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I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their vi

I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their victory. I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google. We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world. They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc. They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.

nozzlegear 1y ago
> They shouldn't be strong arming [...] the entire automotive industry. Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay. With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
- echelon 1y ago
  > With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto. Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition. Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google. Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive. All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
  - ralph84 1y ago
    The EU mindset in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter how shitty and expensive the solution is, as long as they get to say they owned big tech.
    - echelon 1y ago
      Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too. Big tech is literally a machine putting a ceiling on your ability to build. They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules. If you get big enough, they self-fund an internal team to compete with you. Or they offer to buy you for less than you're worth. If you don't accept, they buy your competitor. Capitalism should be brutal. Giant lions that can't compete should starve and give way to nimble new competition. You shouldn't be able to use your 100+ business units to subsidize the takeover of an entirely unrelated market. They are an invasive species and are growing into everything they can without antitrust hedge trimming. Instead of lean, starving lions, they're lion fish infesting the Gulf of Mexico. They're feasting upon the entire ecosystem and putting pressure on healthy competition. Your own capital rewards are cut short because of their scale. Do you like not being able to write apps and distribute them to customers? It's okay to pay their fee, jump through their hoops, be locked to release trains, pay 30%, forced to lose your customer relationship, forced to use their payment and user rails, forced to update on their whim to meet their new standards - on their cadence and not yours? Do you like having competitors able to pay money to put themselves in front of customers searching for your brand name? On the web and in the app stores? So you have to pay to even enjoy the name recognition you earned? On top of the 30% gross sales tax you already pay? And those draconian rules? That's fucking bullshit. We need more competition, not less. Winning should not be reaching scale and squatting forever. You should be forced to run on the treadmill constantly until someone nibbles away at your market. That's healthy. Competition from smaller players should be brutal and unending. That is how we build robust, anti-fragile markets that maximally benefit consumers. That is how we ensure capital rewards accrue to the active innovators. Apple and Google are lion fish. It's time for the DOJ, FTC, and every sovereign nation to cull them back so that the ecosystem can thrive once more.
      - 1y ago
- xp84 11mo ago
  Why can’t we hate both greedy and shitty GM, and greedy and shitty Apple and Google? Both infotainment and phones should be open to run the software users choose. The biggest problem with tech today is how everyone with control of some kind of choke point expects everyone else to pay them to “allow” the user to use anything that isn’t in the first party’s strategic interest. We saw this when Apple violently crushed that Android-compatible iMessage solution a couple years ago. It was portrayed as that developer “hacking” Apple - not as the users of the iMessage service choosing a different client than Apple likes. This shift in thinking is wild. Since the AT&T breakup the phone company was forced to allow customers to choose their client hardware (phones). Now in the modern day critical infrastructure, we’re back to the same old tricks where powerful parties (platform owners) want to dictate the hardware and software customers are allowed to use based purely on their own greedy interests.
pjc50 1y ago
The sad thing is that you and the person you are arguing with are both right: Apple and Google are lock-in monopolists, and the legacy telcos were much worse monopolists (remember paying for ringtones?), and the car manufacturers want to foist terrible software on people with their own brand of lock-in. Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market. (DIN being a German standards body..)

nozzlegear 1y ago

> They shouldn't be strong arming [...] the entire automotive industry. Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay. With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.

echelon 1y ago
> With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto. Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition. Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google. Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive. All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
- ralph84 1y ago
  The EU mindset in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter how shitty and expensive the solution is, as long as they get to say they owned big tech.
  - echelon 1y ago
    Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too. Big tech is literally a machine putting a ceiling on your ability to build. They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules. If you get big enough, they self-fund an internal team to compete with you. Or they offer to buy you for less than you're worth. If you don't accept, they buy your competitor. Capitalism should be brutal. Giant lions that can't compete should starve and give way to nimble new competition. You shouldn't be able to use your 100+ business units to subsidize the takeover of an entirely unrelated market. They are an invasive species and are growing into everything they can without antitrust hedge trimming. Instead of lean, starving lions, they're lion fish infesting the Gulf of Mexico. They're feasting upon the entire ecosystem and putting pressure on healthy competition. Your own capital rewards are cut short because of their scale. Do you like not being able to write apps and distribute them to customers? It's okay to pay their fee, jump through their hoops, be locked to release trains, pay 30%, forced to lose your customer relationship, forced to use their payment and user rails, forced to update on their whim to meet their new standards - on their cadence and not yours? Do you like having competitors able to pay money to put themselves in front of customers searching for your brand name? On the web and in the app stores? So you have to pay to even enjoy the name recognition you earned? On top of the 30% gross sales tax you already pay? And those draconian rules? That's fucking bullshit. We need more competition, not less. Winning should not be reaching scale and squatting forever. You should be forced to run on the treadmill constantly until someone nibbles away at your market. That's healthy. Competition from smaller players should be brutal and unending. That is how we build robust, anti-fragile markets that maximally benefit consumers. That is how we ensure capital rewards accrue to the active innovators. Apple and Google are lion fish. It's time for the DOJ, FTC, and every sovereign nation to cull them back so that the ecosystem can thrive once more.
    - 1y ago
xp84 11mo ago
Why can’t we hate both greedy and shitty GM, and greedy and shitty Apple and Google? Both infotainment and phones should be open to run the software users choose. The biggest problem with tech today is how everyone with control of some kind of choke point expects everyone else to pay them to “allow” the user to use anything that isn’t in the first party’s strategic interest. We saw this when Apple violently crushed that Android-compatible iMessage solution a couple years ago. It was portrayed as that developer “hacking” Apple - not as the users of the iMessage service choosing a different client than Apple likes. This shift in thinking is wild. Since the AT&T breakup the phone company was forced to allow customers to choose their client hardware (phones). Now in the modern day critical infrastructure, we’re back to the same old tricks where powerful parties (platform owners) want to dictate the hardware and software customers are allowed to use based purely on their own greedy interests.

pjc50 1y ago

The sad thing is that you and the person you are arguing with are both right: Apple and Google are lock-in monopolists, and the legacy telcos were much worse monopolists (remember paying for ringtones?), and the car manufacturers want to foist terrible software on people with their own brand of lock-in. Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market. (DIN being a German standards body..)