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At this point I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the EU competition/antitrust investigation [1] might go somewhere and get an outcome. The trouble with inve
by g_p 6y ago
At this point I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the EU competition/antitrust investigation [1] might go somewhere and get an outcome. The trouble with investigations like these, as we all know from previous cases, is they tend to drag on rather than yield rapid outcomes.
In this case, it seems we've sleepwalked into a situation where there are conflicts of interest like never really seen before - companies with global scale, able to arbitrarily decide which competition they wish to allow to be present on "their" marketplace, and make them either raise their price by 30%, or be 30% less profitable.
Resolving these conflicts, and recognising these aren't simple "creation of a moat", but rather some actual, tangible, anti-competitive practices would be a good starting point. But what is the outcome? Apple's view is "we're protecting users from bad things on the internet", but perhaps this kind of arbitrary decision-making is not one to be getting made arbitrarily?
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1073 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
- rimliu 6y agoWe already have the cookie law. Do you need another gift from EU?
- g_p 6y agoGDPR itself is a lot more than the "cookie law", and in my view most people are mis-interpreting and mis-applying it. Any site that won't let you in without accepting their tracking cookies is actually breaking GDPR. If we enforced the law as written, I think the "cookie law" would be a net positive for everyone. In terms of who deals with the anti competitive situation, I don't think that matters. But this is textbook market distortion that traditional antitrust laws were made for, and I think it's high time we saw them used to break up anti-competitive market practices.