> Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.
I had never heard that name and just googled them. HOOOOLLLYYY COW!!!!!!! That's what I call monopoly.
Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.
That's exactly why I mentioned people using multiple apps, which lessens the effect quite a bit. Users on dating apps are also rather fickle, and will jump to the next best app once that becomes available, so even with a big market share, there isn't much lock-in and there isn't much of an outsized benefit to the position as a market leader. E.g. in the European market Bumble appeared a few years after Tinder and within 1-2 years basically everybody that I know that used Tinder before at least tried out Bumble and many continue to use both or switched outright. Of course that's very anecdotal, but current statistics for number of US users for both apps paint a similar picture[0].
> I think it's safe to assume they own 80-90% of the market share. That is pretty close to monopoly if you ask me.
In 2016, they apparently owned 25% of market share[1], which is pretty far away from a monopoly if you ask me.
It seems a bit weird to me to group them together with Alphabet/Facebook/Apple. The others span far more markets, and have much much stronger lock-in effect which they can unfairly leverage to push other products. Compared to that, Match Group is laughable.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/826778/most-popular-dati...
[1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/07/why-match-group-st...
...so duopoly??
I think it's much more than that.
Google makes apps and services. Google makes the platforms apps run on (Android, ChromeOS, Chrome [web + electron], Stadia). Google makes the services used to monetize apps (AdSense). Google makes the services used to distribute apps (Google Play Store, Stadia). Google makes the services used to find apps and services (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Play Store). And that's not to mention the deployment platforms, communication platforms, payment platforms, analytics platforms, development tools, content hosting services, etc.
They have so much control that you can't hope to compete with any of their established apps or services - no matter how much better your own product might be. All you can to is try to make something new and get big enough that Google can't take you on directly.
Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.
Who knows? How many alternatives died or resolved themselves to relative obscurity because Google managed to get a strangle hold on the market before their competitors could establish themselves?
Maybe Windows Phone would still exist. Maybe we'd be much further along with a truly open mobile Linux platform.
Maybe Firefox wouldn't be slowly fading into obscurity. Maybe Opera would be one of the top browsers. Maybe Edge would still be developing its own browser tech instead of just reskinning Chromium.
Maybe OSM would be the most popular map provider. Maybe Vimeo would be the go-to platform for video hosting. Maybe people would prefer store their files on Box. Maybe ads would have never have become such a popular monetization strategy and we might have seen some new and innovative strategies in its place.
Who knows?
If anything Google made Maps shittier over time (similarly to how they've managed to fuck over their own GMail offering).
As for Chrome, that was originally developed by KDE devs first and Apple second into a modern browser engine. The innovation part was theirs. Google just adopted it wholesale in the beggining, and started monopolizing its steering...
That’s... not how that works. You’re talking about WebKit, but the innovation of Chrome was separate processes for everything so a crash anywhere wouldn’t take down the whole browser. Sure, they’ve gone a bit “mad with power,” but to claim Google did nothing in the beginning is ignoring reality.
I'd argue that's more of an evolution than an innovation.
It had only just become normal for home and office PCs to feature multi-core processors. High capacity RAM was becoming relatively cheap compared to other PC components. We were still in the early days of webapps and social media. The concept of "browser tabs" was still new.
Google had the advantage of starting from ground zero, so they could consider these new trends as part of their design. Incumbents had to re-work their existing tech to take advantage of those trends.
That's not to say I agree that all these predicates are met in Google's case, but if you really do find yourself in a situation where a company can't be broken up because the constituent products are necessary to society but can't function without one another, then that company probably can't be effectively regulated by any government.
Suppose Chrome couldn't be a part of Google. They would have just contributed to Firefox, wouldn't you say?
Or if they were worried about Apple, donated startup capital to a non-profit Android Foundation to get it off the ground, where it could subsequently operate under a business model similar to Mozilla.
The difference is that the independent entities wouldn't have the same conflicts of interest as they do as part of the mothership. Firefox can care more about privacy than Chrome, so if it was the dominant browser, all the better. An Android Foundation operated by people in the spirit of Debian would probably care more about continuing to support older phone hardware, and care less about monopolizing app distribution to their operating system.
Hopefully much fewer.
>How much innovation is restricted by splitting entities.
None. It's actually increased. What you listed is products, not innovations.
So was MeeGo, maybe we would be using that now if Google couldn't just throw its weight around.
> The Play Store and Chrome Web Store
Ah vendor locked in store fronts, nearly as innovative as the company store in mining towns. The promise by Google to completely pull the rug out under any Android manufacturer trying to get away from it only ads to its clear innovative superiority .
> Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible.
Yes, the last decade of venture capitalist funded loss companies like Uber has shown that no one could reach that size without Google to guide them.
Over the past 10 years, how many companies chose to build native apps for iOS instead of web apps running everywhere? How many people bought iOS devices instead of competing products because of that rich app ecosystem (working only on iOS devices)? How much money did they make through the App Store fee that app developers could have saved if Web Apps had been a viable option? How much money was poured in the native industry instead of the Web?
