Earlier quoted context omitted.
> keeping US companies in check Also keeping EU companies in check :-)
If there were any EU tech companies to check, then they would be.
So according to you, there are zero European tech companies?
European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
871–880 of 975 posts
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't uninstall Chrome on my LG Android phone either.
No, but you can fully disable it (and that's equivalent to uninstalling, and wasn't possible on windows).
That is certainly not the equivalent as it still occupies storage.
Also, you could actually uninstall IE. That only uninstalled the shell, not the libraries (as there were dependencies) but it was gone in terms of the application.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#873Earlier quoted context omitted.
(The rest we are going to disagree on. I know the specifics of these agreements and advised on some of them, so i can't talk about them for rea) "There's a very good chance that without it being open source it would have went precisely nowhere. " Why? You say a lot of things, but none seem to related to why this is true. As far as i can tell, it is definitively not true. The app developers were happy to go where ther…
Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fee ala Windows, Google would not be sitting on 80% global market share today.
> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good.
If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
It had a few new concepts, mainly multi-processes, but "far superior when it came out" is a broad exaggeration. Equally, IE was far superior to Netscape when it came out ;) This is not to say Chrome is (now) the inferior browser but saying their marketing push has nothing to do with its market share is ignoring reality.
It had little things like multi-process, omnibox, and something like a 10x faster JS engine than the competition, but the real killer feature was the auto-updating.
It did come with advantages, no doubt, but - as so often - its market share is not necessarily because it tried to push the web further, a large share is simply because of Google's aggressive marketing.
To this day Google is pushing their browser if you dare to use their services with Edge.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key difference at that time was that Microsoft had zero real competition and was stifling innovation in the OS and web space. Instead today Android is the only alternative to the most proprietary and richest company in the history of computing, which needs no legal remedies or special favors.
Android has something like 85-90% marketshare - not different then Windows back in the day. Google bundling their Search with it is just pushing their own agenda.
"85-90% marketshare" by devices, not by revenue and definitely not profit.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How is the Play Store related to the Google Seach app or to Chrome? - They're not, and the attempt to claim they are part of a mobile "suite" is the same sort of obfuscation Microsoft used when they argued a web browser (IE) was an essential part of a desktop OS. This ruling seems obvious to me.
> same sort of obfuscation Microsoft used when they argued a web browser (IE) was an essential part of a desktop OS How is a web browser not an essential part of a desktop OS. Literally every single consumer operating system comes bundled with a web browser, and in fact everyone bundles their own OSX: Safari ChromeOS: Chrome Windows: Edge
> How is a web browser not an essential part of a desktop OS.
The short answer, at the time anyways, was that you could just delete it to no consequence. It was just another program.
Some of the phones do "need" a browser as they provide it as a feature to apps, so things are a bit murkier now.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#877The net outcome of this decision will be that nobody will create significant open platforms of this type anymore, because once you are successful you will no longer be able to have any control over the experience. Someone will always be able to find a market that you are hurting. If you actually read the decision that's essentially their underlying complaint. They dress it up in terms about search market blah blah bl…
"nobody will create significant open platforms of this type anymore, because once you are successful you will no longer be able to have any control "
'open' and 'control' are hard to reconcile.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#878Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do care about companies that abuse their position as a monopoly. I think its probably right that Google gets fined for not allowing companies to sell Android forks. What I have a problem with is that if a company is doing some standard business practice, like paying a different company to exclusively use their product, that is okay when they are a not a monopoly but that suddenly become not okay because they have b…
Because a monopoly is a special status that infers special powers and special responsibilities. I'm not sure what is so hard to understand in that.
if the practices used by the company were so bad and abusive, shouldn't the customers just move to another company? Voila, problem solved, the company no longer has monopoly.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#879I'm having a really hard time figuring out what happy ending the EU has in mind here. Google stops licensing Android to OEMs and doubles down on Pixel. It takes them years to catch up to Apple's marking and distribution head start, if they ever do. Samsung goes back to Tizen, which nobody wants, and sales plummet. All the other Android OEMs disappear. All we have left is Apple and the most expensive, proprietary and…
I get the impression that you didn't read the actual article. There are three complaints all basically about the contractual conditions Google imposes, two about imposing Google search and the most interesting one about Google forcing manufacturers to choose between selling only Google's version with Play Store & Google apps or never Google's version. This forced in particular the big ones to commit fully to Google's…
> "buy only from us or never from us"
And? Seems like a valid move (from both moral and corporate perspective) to me.
Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a location picker. I'm talking about the map view on which applications show you things, such as live views of all trains in the country or something. And this is just one example, there are a hundred more things that are in the proprietary google suite, without which you'll be able to install only a few of the apps available for the platform.
Hmm, those are the specific apps using Google Maps API. That's like saying why does HackerNews use jQuery, I want it to use lodash. (I don't know if they do, just an example).
Don't they just call the default maps sdk, whatever implementation it is? Because if I firewall google play services and some other google stuff, but not the app that uses it, then everything will work but the map isn't displayed. It's google play services that does the map loading, not the app, it seems.