You can't have the Play app store on your Android phone unless you accept to install Youtube, Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Photos. This is clearly anti-competitive.
That line of reasoning didn’t work out to well against Microsoft. No there was no browser choice screen in the US and no forced unbundling. If enough users choose Chrome willingly on the desktop to make it the majority, do you think unbundling is going to help some scrappy startup hosting video at scale with all of the associated cost is going to arise instead of everyone just downloading YouTube? Google Drive has pl…
Your two arguments contradict each other. Bundling YouTube is fine because there are no viable competitors. Bundling Google Drive is fine because there are plenty of viable competitors.
If Chrome was able to compete in a level playing field, then so should the other Google services. You seem to believe that Google makes an effort to tie together its services because they are stupid and don't realise they are not gaining anything from it.
I like your style, "lol" is the appropriate response to the notion of losing Google's entire list of products. Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?
it was a losing fight, by covid I switched to iOS when I realized safetynet really messed up with the ability to own your own hardware since banking apps would straight up break if you rooted your phone. at that point I also realized there was less fragmentation with iPhones and had more long term support.
Yeah. What's the point of things like GrapheneOS if using them means we'll be refused service? Remote attestation lets them use cryptography to literally discriminate against us. Not using a corporate pwned machine? Can't log into your bank account.
It's beyond stupid. Everything is gonna require this. Banks want it because fraud. Streaming apps want it because copyright infringement. Ordinary apps want it because advertising. If we must be in some walled garden, might as well choose the better kept one instead of the Google nonsense.
This is how computing freedom dies. There's absolutely no point to free software if we can't run it.
You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly. Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing. I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
> You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I disagree: 1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests. 2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird vi…
Have you tried Firefox recently? It's been my favorite for a decade or so. Now that chrome has crippled its extension API, it's objectively better.
I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, too.
The fact that you and I are happily using Linux is great evidence that software made collaboratively is better than software made competitively.
Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works. Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
> Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. No, that’s not how it works, at all. I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.
If they leave YouTube, they'll soon learn just how much they've been relying on Google's free bandwidth and storage for their videos. They'll either have to move to just another ad-supported service (who will almost certainly not have Google's infrastructure and thus higher costs) or you'll end up being asked to pay a lot more to their patreon.
You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly. Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing. I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
"You essentially outline why it should be broken up." No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services. "Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing." No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open m…
Sorry but you’re starting with a very poor definition of monopoly. If you define things incorrectly, you can make any point logical but the definition (and point) are still wrong.
Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux. They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1] It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.” [0] https://github.com/appleopen [1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
Please stare at your own links for a second. Let me help you: https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astar... Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars. I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that. As for the other link. More than half of those projects are Apple specific.
Look at the second link. Many of their projects aren’t in appleopen.
That’s great you have personal repos with more than 8 stars!
Here is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says: https://maps.apple.com/unsupported "Your current browser isn't supported" I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error. Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I…
And of course it works when I change only the user-agent to windows.
> But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large. Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, ac…
One of the acquisitions you are talking about was 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane . Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger. The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy.…
> 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane.
> Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large I agree But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons
This isn't something that has anything to do with size or property. Just 1) eliminate advertising, and 2) actually enforce the most basic of antitrust, namely using one product to subsidize another operating at a loss that prevents competition.
> Just 1) eliminate advertising, and 2) actually enforce the most basic of antitrust, namely using one product to subsidize another operating at a loss
Those are good ideas to consider, too
But also very radical
We are beyond the point where we need to be open to the "unthinkable "
YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit. Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of peo…
What's funny about this comment is that YouTube is absolutely usable if you pay for YouTube Premium, but most won't. Goes to show, while everyone whines about how bad an ad based business model is, noone has any alternate strategy that works at scale, - especially one that's not exclusionary to people from the developing world who can't afford to pay for every single thing on the internet.
It's crazy that people will watch hours of YouTube content every day, streaming HD video with almost zero buffering, features like auto-generated subtitles that can then be automatically translated into other languages, essentially unlimited storage so the videos they like are around forever (copyright claims and the like are a separate issue), you can embed the videos onto your own site for free, you can use them to livestream... all this and you'll never see a single advert if you pay for YouTube Premium. It's fantastic, but most people are so entitled that they seem offended that YouTube would ask for money to provide this service. I know premium does nothing about the insane amount of sponsorship slop every creator stuffs into their videos now, but maybe if people stopped using every possible tool they can find to block YouTube adverts and paid for premium, YouTube would pay their creators more and they wouldn't need to constantly lie about drinking AG1 every day and the quality of raycon headphones.