Apple has been preventing the growth of the Web as an app platform for years, it's time for a change, and it's time they pay for it.
The problem is that they prevent other browsers to add these features, because they prevent them from using their browser engines. That way, they prevent these browsers to really compete with theirs (Safari). Because if we could run the real Chrome on iOS, with all the APIs it supports, it's obvious everyone would ditch Safari straight away.
And more importantly, that way they prevent Web apps from competing with native apps. Because obviously, who would use a Web app which can't even send push notifications instead of a native app with all the native APIs it has access to?
So the problem is not Apple not caring enough about the Web. The problem is Apple having anti-competitive behaviour regarding Web browsers and application platforms on iOS.
You'd be running features that both Mozilla and Safari consider harmful and will not implement.
And if I'm not happy with that, maybe I'll switch to Firefox, which doesn't support them while not holding the Web back on many other features and with many unfixed bugs for years, like Apple does with Safari.
That's the advantage of competition, if you're not happy with a product, you can use another one instead.
Most frontend devs that I know making PWAs complain endlessly about the number of exceptions and workarounds for Safari, and indeed it does slow down development and ends up being a justification for contemplating dedicated mobile apps.
Apple doesn't have to do anything, they just have to stop blocking others from doing anything.
Anything else, like two iOS versions, is simply a provocation on the level of "we cannot unbundle IE".
This is where this line of reasoning goes wrong.
People will be persuaded to go out of the App Store ecosystem regardless of whether it is good for them or not.
Tens of billions of dollars and the most valuable advertising real estate on Facebook, Amazon, and the front page of Google, not to mention Epic and the other TenCent owned games companies will all be used to convince users to install alternative App Store.
Facebook and Amazon will presumably bundle stores directly into their apps. Why wouldn’t many other companies do this. Presumably TikTok would.
But it doesn’t matter, because all this is effectively false in practice. The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed (by their IT or their power-user of reference). This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration, a strawman propped up to defend Apple’s utterly anticompetitive practices.
You’re going to need to explain this. I don’t see anything in what I wrote that leads to the conclusions in your first paragraph.
1. Users may not understand the security/privacy benefits until after they have sacrificed them.
2. There will be very large competitors trying to persuade them that there are no benefits. E.g. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178068/facebook-apple-...
3. Alternate stores will pay for exclusives and users will be forced to use them or lose important apps.
4. Key apps such as Facebook itself will just build stores into their apps.
As to your second paragraph:
“The overwhelming majority of people can barely be bothered to change their desktop browser, and even then they mostly do it only when directed..”
This is true, which is precisely why only Facebook and Google plus Amazon and a few others, E.g. Epic, will have the resources to persuade users to establish large alternative stores. Google advertised Chrome on the front page, and on TV. This is exactly what would happen with alternative stores.
“This idea that they will all suddenly go tweak-crazy and install every appstore under the sun is simply an exaggeration..”
A strawman is when you present a deliberately weak version of another person’s argument, and then attack it. This paragraph of yours is a strawman. Nobody alluded to anyone going tweak crazy etc. Nobody defended Apple.
My comment was a response to this:
“People who want to stay safe in the Appstore garden have nothing to do, and everyone else can go the extra mile if they want to.“
Which is clearly an unrealistic depiction of how things would be.
This. We devs do a great/horrible enough job of this already being lazy with implementations and saying “Chrome is the only supported browser”
Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).
Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.
Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.
However, Mozilla doesn't have a massive userbase like that, which leads me to suspect that Google only pays Mozilla to stave off pressure form regulators who would otherwise accuse them of having a monopoly on browsers.
You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.
I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.
“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”
I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)
The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.
I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.
If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.
Not even close. I've used Common Crawl, it has nowhere near the breadth that Google has in their index.
Problem no. 1 is that website owners block non Google crawlers because of limited bandwidth. So you can't reliably even get started on creating your own search engine. Once we have the data available, we can figure out the other bits and what they require. But to get to that door, you need access to the crawl.
You don't need to have everything in the Google index to beat Google.
You need to be better than Google in the search niche that you'll serve.
And for that, at the bare minimum, you need access to all the crawl data that Google has to get started, then throw away the bits that you don't need.
Quote via [2]
--- start quote ---
When Mr. Maril started researching how sites treated Google’s crawler, he downloaded 17 million so-called robots.txt files — essentially rules of the road posted by nearly every website laying out where crawlers can go — and found many examples where Google had greater access than competitors.
ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers, permits only Google’s crawler to have access to links containing PDF documents. Only Google’s computers get access to listings on PBS Kids. On Alibaba.com, the U.S. site of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, only Google’s crawler is given access to pages that list products.
--- end quote ---
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
[2] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/12/14/wakabayashi-goo...
When they saw crawler they don't mean Googlebot or something.
They mean the whole thing you've described, the search engine as a backend.
What the law proposes is that other companies should be able to just buy the search engine service from a new company split from Google, of which Google which will just be just another client.
>I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking.
The idea is to split the whole search part from Google. Let them have the ad business, Android and so on, and just rent the search from the spin-off company...
