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As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while

by mabbo 5y ago

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant. Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. It's all very profitable. If we cannot trust large companies to not abuse this kind of power, then they should be prevented by law from playing both sides. This may result in the breakup of some very large companies, akin to the 1934 Air Mail Act that broke up Boeing.

Bellamy 5y ago
Another example: FDA is funded by pharma companies.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  No wonder people think businesses run governments when they use bad metrics of control like that. The earth itself controls oil companies and is therefore responsible for global warming by that logic!
sillysaurusx 5y ago
The underlying assumption is that this behavior is bad. Why is it bad? Especially bad enough to be regulated by a new law?
- II2II 5y ago
  It is a conflict of interest that allows them to gain a disproportionate amount of control over the market. It causes direct harm to competitors, through both the access to confidential sales data and access to the market. It also causes harm to consumers (at least in cases of locked down platforms like iOS) since they no longer have access to competitor's products. In short, it is no longer a free market.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  It hinders fair competition, which hurts consumers. It misallocates dollars to these gatekeepers.
- tonightstoast 5y ago
  The current chair of the FTC has an interesting paper on this question (written before she became chair). https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
- skohan 5y ago
  Are you kidding? You don't think this kind of behavior disincentivizes innovation? And it's not exactly new. Common carrier regulations have been a thing forever.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Because this kind of behaviour results in monopolies which stifle innovation and invariably harm people.
- seanhunter 5y ago
  For one thing it's bad because of information asymmetry between the market owner and other participants. The market owner knows all the information but each other participant only knows a fraction of the information. If the information was all completely public it would be less bad probably. This is why in financial markets "dark pools" (private alternative execution venues) ended up getting new regulation from the SEC to prevent abuse https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/dark-pools#sort=%40pubbrowsedate%20descending https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/dark-pools#s... Antitrust law doesn't come into effect just because something is bad in the abstract sense though, it comes into effect when there is harm to the consumer as a result (that's my understanding anyway). The harm here is due to the market distortion primarily (I would think).
ngngngng 5y ago
Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?
- rcdwealth 5y ago
  Difference is that neither Wallmart, Equate, Costco are marketplaces for third parties.
- amelius 5y ago
  Do you have an argument against that?
- hnxs 5y ago
  Can you explain how Costco is relevant here when they make most of their money off membership fees and not sales?
  - klipt 5y ago
    Would you say the same about Amazon promoting its own brand, if Amazon made more money off Prime than sales?
    - cgriswald 5y ago
      I'd say in the case of Amazon, store brands are missing the point. They can let sellers take all the risk of determining what the market will support, while profiting whether the seller is successful or not. If successful, Amazon can reach its own deal with the manufacturer and compete with the very same branded product, possibly at a lower price, without having to pay into the marketplace, and with the capability of manipulating the search results.
- riazrizvi 5y ago
  If 92.47% of all stores in the USA were only Walmart then yes, there would be a national interest in determining how grocery store competition had been destroyed/denied and we would want to fix it. In such a situation you would see a degradation of store product quality vs price. It might not be so clear with internet search because Google’s ascendence was coincident with innovation that it has hoovered up. But once you see competition restored, with things like the return of a Search API, or of more transparent ranking metrics, or of customizable ranking algorithms then you will begin to see what you are missing.
epistasis 5y ago
> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well. While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeeaaaaal hard time finding any way that this sort of thing harms consumers.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  This is a tired argument. Amazon doesn’t work like a supermarket: a closer analogy would be a shopping mall also providing cash registers to the stores. Amazon doesn’t buy from the producers nor act as a distributor on most transactions. The risk is all externalized, and they face minimal penalty (no loss of shell space, no stocking risk) by having their product alongside the original one.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Agreed that this will happen, but I also think this is exactly the same thing that's expected of store brands: cheaper, but could be of lower quality.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    The Amazon brands I see as the ONE product they should (in theory) never allow co-mingling on and thus the safe one to buy for a known quality.
- lenkite 5y ago
winternett 5y ago
Just think about all the development and financial data and ideas that google has a direct untraceable back door into through running gmail, android phones, and chrome browser alone... I have resorted to using an old school notepad for my development ideas pretty much. A software company I used to work for got shuttered just 3 months after a big software company paid the startup a visit to observe operations back in 98, I've always been wary of corporate espionage since.
- rapnie 5y ago
  It always completely astounded me how countless professional businesses are casually and mindlessly handing over their most private internal communication and metrics to Google on a platter. And aren't Google's privacy policies and ToS's stating that all collected information can be used to "improve their own services" or something along those lines? Does that include 'extract business advantage' from your data? I don't know and IANAL, but I'd prefer some separation from such an ad-tech giant with my corporate intelligence.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    Infosec teams that are competent tend to push back on that. If there's no infosec and it's just infra and developers and CTO's signing contracts with vendors, even Google, you have an issue.
  - ReaLNero 5y ago
    (Not a Google engineer) Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited. The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      The last case of ad bidding proves that while not everyone at Google knows whats going on, they are abusing the data they are sitting on.
monkeydust 5y ago
As someone who's been involved in developing financial exchanges this concept is bizarre. There is regulation and participant agreements that would prevent NYSE for example from running its own market making firm and abusing it's position as exchange to benefit over other participants for profit, if it did this others would leave and the exchange would eventually die.
- btown 5y ago
