7 ms·
The irony is that if Google had not licensed Android and only manufactured its own devices, like Apple does, it could restrict consumer options much more harshl
by guelo 4y ago
The irony is that if Google had not licensed Android and only manufactured its own devices, like Apple does, it could restrict consumer options much more harshly without EU fines and restrictions.
- dahfizz 4y agoTheoretically, yes. But I am confident the EU would find other ways to extract fines from Google in that case.
- stingraycharles 4y ago“Extract fines” makes it sound like the EU is the evil one here, rather than Google abusing its position.
- dahfizz 4y agoThe world is not a child's cartoon. It can be simultaneously true that Google is a scummy monopolist and the EU is not acting in good faith.
- pmyteh 4y agoIt's acting in good faith insofar as it does care about establishing transparent markets (and also protecting citizen privacy). It's fortunate (at least for itself) that these ambitions are entirely consistent with political expediency - which means they can pursue them without reserve. If an EU company did similar it might not be hit so hard (which would be hypocritical). But that doesn't make this action (a fine for obviously anticompetitive action) in bad faith, so much as it would make the other (lack of fine) so.
- tremon 4y agoIf you're accusing others of acting in bad faith you need to substantiate that. With a proper argument. Otherwise you're not acting in good faith yourself.
- edgyquant 4y agoI wouldn’t use the term bad faith but it’s clear the EU wants American big tech out
- kergonath 4y agoThe EU very regularly fines European companies. AFAIK there is no statistics showing a preference towards investigating American companies. Though that is certainly the case for large software companies, simply by due to the fact that there are more of them and with larger revenues than European ones. Have you any evidence, numerical or otherwise, to substantiate your assertion?
- oblio 4y agoThe EU doesn't want big tech out. It wants big tech abusers out. And guess what, most of those big tech abusers are American. But if it helps with anything, it doesn't look too kindly upon Chinese companies, either. It can't really do much about European big tech companies since there aren't that many left... and they're in enterprise markets where things work completely differently (enterprises can sue you themselves very efficiently if they're disadvantaged, thank you very much).
- krzyk 4y agoYes, but this Google. They are far away from having consumers as their top priority. And this is EU, which mostly does have them as top priority.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- StingyJelly 4y agoAs a counterexample there's Apple with not insignificant market share in Europe - pushing icloud, not supporting third party operating sysems or even sideloading, still keeping proprietary connector despite everyone else using usb-c, etc.
- at-fates-hands 4y agoWhich kind of begs the question about the differences between a "walled garden" in a way to protect their users and what exactly amounts to anti-competitive business practices. Windows phones tried the Apple approach if I remember correctly when their phones were on the market and it wasn't enough to keep them competitive. They had a litany of other issues to boot, but taking the "walled garden" approach raised the ire of many developers.
- stingraycharles 4y agoFor sure my recently bought iPad and Apple Watch use USB-C, so I think that part is not true. Arguably due to EU legislation.
- StingyJelly 4y agoYet the all new iphone 14 still uses lightning and I bet you and most apple watch owners also own an iphone.
- gls2ro 4y agoAt the first Google search (irony) I found that apple is maybe around 30% maybe (depending on the source) a bit hight than Samsung which is pretty close. but when looking at iOS vs Android then we have 30% (iOS) vs 60% (Android). this does not look at all even close to a monopoly from Apple. As far as I see their power in Europe comes from the fact that competition is following them in some decisions.
- rococode 4y agoDMA may be coming soon and would most likely affect Apple too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
- _aavaa_ 4y ago> The list of obligations would include prohibitions on combining data collected from two different services belonging to the same company (e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp); Would this not simply kill the kind of integration that Apple has between its different services? Or any of the smart assistants?
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoIf Google chose that path, other manufacturers would still need an OS to put on their phones - and it's likely Windows Phone would be the contender. So maybe we'd live in a world with 3 mobile OS's and more competition. The point is, the alternative scenario involves more actors making different choices.
- slaw 4y agoWe would live in a world with 2 mobile OS's iOS and Windows Phone. Android would land in Google Graveyard.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThen maybe Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch would still be around as FOSS mobile OS.
- doublepg23 4y agoFirefox OS was built from a lot of Android internals.
- riffraff 4y agoWebOS!
- linmob 4y agoUbuntu Touch is still around, see [0]. That said, with continued funding by Canonical, they like would have progressed differently (likely more). Firefox OS and webOS are still around under different names, which are Capyloon [1] and LuneOS respectively [2]. [0]: https://ubuntu-touch.io/ https://ubuntu-touch.io/ [1]: https://capyloon.org/ https://capyloon.org/ [2]: https://webos-ports.org/wiki/Main_Page https://webos-ports.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Apocryphon 4y agoInteresting, I had thought KaiOS was the last remnant of FFOS. I wonder which of these projects is most active at this time.
- kube-system 4y agoOr they could have written their licensing agreements in a way that doesn’t violate antitrust law. Apple has lots of partners, but Foxconn and Pegatron make phones for many companies.
- dagaci 4y agoThis is true, but the case for the acceptance of Android in the Market was that its was and open-platform and open-source. This is what gave it legs despite its early questionable software and hardware merits (the mantra being that you can fix it yourself!). The slow moving EU, a decade++ later is on target from this point of view. ....
- mhermher 4y agoNot even necessarily the "market" of consumers, but more specifically the market of manufacturers.
- babypuncher 4y agoAndroid is not really all that open anymore, at least not in the sense that it was in 2010 when AOSP was basically just a de-Googled Android. The AOSP today is more like Darwin is to macOS than Chromium is to Chrome. I think today's ruling reflects this, as much of it has to do with how Google handles the licensing of their proprietary Android bits.
- michaelmrose 4y agoIf you look at their in house phones the odds are that this would actually have tanked android entirely.
- babypuncher 4y agoI don't think we would still be talking about Android today if Google went down that path. I think in this alternate universe, Windows Phone may have actually succeeded.