Re:Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
by scholia on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @06:07PM
(#15445727)
Android market share in Europe is around 75%. When you have a monopoly market share, you get treated differently, as Microsoft found.
Otherwise, Google wasn't found guilty of anything to do with software or apps. It was found guilty of abusing its monopoly market power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the expense of rivals.
I think we all expect Google to deliver honest and fair search results. When it delivers results that favor its own properties, users are being cheated.
It's like a slippery slope. If you enforce rules that say Apple must allow side-loading of software, doesn't that mean any computer should provide that facility? What if that opens up real security risks, is it really regulator's jobs to open up vulnerabilities like that? It's a massive, horrible can of worms. At the end of the day, if you want an open platform like that you can build or buy one. There's really no benefit to the market to mandate that all platforms must be like that though. If open really is better, then it should win on it's own terms not through regulatory fiat.