  Not only is adtech virtually unregulated compared to financial exchanges, it's also immensely more fragmented, and ad networks like Google AdSense are tremendously sticky once they've been exclusively integrated on the long tail of millions of publisher sites. See https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/ https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-... for all the parties involved. There's a lot less transparency for all parties involved (see the work of , and arguably some version of an SEC for adtech is long overdue. If ad exchanges were operated with the transparency of broker-dealers, initiatives like https://checkmyads.org/ https://checkmyads.org/ wouldn't need to exist.
- oblio 5y ago
  Small and medium vendors can't abandon Amazon. And with enough of them you create the largest marketplace on the planet.
- thow-01187 5y ago
  The notion of: "it's a little bit like X, a little bit like Y - but it's neither X nor Y, therefore we it's a wild-west anarchy without any rules or regulations" - this is such a glaring loophole in our legal system that it must be intentional. Derivatives bubble, ad-tech, gig-work, crypto-mania, AirBnB, and many other socially-parasitic enterprises exist solely because our legal code is missing "try-catch-finally" clauses
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    It is intentional - the legal system defaults to absolute freedom in absense of laws. Besides have you seen how goddamn inept just rulemaking is when done based upon the old standards which have nothing to do with the advantages and limitations of the new medium? Look at attempts to prelegislate things which do not really exist yet and you get utter embarrassments of law at best and at worst hamstring your nation by laws which assume that a TI graphing calculator has the potential to go rogue and start deliberately killing people.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
Anybody can figure out what Apps are popular, or are well liked by their users. Any 3rd party could operate the Apple App Store, and Apple (or anybody else in the world) would still know what apps were popular on it, and Apple would still be able to implement them as features/apps for their own operating systems. To resolve the conflict you’re describing, an operating system vendor would have to be prohibited from distributing software.
emkoemko 5y ago
imagine your Netflix and have to pay Apple massive % to be on their devices... then comes Apple with its own service and they can charge less because they don't charge them self's the % giving them very anti competitive advantage.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  No, it would be a competitive thing. In chess capturing your opponents pieces to weaken them is a valid strategy you will see in any tournament. Capturing Netflix's marketshare by offering a cheaper alternative is competitive. Putting your enemy in disadvantaged positions is just part of the game.
  - fauigerzigerk 5y ago
    I don't understand how your analogy is even remotely relevant. In chess, both sides can make the exact same moves. Neither side can change the rules. Neither side can impose any extra costs on the other side in an asymmetric way. It's a classic example of a level playing field, and it's the exact opposite of the asymmetric roles that Apple and Netflix play on the iOS platform. The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV. But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware. The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      >The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV That is an option for Netflix. If they made their own platform they could offer a more competitive price. Apple was created in 1996. Netflix was made in 1997. Maybe a good strategy of having a dominant streaming platform in 202x would have been to launch a mobile platform. Netflix had the same chance as Apple to take that path, but they didn't. Apple can now capitalize on good moves that it made in the past. In chess you can't just recognize that you are in a bad position and then ask a tournament organizer if you can be reset into an equal position again. Either you continue playing that bad position, or you resign. >But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware. If you have no choice but to charge more than your competitors and you can't justify the extra cost with extra features or whatever and people stop using your service and you go bankrupt then you have lost the game. >The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful. It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.
jdavis703 5y ago
What apps does Apple sell in the App Store that used to be sold by third parties, but were then banned?
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Look at how the Notes app has evolved… There are apps for scanning documents, for example which are now superseded. The Music app which now has a streaming service…
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Spotify is still in the App Store, and iTunes/Apple Music existed long before Spotify.
    - mthoms 5y ago
      Spotify launched in 2006. Apple Music: 2015. iTunes is not a subscription service like Spotify.
- oblio 5y ago
  F.lux. The examples are countless. Well, not sold in this case, but given away for free to increase the moat, then banned.
snarfy 5y ago
I can open a lemonade stand, I just can't sell my own lemonade, is that corrrect?
- Sayrus 5y ago
  Now that's one hell of a straw man. Do you also plan on controlling this stand, allowing others to sell on your stand while watching every single transaction (and maybe the recipe so that the analogy is complete?) and while also having the power to remove them from your stand? Because if you are only talking about opening a stand and selling your lemonade, then you don't have the same foothold as Apple, Google or Amazon.
  - snarfy 5y ago
    > same foothold Yes, this is the problem. Participating in the market they create is not. If that were true every grocery store that has a bakery, deli, or meat counter is a problem. They are too big. Monopolistic forces are the problem.
bothandeach 5y ago
Yes but. It's your country, you let them do these things. You set up your country to let them do these things. So no real reason to complain.
- acdha 5y ago
  Complaining is how problems get fixed. If we took your advice we’d still be living in a country where voting was restricted to white male land owners and most of us would be dreaming about rate reductions at the company store.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  For real, do we have any more influence in this ? Looking at what’s happening now, Apple and Google are not under scrutiny because of our collective petitioning or votes, it’s solely because of competitors with deep enough pockets to duck it in court. As a proof of that, there’s no one to fight Facebook so not much effectively changes on that front, despite all the outcry and editorials thrown at them.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  That's not logical. Our country isn't a monolith. Lots of us are fighting for change so stop acting like 330 million people are all the same would be a great start. Complaints are one point of contention. Currently most people don't care much about their privacy if they find out it will slightly inconvenience them to try out an alternative. Until they get burned or FAANG does something particularly aggregious they just don't care much.
32gbsd 5y ago
we love these large companies. less people to trust, plus free-ish services
niyikiza 5y ago
>>a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant. Like the government?
- mabbo 5y ago
  The government is not a company, and does not have an overall goal of maximizing profit. That's what makes it different. If the government is not meeting the demands of the people, we elect a different one (in theory).

