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I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour: 1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Googl

I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour: 1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall). 2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for). 4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

magashna 7y ago
In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.
- neogodless 7y ago
  Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")
fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
Those sound anti-competitive as well
yummypaint 7y ago
Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.
- enitihas 7y ago
  No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.
neogodless 7y ago
It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere. As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position. Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?
- repolfx 7y ago
  The Apple ecosystem is huge though. You can't claim Google is dominant "outside the Apple ecosystem". That's the same as saying Google has a monopoly if you ignore its competitors. I used to work at Google. Apps written by hobbyists were only exceptionally rarely blocked deliberately. But those apps often [ab]use internal APIs and protocols of the services, so they'd break during updates (which were frequent). Sometimes they have to be blocked due to external contracts (e.g. Maps). Sometimes they tripped anti-botting/anti-spam detection and got users blocked that way. In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software. Moxie Marlinspike has written about the difficulties introduced by formally supporting this: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software Yes there are. They are called anti trust laws, and anti competition laws. These laws apply to companies that have significant market power, regardless if they are on the internet or not. If a company has significant market power, then it is illegal for them to engage in anti competitive practices. In Google's industries, such as search, it can be described as being close to a monopoly, which is enough for anti trust laws to kick in. Yes, if you have significant market power, then you are required by law to not engage in anti competitive practices.
smush 7y ago
> Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? EDIT -> They did NOT, see below comment by nvrspyx. Apparently they did, and removed it around Mojave-era or so...? I'm not familiar with Apple products, this statement is based on https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_this_hurts_apple_removes_jabber_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_th... > Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed. > When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? I agree that incompatibility in general is not on its face evidence of anti-competitive behavior. > Facebook offered XMPP messenger? They did, then once they imported users to their platform, turned that feature off. That might have precipitated Google to turn off XMPP federation on GTalk to stop the bleeding. > Shall Google ... not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall)? Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list. > Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? Those developers could refrain from developing themselves, but they were not in a position to stop competitors from developing their own apps. Google is in a different position. > Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for Google said not to develop the app that way, but this way. MS complied. Google still refused to allow the app for no explained/good/political/anti-competitive? reasons. Google was focused on killing Windows Phone, not the iPhone, even as far back as 2006. Eric S in the Verge article in my above comment "... at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft's mobile strategy would be successful."
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  Jabber was an option in macOS's messages app, which allowed you to connect to Facebook for example. It was an app to consolidate multiple messaging protocols. iChat (replaced with Messages) was sort of like Pidgin, Empathy, or Adium. However, iMessage, Apple's own chat protocol, never used XMPP. It has always been proprietary. Messages replaced iChat, which only uses iMessage. However, iChat used to technically still be hidden underneath Messages, but was really a separate app. That reddit post is when they removed iChat completely.
squarefoot 7y ago
Google just happens to be the biggest among them, so it's understandable they come first, but this is going to happen for every entity that grows to a certain point because it's how our system works: small players crying mommy about big corporations killing competition until they grow to a point they can kill competition themselves, which they will happily do, becoming themselves the bad guys. Then some external entity comes and restores some balance by splitting them etc. Rinse, repeat. Maximizing profits, which is the goal that moves every company everywhere, from small shops to multinational corporations, leads ultimately to this if no, sloppy, or deliberately inefficient control is performed.
- enitihas 7y ago
  Biggest among what companies. Both market cap and net income of google are less than both MSFT and AAPL.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    MSFT has had a phenomenal year. Amazing that big bad monopoly MSFT, survived an attempt to break it up, and then collapsed to irrelevancy, attacking Google with AstroTurf political advertising campaigns, yet is now higher market cap then AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, currently the only one worth (barely) over $1T.
nesadi 7y ago
All of these companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, actually. This isn't proof that Google isn't guilty.
- enitihas 7y ago
  If some behaviour is too common across all companies, Governments need to focus on laws to address the underlying problems across the industry, not to cherry pick a company and make example of.
  - nesadi 7y ago
    I mean, that's why the government isn't just one institution. You have Congress/Senate and the state-level governments to pass laws, and the FTC and the DoJ (and state-level equivalents) to enforce them. You can do both. Except the behaviour of Google et al. has largely gone ignored since their rise for whatever reason. I don't even remember the last time we saw a proper anti-trust case in the US, much less one that went anywhere. Was it Microsoft? Who knows. And there are plenty of financial interests to ensure that anti-trust isn't enforced and isn't adapted to the modern state of markets. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed, but that doesn't make suing Google for their abhorrent behaviour any less valid. It seems to me like a decent first step.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
freehunter 7y ago
There is a big difference between removing support for something you once supported versus never supporting it at all. If Google never supported XMPP, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But removing XMPP support in favor of closed protocols raises eyebrows. It makes people wonder if the change was for the better, or just as a way to close out competitors. Similar to Google Reader. If they never had the product, no one would be complaining. But they did offer the product, it was so much better than the competition that it put the competition out of business, and then Google shut it down. That raises eyebrows. That makes people wonder if there's something malicious behind it. That's not to say they can never change their product lineup or discontinue products. But if they do, they have to answer questions like this. If there was no malicious intent behind removing XMPP support from their chat product, then everything is fine and the questions stop. We don't know, which is why regulators are investigating. On the Windows Phone part, you are blatantly misrepresenting what happened. It's not that Google refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, it's that they refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, then blocked Microsoft from developing their own apps for Google products, then blocked Windows Phones from accessing Google products through a web browser that was more than capable of displaying Google web apps. You could not access Google web apps on Windows Phones in any way, a limitation that was not applied to any other phone maker or any other phone. There is absolutely no defending that situation, Google played Microsoft hard and they played them dirty. Yes, Microsoft has done the exact same thing in the past and yes they deserved it, but remember: Microsoft was punished as an abusive monopolist.
ThatPlayer 7y ago
> Facebook offered XMPP messenger? They did actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 The actual link itself is now gone, so there are comments. I remember using it with Thunderbird at the time.
airstrike 7y ago
I would imagine it's pretty self-evident that other companies' examples of anti-competitive behavior don't absolve Google of their own wrongdoings.
lonelappde 7y ago
The irony is that anticompetive behavior usually means competitive behavior but being the one that wins, as OP's examples show. OP even went wonder as blaming Google for Talk, which is mostly famous for being the last major service to disable XMPP after losing marketshare to competitors who already did or never supported it. Before Google, Apple and MS went head to head with the same anti/competitive techniques as each other but since MA one Apple got to play the victim.

