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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • The problem is SEO.

    You can’t just use keywords anymore because every site out there is actively exploiting that system. Being the search engine everyone uses inherently means everyone will try to cheat to be overrepresented. It’s an adversarial system now, which forces an arms race between the search engine and web sites, meaning a search engine has to constantly evolve to stay ahead.

    They’ve failed to do that and I definitely don’t like the end product now, but there’s nothing they can do to be what they were 10 years ago either. The web has changed.



  • Controlling what happens on your systems is not anti-competitive. You can’t just re-define words to mean something that’s the exact opposite of what they are. The locked down system of Apple and consoles is their biggest value add. It’s not “something I tolerate to buy an iPhone”. It’s why I buy an iPhone. They make so much money because their control of their own product makes it better. There is no such thing as a “monopoly” on your own hardware. It’s literally impossible.

    Google is a monopoly because they are controlling the behavior of competitors with their market position. That is always a monopoly. Controlling your own product never is.


  • It has nothing to do with the OS. It’s for the play store. But again, a limitation of the OS would be something that the OS can’t do, not the OS just refusing to allow hardware for business reasons.

    Your opinion on rational is just as flawed. People should be able to make their own products. It’s specifically pretending to be open to form a standard that multiple independent companies join in on, then unilaterally controlling that standard to make decisions for the entire market that’s abusive.

    There are many companies that do what Apple does and run closed operating systems on their own hardware. Apple built their market share on the strength of their walled garden providing an excellent development environment. It’s not what a monopoly is. Controlling the behavior of hundreds of competing products is a monopoly.


  • You have to manually enable the play store on all of those devices. It’s why they’re so niche and only made by Chinese companies.

    It’s not in any way a limitation of the OS. It’s a business decision that is using their market position as the only source of most Android apps in order to control what manufacturers are able to make and sell.

    And again, your core concept isn’t just flawed. It completely lacks understanding of what antitrust is. You can make decisions that only affect your own hardware. You cannot claim to be open and use that “openness” to make yourself the standard, then use that market position to pick winners and losers between your “partners” using that product, especially when you’re also one of them. That’s anticompetitive. Google wants all the benefits of being “open” while completely dictating the entire market.



  • One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.

    This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.

    It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.