by mabbo 5y ago

Bellamy 5y ago

Another example: FDA is funded by pharma companies.

Nasrudith 5y ago
No wonder people think businesses run governments when they use bad metrics of control like that. The earth itself controls oil companies and is therefore responsible for global warming by that logic!

sillysaurusx 5y ago

The underlying assumption is that this behavior is bad. Why is it bad? Especially bad enough to be regulated by a new law?

II2II 5y ago
It is a conflict of interest that allows them to gain a disproportionate amount of control over the market. It causes direct harm to competitors, through both the access to confidential sales data and access to the market. It also causes harm to consumers (at least in cases of locked down platforms like iOS) since they no longer have access to competitor's products. In short, it is no longer a free market.
sjtindell 5y ago
It hinders fair competition, which hurts consumers. It misallocates dollars to these gatekeepers.
tonightstoast 5y ago
The current chair of the FTC has an interesting paper on this question (written before she became chair). https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
skohan 5y ago
Are you kidding? You don't think this kind of behavior disincentivizes innovation? And it's not exactly new. Common carrier regulations have been a thing forever.
tjpnz 5y ago
Because this kind of behaviour results in monopolies which stifle innovation and invariably harm people.
seanhunter 5y ago
For one thing it's bad because of information asymmetry between the market owner and other participants. The market owner knows all the information but each other participant only knows a fraction of the information. If the information was all completely public it would be less bad probably. This is why in financial markets "dark pools" (private alternative execution venues) ended up getting new regulation from the SEC to prevent abuse https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/dark-pools#sort=%40pubbrowsedate%20descending https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/dark-pools#s... Antitrust law doesn't come into effect just because something is bad in the abstract sense though, it comes into effect when there is harm to the consumer as a result (that's my understanding anyway). The harm here is due to the market distortion primarily (I would think).

