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Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Last fall

Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s reliance on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker... Google, which the law will force to allow more competition in search, explored ways to lobby E.U. regulators to crack open Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could siphon users from Safari and Spotlight... Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water in these skirmishes advocating a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose, in service of enabling the deepening of Google's moat in collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand. Stepping back... I believe engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy. I believe the hard work for achieving that ease makes users happy and engineers wealthy. Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
I have no problem with "carrying Google's water" in this case. They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. They should totally get to enjoy that freedom on Apple devices. As should we. This is completely independent from Google's surveillance capitalism problem. We should deal with that separately by turning personal information into massive liability. Society should make it so it costs them literal truckloads of money to know even a single bit of information about any human being. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them. > sell a mobile console appliance Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Companies have no rights. Only people do.
- tempodox 3y ago
  > They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. Except they tirelessly work on taking computing freedom away from you.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    You sure about that? Google's been one of the better companies when it comes to free and open source work. Their phones are significantly more free than their competition. It's ironic, they sell the easiest phones to install custom operating systems on. They even put in work into open firmware for their chromebook laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about them, despite their surveillance capitalism.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  I switched away from Android in part because I wanted a phone that was just an appliance that always worked. I enjoyed fiddling with alternative ROMs and such but I eventually realized that, as a tinkerer, the only way to make sure my phone always worked when I needed it was to pick a device I couldn’t root and tinker with. I think the market is big enough for both models and we’re all worse off if the users that want the Apple experience are unable to pick it.
  - nervlord 3y ago
    [dead]
  - nerdix 3y ago
    Just because you can root and tinker with something doesn't mean you have to. Millions of people use Android phones without ever having touched a third party rom (or even have the knowledge that they exist). Additionally, Apple allowing a user to install a browser with a rendering engine other than webkit does not preclude a completely different user from experiencing the "Apple experience". The default experience will be the Apple experience. I really don't understand this common sentiment that more freedom for a user to use a device in the manner in which they want to somehow takes away the freedom of others.
saurik 3y ago
This is a false dichotomy: we should be aggressively dismantling both of these companies for having distortional market power.
- JustifyContent 3y ago
  Powerful technology corporations are good for American hard and soft power. Also, they can create crucial technology. OpenAI would be nowhere without the transformer.
  - renegat0x0 3y ago
    Monopolies are never good for users, and for employees. There are good only for corporations and CEOs.
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    That's not great for us 95% of people who don't live in the US.
    - pvarangot 3y ago
      It's also not clear if it's good for most of us in the U.S. so yeah I get you
kobalsky 3y ago
> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil. > Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss. I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.
- vanjajaja1 3y ago
  > .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place. Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.
choppaface 3y ago
> Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water Well if you search for things like "Google anti-trust docs"[1] you can see HN is ostensibly less interested than the rest of the media in Google's lawyer's scorched-earth blockade of public access to the trial documents and testimony. A lot of the actual material benefits that Google extracted from its anti-competitive schemes have been redacted or explained in closed-door testimony. Curious readers show know that stories like the OP are ones that Google's lawyers want you to focus on rather than what's not being shown. As bad as OP looks, it must be seen in the context of Google hiding other information for the public. e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=google%20anti-trust%20docs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Gunax 3y ago
If even Alphabet cannot get a toehold on Apple devices, then other competitions have no chance. In this case, I strongly favour opening the IPhone. Not because I care about Google, but because I care about completion at large. 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. They never stopped you from installing anything else. I don't understand why the same rule doesn't apply to Apple.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. We said Microsoft was abusing their monopoly because they used criminal blackmail against hardware sellers, threatening to cease business with sellers if they tried to sell any computers with competing operating systems or without operating systems.
- nemothekid 3y ago
  The idea of "opening" iOS so that we can welcome a Google Chrome monopoly just doesn't sit right with me.
  - nuker 3y ago
    This.
  - nervlord 3y ago
    [dead]
- abirch 3y ago
  Microsoft was a monopoly because it had 97% of the desktop market. Their anticompetitive behavior is too long to list but include not being able to remove IE, they bundled Windows Media Player, wouldn't make office for competing products until the second coming of Steve Jobs, they tried to make their own version of Java, ...
  - 8note 3y ago
    This all sounds like the same stuff apple does with ios
danShumway 3y ago
iOS is not a feasible long-term solution to browser monoculture. It's just not. And the (heavy quotes) "equilibrium" between Chrome and Safari is not really want we want, we don't want 2 giant corporate browsers, we want diversity. Google is currently involved in a potentially historic antitrust lawsuit in the United States over its search engine dominance. Maybe after that's done we should look at Chrome under the same lens. You don't have to pick a winner and loser and decide whether you're going to carry Apple's water or Google's water. You can just break them both up and force both of the companies to stop doing anticompetitive crap. It's so dystopian to look at the current browser duopoly and to say, "well, which of these two companies do I want to rule over me, I have to pick one of them." We are capable of better.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
irjustin 3y ago
> Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Wasn't this the dream of MSFT Windows?
ants_everywhere 3y ago
> engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy Last time I read Apple's privacy statement, which was about a year ago, it said essentially the same thing Google's does. Which is that both companies collect all of your data and use it internally as much as they want including for, among other things, advertising. The reason Apple has a perceived advantage in privacy (other than the fact that they've marketed it heavily) is that most consumers don't see them as an advertising company whereas Google clearly is. But they do have an advertising business, and one would expect it to get larger as they enter the search space. Apple collects an immense amount of data about its users, including broad categories of data on very private things like health, payments, location, and broad categories like "fraud prevention." If you're concerned about companies "collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand," then I'm not sure it makes sense to buy Apple products, since they are very tight lipped with what they do with the enormous amounts of behavioral data exhaust they collect.
ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
>Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.
- zappb 3y ago
  And the Windows app market might actually be profitable rather than a mess of Electron apps. And maybe PC games wouldn’t all come with rootkits to prevent you from using your device.
  - Zagitta 3y ago
    So your argument is that it's better for your device to prevent you from using it out of the box rather than games which you fairly easily can opt out of by just not installing them?
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > some of you will even defend that Yeah. Always makes me sad to watch people come to Hacker News and defend the dismantling of everything hacking ever stood for.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    You can always buy the device that allows hacking. No one is putting a gun to your head to by an Apple product. If people want to buy a non-hackable Apple product that Apple tightly controls, that’s their business. It doesn’t affect you. You should mind your own business.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      I don't want to buy other devices. I want to buy Apple devices. I think they're just better phones in every way. I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it. I shouldn't be forced to use their software and I certainly shouldn't have less choices just because they want to "own" their "platform". These "all or nothing, take it or leave it" propositions are hostile to consumers and should be resisted at all costs. I should be able to get an iPhone without iOS. I sure as hell won't "mind my business" while my freedoms are being denied by rent seeking corporations. If it was up to me, that'd be illegal. Hopefully the EU will put an end to the notion that they can "own" markets. Don't know what spirit possessed them to do it but I ain't gonna argue with a good thing.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I have no problem with "carrying Google's water" in this case. They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. They should totally get to enjoy that freedom on Apple devices. As should we. This is completely independent from Google's surveillance capitalism problem. We should deal with that separately by turning personal information into massive liability. Society should make it so it costs them literal truckloads of money to know even a single bit of information about any human being. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them. > sell a mobile console appliance Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.

