EU bureaucracy logic at its best - go after google and microsoft, but we let apple do whatever they want. For me they with their closed ecosystem are both bigger danger and more anti competitive than both Google and Microsoft combined. Or at least force them to accept other web browsers in their store.
Apple don't have anything even vaguely approaching a monopoly in any area. Their market share in everything from phones to computers is < 30%; Google's is > 90% for search. You can't have a "Monopoly on the contents of the iPhone app store" any more than Coke has a "Monopoly on the contents of Coke cans", and thus should be forced to fill some with Pepsi.
They have a monopoly on downloaded music purchases. That has been weakened in the last few years. Prior to Spotify and Pandora climbing to substantial scale, iTunes had a very strong monopoly on digital music sales (spanning both the Windows and Mac platforms).
You are completely wrong. Apple has a small market share, so it doesn't matter that they abuse it by disallowing e.g rival browsers and certain apps. It sucks, but one can use Android without too many headaches.
But Google search is more like a public utility than a service. It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc. And hypothetically speaking, at this point Google could just shove whatever they want down their throats and tell them to deal with it.
> And hypothetically speaking, at this point Google could just shove whatever they want down their throats and tell them to deal with it.
Or the new GMail app on the Lollipop ROM for my Nexus 5.
My email address was originally on Google Apps. I switched to Windows Phone from my Palm Pre in 2011 and they discontinued Exchange ActiveSync support shortly thereafter, so I moved everything over to Windows Live Domains, keeping my Google Apps login as my Google account.
I recently took a foray to Android in June and picked up the Nexus 5 I'm currently using, and I had no issues setting up my now Outlook.com account (same email address I used for my Google account) in the stock AOSP email app, I removed GMail and there was no trace of my no longer used Google Apps services on my device. Now with Lollipop, I always see two email accounts, one of which is the Google Apps account that no longer has email routed to it but I have no way to hide, and since it shares the same address getting my Outlook.com account added was a pain in the ass (it errored saying I cannot add multiple accounts with the same email address, had to use my @outlook.com alias).
Google used its search monopoly to wedge its way into other areas, the two big ones being email (I see way more active @gmail.com users than I do @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com/@outlook.com and ISP emails today) and online video (youtube). They then used these markets to push their way into the mobile space, which now has the opposite effect (their mobile OS is pushing people into using Google services exclusively).
Both iOS and Windows Phone use their own account systems (Apple ID and Microsoft Account respectively) to provide access to platform-specific services (Store, Synchronization, etc) but both allow users to sign up without requiring they create an email account with them, and both platforms have easy setup for the wealth of other email/calendar/contact sync services most people use.
Honestly, anyone who DOESN'T see Google abusing their monopoly position to prevent or at least actively discourage people from using competitive services is lying to themselves.
"It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc."
Assuming they did prime place their own products, this is not a recognized antitrust harm (it is not bundling or tying, despite random claims on HN).
If you want to base this on "good for society" or "ethical", i don't suspect you'll actually get anywhere in terms of coming to a conclusion. There are reasonable arguments on both sides.
My opinion on things related to competition/antitrust are based mainly on evolution of law and economic viewpoints.
Basically, over the past hundred years, courts have moved away from (and economists have strongly supported) declaring these kinds of things as "per-se" illegal precisely because evidence has not shown that you can simply point at them and say "yeah, this hurts competition" or "yeah, this hurts consumers", despite what one may think.
In some cases, this evolution of law/economy has pretty clearly turned out bad for consumers price-wise (with the return of folks requiring retailers to sell at certain minimum prices).
I know there are reasonable arguments on both sides - I'm really wanting to understand your personal view. It sounds as though you might think that ideas about ethics or good societies are things you prefer not to hold a view on given the quotes.
The second part of your comment only mentioned prices as a factor in terms of what is good or bad for 'consumers'. I realize that you leave room for other ideas of what is good or bad, but in lieu of mentioning anything else, it seems as though this is all you are willing to put forward as a criterion.
I guess I understand a little more about your perspective, but not much.
I don't really have a personal view on the ethics or societal good, to be honest.
I try not to hold uninformed views, and i haven't had the time or honestly, desire, to do the research into history necessary to have an informed one.
Truthfully, this kind of stuff is only tangentially interesting to me: Companies without physical resource monopolies (ie oil, diamonds, whatever) tend to come and go despite all efforts to the contrary. I don't expect Google, Facebook, or anyone else will be any different.
The fact that the bits are shipped on a CD or downloaded as a webpage should not make a difference. Google gives its own services a major advantage while burying the competition.
Beats me, both Apple and Microsoft require an account be created to get the most out of their devices and services, but making an account doesn't force you to create a new email address in the process unlike Google.
I suppose it's that 90% of offices around the world use Microsoft products (Windows, Office, etc...) so it's very difficult to not use them both for users (they must use it in work) and for companies (try explaining that you fucked something up because Pages displayed something different to Word)
Similarly, massive chunks of the internet rely on Google (and Facebook) for functionality like authentication. Aside from that, I'd struggle to suggest a different mail provider than gmail such is there monopoly in that space.
> I'd struggle to suggest a different mail provider than gmail such is there monopoly in that space.
Outlook.com is great, I love it more than GMail personally, especially since I can pay a relatively affordable $19/year to get rid of the ads and know that my email provider doesn't have programs scanning every word of every email I send or receive.
Privacy is a feature, you don't get that when using Google services.