ngngngng 5y ago

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

rcdwealth 5y ago
Difference is that neither Wallmart, Equate, Costco are marketplaces for third parties.
amelius 5y ago
Do you have an argument against that?
hnxs 5y ago
Can you explain how Costco is relevant here when they make most of their money off membership fees and not sales?
- klipt 5y ago
  Would you say the same about Amazon promoting its own brand, if Amazon made more money off Prime than sales?
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    I'd say in the case of Amazon, store brands are missing the point. They can let sellers take all the risk of determining what the market will support, while profiting whether the seller is successful or not. If successful, Amazon can reach its own deal with the manufacturer and compete with the very same branded product, possibly at a lower price, without having to pay into the marketplace, and with the capability of manipulating the search results.
riazrizvi 5y ago
If 92.47% of all stores in the USA were only Walmart then yes, there would be a national interest in determining how grocery store competition had been destroyed/denied and we would want to fix it. In such a situation you would see a degradation of store product quality vs price. It might not be so clear with internet search because Google’s ascendence was coincident with innovation that it has hoovered up. But once you see competition restored, with things like the return of a Search API, or of more transparent ranking metrics, or of customizable ranking algorithms then you will begin to see what you are missing.

epistasis 5y ago

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well. While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeeaaaaal hard time finding any way that this sort of thing harms consumers.

makeitdouble 5y ago
This is a tired argument. Amazon doesn’t work like a supermarket: a closer analogy would be a shopping mall also providing cash registers to the stores. Amazon doesn’t buy from the producers nor act as a distributor on most transactions. The risk is all externalized, and they face minimal penalty (no loss of shell space, no stocking risk) by having their product alongside the original one.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Agreed that this will happen, but I also think this is exactly the same thing that's expected of store brands: cheaper, but could be of lower quality.
- mjevans 5y ago
  The Amazon brands I see as the ONE product they should (in theory) never allow co-mingling on and thus the safe one to buy for a known quality.
lenkite 5y ago

winternett 5y ago

Just think about all the development and financial data and ideas that google has a direct untraceable back door into through running gmail, android phones, and chrome browser alone... I have resorted to using an old school notepad for my development ideas pretty much. A software company I used to work for got shuttered just 3 months after a big software company paid the startup a visit to observe operations back in 98, I've always been wary of corporate espionage since.

rapnie 5y ago
It always completely astounded me how countless professional businesses are casually and mindlessly handing over their most private internal communication and metrics to Google on a platter. And aren't Google's privacy policies and ToS's stating that all collected information can be used to "improve their own services" or something along those lines? Does that include 'extract business advantage' from your data? I don't know and IANAL, but I'd prefer some separation from such an ad-tech giant with my corporate intelligence.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  Infosec teams that are competent tend to push back on that. If there's no infosec and it's just infra and developers and CTO's signing contracts with vendors, even Google, you have an issue.
- ReaLNero 5y ago
  (Not a Google engineer) Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited. The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    The last case of ad bidding proves that while not everyone at Google knows whats going on, they are abusing the data they are sitting on.

monkeydust 5y ago

As someone who's been involved in developing financial exchanges this concept is bizarre. There is regulation and participant agreements that would prevent NYSE for example from running its own market making firm and abusing it's position as exchange to benefit over other participants for profit, if it did this others would leave and the exchange would eventually die.

btown 5y ago
Not only is adtech virtually unregulated compared to financial exchanges, it's also immensely more fragmented, and ad networks like Google AdSense are tremendously sticky once they've been exclusively integrated on the long tail of millions of publisher sites. See https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/ https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-... for all the parties involved. There's a lot less transparency for all parties involved (see the work of , and arguably some version of an SEC for adtech is long overdue. If ad exchanges were operated with the transparency of broker-dealers, initiatives like https://checkmyads.org/ https://checkmyads.org/ wouldn't need to exist.
oblio 5y ago
Small and medium vendors can't abandon Amazon. And with enough of them you create the largest marketplace on the planet.
thow-01187 5y ago
The notion of: "it's a little bit like X, a little bit like Y - but it's neither X nor Y, therefore we it's a wild-west anarchy without any rules or regulations" - this is such a glaring loophole in our legal system that it must be intentional. Derivatives bubble, ad-tech, gig-work, crypto-mania, AirBnB, and many other socially-parasitic enterprises exist solely because our legal code is missing "try-catch-finally" clauses
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  It is intentional - the legal system defaults to absolute freedom in absense of laws. Besides have you seen how goddamn inept just rulemaking is when done based upon the old standards which have nothing to do with the advantages and limitations of the new medium? Look at attempts to prelegislate things which do not really exist yet and you get utter embarrassments of law at best and at worst hamstring your nation by laws which assume that a TI graphing calculator has the potential to go rogue and start deliberately killing people.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