dontlaugh 3y ago
Companies have no rights. Only people do.
tempodox 3y ago
> They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. Except they tirelessly work on taking computing freedom away from you.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  You sure about that? Google's been one of the better companies when it comes to free and open source work. Their phones are significantly more free than their competition. It's ironic, they sell the easiest phones to install custom operating systems on. They even put in work into open firmware for their chromebook laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about them, despite their surveillance capitalism.
fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
I switched away from Android in part because I wanted a phone that was just an appliance that always worked. I enjoyed fiddling with alternative ROMs and such but I eventually realized that, as a tinkerer, the only way to make sure my phone always worked when I needed it was to pick a device I couldn’t root and tinker with. I think the market is big enough for both models and we’re all worse off if the users that want the Apple experience are unable to pick it.
- nervlord 3y ago
  [dead]
- nerdix 3y ago
  Just because you can root and tinker with something doesn't mean you have to. Millions of people use Android phones without ever having touched a third party rom (or even have the knowledge that they exist). Additionally, Apple allowing a user to install a browser with a rendering engine other than webkit does not preclude a completely different user from experiencing the "Apple experience". The default experience will be the Apple experience. I really don't understand this common sentiment that more freedom for a user to use a device in the manner in which they want to somehow takes away the freedom of others.

saurik 3y ago

This is a false dichotomy: we should be aggressively dismantling both of these companies for having distortional market power.