And at the same time, on the same website I need to enter Google-provided captcha. To fight robots.
In the end, the point would be to make Google closer to what it was at the beginning -- just input and output. No ads on top of it, no bundling with other offerings etc. And if the publisher's ranking remains as good as it should, then surely some will be willing to pay not only for the raw data, but the ranking as well.
The search front companies would use the index to retrieve pages, then they would rank these pages with their own criteria and filter with their own white/black lists, then present the result in their own UI. Each one would have their own ads and tracking (or lack thereof). The index would not be able to know the identities of the users.
In the end they all boil down to an "attention economy", it's about us and our eyeballs, we should have more say on what we are consuming.
The part about ranking, filtering, tracking and UI is true for FaceBook and Twitter as well, even though they are a different kind of service. We could have alternative views on these systems, where we have more control on the way the system manipulates the information for us.
For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.
While we're at it, how about making shady practices about "last seat available" and "secure your seat" and "sit with your family!" and so forth illegal. "Upgrade to clue!"
Oh fuck NO. Apple has saved me from scummy apps more times than I can remember. They always refund without question, including when I fell for Match.com's "Pay up to see how many bots like you" scam.
Right now I'm fighting to get my money back from Couchsurfing.com (they started throwing a "COVID contribution" prompt on the app and the website that blocks you from doing anything, can't even delete your account until you pay) and they're flat out ignoring me. They use a custom payments system. If it was a regular In-App Purchase, Apple would have refunded me within hours by now.
Anyone clamoring for the protections of the App Store to be abolished is very likely someone salivating to prey upon users.
They own Windows + Internet Explorer/Edge + Bing and a lot of internet services.
I think it's problematic that Skype gets auto-installed eery time Windows updates.
While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.
The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.
In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.
The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.
Not only has Chrome near monopoly, cemented by being the default preinstalled browser - they feel the urge to nip even the tiny insignificant competition in the bud.
We're beginning to see the limitations of globalization. For all the anti-trust rhetoric from the US, it's unlikely it'll accept this level of over-reach without pushing back. Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?
We're definitely in the beginning stages of a new world order that's far less cohesive, with distributed levels of influence.
I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.
Both of these are already the status quo even before this law
Let's not forget that this is a US based website. It's only natural that US based issues and US based viewpoints will always surface.
- Bumble
- Badoo
- Eharmony
- Zoosk
- ChrstianMingle
- JDate
- tons of international and niche sites and apps
- many, many others
The idea that there is monopoly power being leveraged here to prevent other dating sites from being started and grown and be successful has very little evidence behind it.
If you agree that Apple should be on the list, then Match Group should without question be on the list.
Instead, the reason why they are bad, is due to things like barriers to entry, and the anti competitive practices that they enact.
For dating apps, I don't see how match group is putting up anything that could be described as a barrier to entry, for other dating apps.
Whereas Apple is absolutely doing things that effect competition in the market, by, for example, preventing competing app stores on the Iphone.
Therefore, Apple's actions are much worse than Match Groups, even though they have a smaller percentage of the market.
In your opinion, what is the real reason for no allowing alternative browsers?
I like this idea, but more precisely I'd put the index with the crawler as well and only keep the ranking/filtering and display part separate. I'd like to see many "heads" on top of the crawler/indexer.
Regarding "match". You would be surprised how much fraud exits in the dating industry. How many people get payed to keep paying customers engaged with the app. Also, just wait until your Tinder gold expries. You will get tons of (hidden) likes.
Microsoft
They might be the ones who finally push it for mainstream adoption, then PayPal can go kick rocks.
If it fails, then maaaybe we could think about it. Still not as bad as these 4 major offenders.
You'll have to explain why a dedicated hardware company wouldn't be able to come up with such a chip given sufficient competition. If many people use language X, then it makes sense for an IC design company to optimize for that language (unless there is a near-monopoly situation and they don't care about what the market wants).
> But there are plenty of other examples (ever wonder why no one seems to be able to replicate Apple's great trackpads?).
I'm afraid you'll have to provide some more context, because the connection between your argument and both hardware and software seems missing.
They gave you an example. Apple (software part) don't need to run around and ask hardware companies to implement optimisations in their hardware, and hope that implementation will be as promised (see: Microsoft and Qualcomm, and debacle called "custom ARM chip for Windows"). Apple (software part) can plan their releases many years in advance, knowing that Apple (hardware part) will fulfil their promise (see: Intel's roadmap recently, NVidia and Apple in the past). Apple (software part) can choose programming language that suits them and be sure that the hardware will follow. Apple (hardware part) can plan many years in advance and make obviously superior product knowing that there will be enough software support (Rosetta 2) to overcome initial platform switching pain. The whole M1 Mac story is all about the company that is so integrated that they can pull something that nobody else can.
You choose to ignore the example.
1. Alphabet/Google
2. Apple
3. Facebook
4. Match Group
Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.
Reasons:
For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.
For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.
For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.
For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.
---
From the Chinese side:
I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.
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Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.
The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.
For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.