magashna 7y ago

In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.

neogodless 7y ago
Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago

Those sound anti-competitive as well

yummypaint 7y ago

Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.

enitihas 7y ago
No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.

neogodless 7y ago

It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere. As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position. Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?

repolfx 7y ago
The Apple ecosystem is huge though. You can't claim Google is dominant "outside the Apple ecosystem". That's the same as saying Google has a monopoly if you ignore its competitors. I used to work at Google. Apps written by hobbyists were only exceptionally rarely blocked deliberately. But those apps often [ab]use internal APIs and protocols of the services, so they'd break during updates (which were frequent). Sometimes they have to be blocked due to external contracts (e.g. Maps). Sometimes they tripped anti-botting/anti-spam detection and got users blocked that way. In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software. Moxie Marlinspike has written about the difficulties introduced by formally supporting this: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- stale2002 7y ago
  > In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software Yes there are. They are called anti trust laws, and anti competition laws. These laws apply to companies that have significant market power, regardless if they are on the internet or not. If a company has significant market power, then it is illegal for them to engage in anti competitive practices. In Google's industries, such as search, it can be described as being close to a monopoly, which is enough for anti trust laws to kick in. Yes, if you have significant market power, then you are required by law to not engage in anti competitive practices.

smush 7y ago

> Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? EDIT -> They did NOT, see below comment by nvrspyx. Apparently they did, and removed it around Mojave-era or so...? I'm not familiar with Apple products, this statement is based on https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_this_hurts_apple_removes_jabber_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_th... > Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed. > When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? I agree that incompatibility in general is not on its face evidence of anti-competitive behavior. > Facebook offered XMPP messenger? They did, then once they imported users to their platform, turned that feature off. That might have precipitated Google to turn off XMPP federation on GTalk to stop the bleeding. > Shall Google ... not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall)? Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list. > Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? Those developers could refrain from developing themselves, but they were not in a position to stop competitors from developing their own apps. Google is in a different position. > Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for Google said not to develop the app that way, but this way. MS complied. Google still refused to allow the app for no explained/good/political/anti-competitive? reasons. Google was focused on killing Windows Phone, not the iPhone, even as far back as 2006. Eric S in the Verge article in my above comment "... at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft's mobile strategy would be successful."