JustifyContent 3y ago
Powerful technology corporations are good for American hard and soft power. Also, they can create crucial technology. OpenAI would be nowhere without the transformer.
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  Monopolies are never good for users, and for employees. There are good only for corporations and CEOs.
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  That's not great for us 95% of people who don't live in the US.
  - pvarangot 3y ago
    It's also not clear if it's good for most of us in the U.S. so yeah I get you

kobalsky 3y ago

> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil. > Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss. I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.

vanjajaja1 3y ago
> .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)
- danShumway 3y ago
  > The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place. Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.

choppaface 3y ago

> Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water Well if you search for things like "Google anti-trust docs"[1] you can see HN is ostensibly less interested than the rest of the media in Google's lawyer's scorched-earth blockade of public access to the trial documents and testimony. A lot of the actual material benefits that Google extracted from its anti-competitive schemes have been redacted or explained in closed-door testimony. Curious readers show know that stories like the OP are ones that Google's lawyers want you to focus on rather than what's not being shown. As bad as OP looks, it must be seen in the context of Google hiding other information for the public. e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=google%20anti-trust%20docs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Gunax 3y ago

If even Alphabet cannot get a toehold on Apple devices, then other competitions have no chance. In this case, I strongly favour opening the IPhone. Not because I care about Google, but because I care about completion at large. 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. They never stopped you from installing anything else. I don't understand why the same rule doesn't apply to Apple.

carlosjobim 3y ago
> 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. We said Microsoft was abusing their monopoly because they used criminal blackmail against hardware sellers, threatening to cease business with sellers if they tried to sell any computers with competing operating systems or without operating systems.
nemothekid 3y ago
The idea of "opening" iOS so that we can welcome a Google Chrome monopoly just doesn't sit right with me.
- nuker 3y ago
  This.
- nervlord 3y ago
  [dead]
abirch 3y ago
Microsoft was a monopoly because it had 97% of the desktop market. Their anticompetitive behavior is too long to list but include not being able to remove IE, they bundled Windows Media Player, wouldn't make office for competing products until the second coming of Steve Jobs, they tried to make their own version of Java, ...
- 8note 3y ago
  This all sounds like the same stuff apple does with ios

danShumway 3y ago

iOS is not a feasible long-term solution to browser monoculture. It's just not. And the (heavy quotes) "equilibrium" between Chrome and Safari is not really want we want, we don't want 2 giant corporate browsers, we want diversity. Google is currently involved in a potentially historic antitrust lawsuit in the United States over its search engine dominance. Maybe after that's done we should look at Chrome under the same lens. You don't have to pick a winner and loser and decide whether you're going to carry Apple's water or Google's water. You can just break them both up and force both of the companies to stop doing anticompetitive crap. It's so dystopian to look at the current browser duopoly and to say, "well, which of these two companies do I want to rule over me, I have to pick one of them." We are capable of better.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

irjustin 3y ago

> Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Wasn't this the dream of MSFT Windows?

ants_everywhere 3y ago

> engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy Last time I read Apple's privacy statement, which was about a year ago, it said essentially the same thing Google's does. Which is that both companies collect all of your data and use it internally as much as they want including for, among other things, advertising. The reason Apple has a perceived advantage in privacy (other than the fact that they've marketed it heavily) is that most consumers don't see them as an advertising company whereas Google clearly is. But they do have an advertising business, and one would expect it to get larger as they enter the search space. Apple collects an immense amount of data about its users, including broad categories of data on very private things like health, payments, location, and broad categories like "fraud prevention." If you're concerned about companies "collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand," then I'm not sure it makes sense to buy Apple products, since they are very tight lipped with what they do with the enormous amounts of behavioral data exhaust they collect.

ApolloFortyNine 3y ago

>Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.

zappb 3y ago
And the Windows app market might actually be profitable rather than a mess of Electron apps. And maybe PC games wouldn’t all come with rootkits to prevent you from using your device.
- Zagitta 3y ago
  So your argument is that it's better for your device to prevent you from using it out of the box rather than games which you fairly easily can opt out of by just not installing them?
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> some of you will even defend that Yeah. Always makes me sad to watch people come to Hacker News and defend the dismantling of everything hacking ever stood for.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  You can always buy the device that allows hacking. No one is putting a gun to your head to by an Apple product. If people want to buy a non-hackable Apple product that Apple tightly controls, that’s their business. It doesn’t affect you. You should mind your own business.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    I don't want to buy other devices. I want to buy Apple devices. I think they're just better phones in every way. I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it. I shouldn't be forced to use their software and I certainly shouldn't have less choices just because they want to "own" their "platform". These "all or nothing, take it or leave it" propositions are hostile to consumers and should be resisted at all costs. I should be able to get an iPhone without iOS. I sure as hell won't "mind my business" while my freedoms are being denied by rent seeking corporations. If it was up to me, that'd be illegal. Hopefully the EU will put an end to the notion that they can "own" markets. Don't know what spirit possessed them to do it but I ain't gonna argue with a good thing.