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Right, well, that's great if you favor Google being untouched by regulators. Personally, I favor Google being broken up by services where they dominate market

Right, well, that's great if you favor Google being untouched by regulators. Personally, I favor Google being broken up by services where they dominate market share. Search and video would split. And probably, Android would split.

kgermino 5y ago
Your parent isn't saying they favor Google being untouched by regulators. It's assuming that Google prefers being untouched by regulators. Assuming Google doesn't want to be broken up, poking the bear with publicly anti-competitive behavior seems like a bad choice.
mindslight 5y ago
Breaking up Google by services is such a lame last-century approach - it leaves the same network effects, the same middleman position, and the same business dynamics. And then we just have to hope that these independent companies, run by people who previously worked with one another, don't just recreate the same power structure through exclusive contracts and informal wink and nods. We know the right answer - it's forcing these companies to have publicly accessible, nondiscriminatory APIs for everything that is possible through their proprietary web interfaces or proprietary apps. There should be no private APIs, API keys, or separate contract/account needed to use said API - just the exact same login credentials that a user supplies to the website (if any). The accompanying software provider restriction is that companies shouldn't be able to take away functionality that has already been sold to users - ie Roku shouldn't be able to threaten Google with removal either. An update should never be mandatory, should always be able to be rolled back, should practically never remove an app, and the bar for maintaining backwards compatibility on an embedded device should be quite high. This forms a neutral baseline that companies can choose to form additional agreements on top of, without the threat of being extorted as the power dynamic changes.

kgermino 5y ago

Your parent isn't saying they favor Google being untouched by regulators. It's assuming that Google prefers being untouched by regulators. Assuming Google doesn't want to be broken up, poking the bear with publicly anti-competitive behavior seems like a bad choice.

mindslight 5y ago

Breaking up Google by services is such a lame last-century approach - it leaves the same network effects, the same middleman position, and the same business dynamics. And then we just have to hope that these independent companies, run by people who previously worked with one another, don't just recreate the same power structure through exclusive contracts and informal wink and nods. We know the right answer - it's forcing these companies to have publicly accessible, nondiscriminatory APIs for everything that is possible through their proprietary web interfaces or proprietary apps. There should be no private APIs, API keys, or separate contract/account needed to use said API - just the exact same login credentials that a user supplies to the website (if any). The accompanying software provider restriction is that companies shouldn't be able to take away functionality that has already been sold to users - ie Roku shouldn't be able to threaten Google with removal either. An update should never be mandatory, should always be able to be rolled back, should practically never remove an app, and the bar for maintaining backwards compatibility on an embedded device should be quite high. This forms a neutral baseline that companies can choose to form additional agreements on top of, without the threat of being extorted as the power dynamic changes.