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A comment on 50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google. Parent comment

Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by d1zzy on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:21PM (#20923587)
> Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list.

So you're saying that Google (or any other company for that matter) is better off NEVER EVER releasing services that use potentially open protocols because later on if they would ever consider changing those to a closed protocol it can be seen as anti-competitive. Better to just always use closed protocols.

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Re:50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust i... by shkkmo on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:58PM (#20923837)
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is a pretty clearly anti-competitive strategy.

The best way to counteract that strategy is a more complicated topic.

You are correct that creating bad rules around the removal of open protocols could end up dis-incentivizing usage of open protocols, but that doesn't mean there aren't some good rules that won't (I don't claim to know what they would be).

I think it makes sense that we create anti-trust or consumer protection laws that cover the circumstances under which services with high market-shares can remove support for open protocols.

I even see a potential argument to require services with sufficiently high market-share to implement open protocols.

[ Parent | on HN ]