, or any of the other numerous criteria you try to add on as well. Being able to buy a PC without paying for Windows or paying for an Apple product is inc…

No, you are shoehorned into buying a very specific model. It should be no problem whatsoever to choose any model on that site, and select "Ubuntu" for the OS, but you can't. If you go and look (and here I mean actually go and look[0]), the vast majority of machines that you can buy do not have the option to not pay for a Windows license. The choice you get is "Windows 8.1 or Windows 10".

[0] http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops/xps-laptops

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