5 ms·

My phone company offered me free data usage on spotify. Sounds great right! Except this is bordering against net neutrality. You see, like with net neutralit

My phone company offered me free data usage on spotify. Sounds great right! Except this is bordering against net neutrality. You see, like with net neutrality, Apple could offer services in the future to companies to get a "free pass" on their cute filter. This means people who want to advertise their innocent little game, have no chance against companies with a lot of money who can afford to do so. If you are in favor off this update, but against for example net neutrality, then you might want to check up again on how well you understand these concepts, and how they could play out in unfavorable division of power. tldr; Monopoly is inherently unfavorable, not just theoretically but has proven so time and time again in many different sectors.

notgood 9y ago
Exactly; they are the gatekeepers of their iOS ecosystem but got no backslash like Microsoft did with Windows (circa 2001); so now they know they have a free pass and are trying to be the gatekeepers of the Web [for their users] as well.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  iOS is not a monopoly product. As a user, I welcome Apple's new feature, and I'm fine with it being the default.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  The backlash against MS began in the 90s with the start of the anti-trust trial. It was preceded by MS achieving a greater than 90% [0] market share. Apple has nowhere near that and so will not see that sort of legal backlash for them for a while. Microsoft used their position to do things like: Spend over $1 billion to advertise a free web browser to compete with Netscape (fear of cross-platform applications that Netscape could support). Embraced a fucked up version of web standards where they literally did the exact opposite of what the specs said in order to make sites compatible for their users break (without serious dev effort) for everyone else. Convinced Compaq (memory fuzzy, I get them and HP mixed up now) to not release computers with BeOS. If they had, MS was going to eliminate their favorable Windows licensing costs. This would have driven them out of business as they could not achieve competitive PC prices with reasonable margins (PCs already being a low margin business at that point). They tried similar, though less aggressive, pushes against companies that later wanted to release Linux workstations. There's a whole litany of MS's abuses of its monopoly position in the anti-trust suit, it was actually fascinating reading if you care about economics, business, politics. [0] Precise numbers failing me, I believe they got close to 97% at some point.
mikeash 9y ago
Net neutrality is about ISPs. Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here. This is not a violation of net neutrality any more than me throwing away junk mail is a violation of the neutrality of the postal service.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here. Are they? That's not really their approach to many things. It seems to me they are making decisions for users. I have nothing of note to say on this specific change, but we should be careful about where we want "neutrality" applied in our network go-betweens (be them ISPs, devices, whatever).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 9y ago
    It’s an option you can turn off, so, yes, they are.
    - kodablah 9y ago
      Surely we can acknowledge that control is not binary? There was no control that said "don't turn this on by default" or a control that lets me set the specific parameters of cookie sharing. The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Whether an ISP allows you to turn off the on-by-default traffic shaping or whether a device lets you turn off the on-by-default cookie restrictions is not the concern. It's whether these go-betweens make decisions for us, such as cookie sharing parameters, video downsampling, etc.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Apple gives the user control over this, and many other aspects of the browsing experience. So... what's the problem here?

notgood 9y ago

Exactly; they are the gatekeepers of their iOS ecosystem but got no backslash like Microsoft did with Windows (circa 2001); so now they know they have a free pass and are trying to be the gatekeepers of the Web [for their users] as well.

greglindahl 9y ago
iOS is not a monopoly product. As a user, I welcome Apple's new feature, and I'm fine with it being the default.
Jtsummers 9y ago
The backlash against MS began in the 90s with the start of the anti-trust trial. It was preceded by MS achieving a greater than 90% [0] market share. Apple has nowhere near that and so will not see that sort of legal backlash for them for a while. Microsoft used their position to do things like: Spend over $1 billion to advertise a free web browser to compete with Netscape (fear of cross-platform applications that Netscape could support). Embraced a fucked up version of web standards where they literally did the exact opposite of what the specs said in order to make sites compatible for their users break (without serious dev effort) for everyone else. Convinced Compaq (memory fuzzy, I get them and HP mixed up now) to not release computers with BeOS. If they had, MS was going to eliminate their favorable Windows licensing costs. This would have driven them out of business as they could not achieve competitive PC prices with reasonable margins (PCs already being a low margin business at that point). They tried similar, though less aggressive, pushes against companies that later wanted to release Linux workstations. There's a whole litany of MS's abuses of its monopoly position in the anti-trust suit, it was actually fascinating reading if you care about economics, business, politics. [0] Precise numbers failing me, I believe they got close to 97% at some point.

mikeash 9y ago

Net neutrality is about ISPs. Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here. This is not a violation of net neutrality any more than me throwing away junk mail is a violation of the neutrality of the postal service.

kodablah 9y ago
> Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here. Are they? That's not really their approach to many things. It seems to me they are making decisions for users. I have nothing of note to say on this specific change, but we should be careful about where we want "neutrality" applied in our network go-betweens (be them ISPs, devices, whatever).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 9y ago
  It’s an option you can turn off, so, yes, they are.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Surely we can acknowledge that control is not binary? There was no control that said "don't turn this on by default" or a control that lets me set the specific parameters of cookie sharing. The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Whether an ISP allows you to turn off the on-by-default traffic shaping or whether a device lets you turn off the on-by-default cookie restrictions is not the concern. It's whether these go-betweens make decisions for us, such as cookie sharing parameters, video downsampling, etc.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Apple gives the user control over this, and many other aspects of the browsing experience. So... what's the problem here?