Anybody can figure out what Apps are popular, or are well liked by their users. Any 3rd party could operate the Apple App Store, and Apple (or anybody else in the world) would still know what apps were popular on it, and Apple would still be able to implement them as features/apps for their own operating systems. To resolve the conflict you’re describing, an operating system vendor would have to be prohibited from distributing software.

emkoemko 5y ago

imagine your Netflix and have to pay Apple massive % to be on their devices... then comes Apple with its own service and they can charge less because they don't charge them self's the % giving them very anti competitive advantage.

charcircuit 5y ago
No, it would be a competitive thing. In chess capturing your opponents pieces to weaken them is a valid strategy you will see in any tournament. Capturing Netflix's marketshare by offering a cheaper alternative is competitive. Putting your enemy in disadvantaged positions is just part of the game.
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  I don't understand how your analogy is even remotely relevant. In chess, both sides can make the exact same moves. Neither side can change the rules. Neither side can impose any extra costs on the other side in an asymmetric way. It's a classic example of a level playing field, and it's the exact opposite of the asymmetric roles that Apple and Netflix play on the iOS platform. The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV. But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware. The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV That is an option for Netflix. If they made their own platform they could offer a more competitive price. Apple was created in 1996. Netflix was made in 1997. Maybe a good strategy of having a dominant streaming platform in 202x would have been to launch a mobile platform. Netflix had the same chance as Apple to take that path, but they didn't. Apple can now capitalize on good moves that it made in the past. In chess you can't just recognize that you are in a bad position and then ask a tournament organizer if you can be reset into an equal position again. Either you continue playing that bad position, or you resign. >But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware. If you have no choice but to charge more than your competitors and you can't justify the extra cost with extra features or whatever and people stop using your service and you go bankrupt then you have lost the game. >The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful. It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.

jdavis703 5y ago

What apps does Apple sell in the App Store that used to be sold by third parties, but were then banned?

pfortuny 5y ago
Look at how the Notes app has evolved… There are apps for scanning documents, for example which are now superseded. The Music app which now has a streaming service…
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Spotify is still in the App Store, and iTunes/Apple Music existed long before Spotify.
  - mthoms 5y ago
    Spotify launched in 2006. Apple Music: 2015. iTunes is not a subscription service like Spotify.
oblio 5y ago
F.lux. The examples are countless. Well, not sold in this case, but given away for free to increase the moat, then banned.

snarfy 5y ago

I can open a lemonade stand, I just can't sell my own lemonade, is that corrrect?

Sayrus 5y ago
Now that's one hell of a straw man. Do you also plan on controlling this stand, allowing others to sell on your stand while watching every single transaction (and maybe the recipe so that the analogy is complete?) and while also having the power to remove them from your stand? Because if you are only talking about opening a stand and selling your lemonade, then you don't have the same foothold as Apple, Google or Amazon.
- snarfy 5y ago
  > same foothold Yes, this is the problem. Participating in the market they create is not. If that were true every grocery store that has a bakery, deli, or meat counter is a problem. They are too big. Monopolistic forces are the problem.

bothandeach 5y ago

Yes but. It's your country, you let them do these things. You set up your country to let them do these things. So no real reason to complain.

acdha 5y ago
Complaining is how problems get fixed. If we took your advice we’d still be living in a country where voting was restricted to white male land owners and most of us would be dreaming about rate reductions at the company store.
makeitdouble 5y ago
For real, do we have any more influence in this ? Looking at what’s happening now, Apple and Google are not under scrutiny because of our collective petitioning or votes, it’s solely because of competitors with deep enough pockets to duck it in court. As a proof of that, there’s no one to fight Facebook so not much effectively changes on that front, despite all the outcry and editorials thrown at them.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
That's not logical. Our country isn't a monolith. Lots of us are fighting for change so stop acting like 330 million people are all the same would be a great start. Complaints are one point of contention. Currently most people don't care much about their privacy if they find out it will slightly inconvenience them to try out an alternative. Until they get burned or FAANG does something particularly aggregious they just don't care much.

32gbsd 5y ago

we love these large companies. less people to trust, plus free-ish services

niyikiza 5y ago

>>a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant. Like the government?

mabbo 5y ago
The government is not a company, and does not have an overall goal of maximizing profit. That's what makes it different. If the government is not meeting the demands of the people, we elect a different one (in theory).