nvrspyx 7y ago
Jabber was an option in macOS's messages app, which allowed you to connect to Facebook for example. It was an app to consolidate multiple messaging protocols. iChat (replaced with Messages) was sort of like Pidgin, Empathy, or Adium. However, iMessage, Apple's own chat protocol, never used XMPP. It has always been proprietary. Messages replaced iChat, which only uses iMessage. However, iChat used to technically still be hidden underneath Messages, but was really a separate app. That reddit post is when they removed iChat completely.

squarefoot 7y ago

Google just happens to be the biggest among them, so it's understandable they come first, but this is going to happen for every entity that grows to a certain point because it's how our system works: small players crying mommy about big corporations killing competition until they grow to a point they can kill competition themselves, which they will happily do, becoming themselves the bad guys. Then some external entity comes and restores some balance by splitting them etc. Rinse, repeat. Maximizing profits, which is the goal that moves every company everywhere, from small shops to multinational corporations, leads ultimately to this if no, sloppy, or deliberately inefficient control is performed.

enitihas 7y ago
Biggest among what companies. Both market cap and net income of google are less than both MSFT and AAPL.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  MSFT has had a phenomenal year. Amazing that big bad monopoly MSFT, survived an attempt to break it up, and then collapsed to irrelevancy, attacking Google with AstroTurf political advertising campaigns, yet is now higher market cap then AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, currently the only one worth (barely) over $1T.

nesadi 7y ago

All of these companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, actually. This isn't proof that Google isn't guilty.

enitihas 7y ago
If some behaviour is too common across all companies, Governments need to focus on laws to address the underlying problems across the industry, not to cherry pick a company and make example of.
- nesadi 7y ago
  I mean, that's why the government isn't just one institution. You have Congress/Senate and the state-level governments to pass laws, and the FTC and the DoJ (and state-level equivalents) to enforce them. You can do both. Except the behaviour of Google et al. has largely gone ignored since their rise for whatever reason. I don't even remember the last time we saw a proper anti-trust case in the US, much less one that went anywhere. Was it Microsoft? Who knows. And there are plenty of financial interests to ensure that anti-trust isn't enforced and isn't adapted to the modern state of markets. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed, but that doesn't make suing Google for their abhorrent behaviour any less valid. It seems to me like a decent first step.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

freehunter 7y ago

There is a big difference between removing support for something you once supported versus never supporting it at all. If Google never supported XMPP, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But removing XMPP support in favor of closed protocols raises eyebrows. It makes people wonder if the change was for the better, or just as a way to close out competitors. Similar to Google Reader. If they never had the product, no one would be complaining. But they did offer the product, it was so much better than the competition that it put the competition out of business, and then Google shut it down. That raises eyebrows. That makes people wonder if there's something malicious behind it. That's not to say they can never change their product lineup or discontinue products. But if they do, they have to answer questions like this. If there was no malicious intent behind removing XMPP support from their chat product, then everything is fine and the questions stop. We don't know, which is why regulators are investigating. On the Windows Phone part, you are blatantly misrepresenting what happened. It's not that Google refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, it's that they refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, then blocked Microsoft from developing their own apps for Google products, then blocked Windows Phones from accessing Google products through a web browser that was more than capable of displaying Google web apps. You could not access Google web apps on Windows Phones in any way, a limitation that was not applied to any other phone maker or any other phone. There is absolutely no defending that situation, Google played Microsoft hard and they played them dirty. Yes, Microsoft has done the exact same thing in the past and yes they deserved it, but remember: Microsoft was punished as an abusive monopolist.

ThatPlayer 7y ago

> Facebook offered XMPP messenger? They did actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 The actual link itself is now gone, so there are comments. I remember using it with Thunderbird at the time.

airstrike 7y ago

I would imagine it's pretty self-evident that other companies' examples of anti-competitive behavior don't absolve Google of their own wrongdoings.

lonelappde 7y ago

The irony is that anticompetive behavior usually means competitive behavior but being the one that wins, as OP's examples show. OP even went wonder as blaming Google for Talk, which is mostly famous for being the last major service to disable XMPP after losing marketshare to competitors who already did or never supported it. Before Google, Apple and MS went head to head with the same anti/competitive techniques as each other but since MA one Apple got to play the victim.