I have resorted to using an old school notepad for my development ideas pretty much. A software company I used to work for got shuttered just 3 months after a big software company paid the startup a visit to observe operations back in 98, I've always been wary of corporate espionage since.
Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited.
The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
And the source for that claim is not even a Google engineer, but apparently somebody who heard how Google engineers are "notoriously loose-lipped".
From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?
> The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
It's much easier to believe once you remember how Google actually makes its money [0].
In that context it not only becomes believable, but it actually fits perfectly into their MO [1].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/09/google_ventures_yield...
Your first link explains how Google doesn't actually give your data to anyone else. Your second link is about a company that Google Ventures invested in. The equivalent would be that some company claims a YC-backed startup stole some of their IP, and that somehow YC is at fault, which is silly. Google isn't even a party to the lawsuit (further, it's not clear that the company who sued even won and to an extent it looks like they might be a patent troll).
> From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?
A bunch of it is public: https://cloud.google.com/access-transparency. Access Transparency provides the access logs to the customer, and Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company. But yes, you could also go searching HN for discussion of these topics and probably find quite a lot from people.
Nobody said Google "gives data away", the article explains how Google monetizes the data.
> Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company
All Access Approval does is prevent individual Google employees from accessing the data, which is not the same as "Google as a whole". It also seems to have a long list of Google services were it does not apply as no AT logs are created or other exceptions apply.
And while that might be nice, it's neither special, nor does it change the nature of Google's business, it's just virtue signaling and building plausible deniability along the lines of "We really do care about privacy! At least in as so far as we don't want to get regulated!"
You know, just like claiming how Google "doesn't give data away", when in reality it very much sells all the useful insights, said data gives, to the highest bidder.
With the scale of surveillance data available to Google, this is how they have their cake and eat it too.
Once you know that note-taking apps (e.g.) are a hugely growing space, it's easy to use publicly available data to find the startups making a splash. Not once did Google's data tell them Startup X is an acquihire target. And yet, here they are at Startup X's door.
And even if they don't access file or email content, metadata like access data like Play Store performance, Google searches for competing products, and Google Analytics data, might seem like fair game.
If there's no infosec and it's just infra and developers and CTO's signing contracts with vendors, even Google, you have an issue.
Got a source for that?
The big tech companies have a much higher market share. For phone app makers, the App Store is the only point of access to the majority of affluent Americans; Google controls access to the rest of the 1st world population (sideloading is possible on Android but 99.9% of normies won't use your app if it's not on the store). Amazon does have competitors and you can also run your own e-shop, but they are the gatekeepers for a large portion of the online sales market - getting kicked off of Amazon is going to hurt bad for any online retailer. Of course getting kicked out of Walmart is also bad, but there are lots of competitors that lots of people use (grocery stores which have regional chains as well as smaller local chains, Target, Costco, Amazon, etc.).
Which leads into the second point - Apple has a long history of integrating cool features/apps into their OS and then kicking out the original creator from the app store. This destroys the creator / original company and basically transfers the idea's profits to Apple. Retail stores and Amazon do make knockoffs, but generally the original product is still sold alongside it. In many cases the branded product is superior to the generic product and many people will pay extra for it; in many other cases the brand also supplies the generic label product so that's beneficial for both parties.
To use real figures, Apple has 60% of the mobile operating system market in the US[1], and Google has 40%. Apple's App Store has 100% more revenue than Google's Play Store[2], and the two are responsible for over 99% of all mobile app sales in the US. Both Google and Apple dominate the mobile app payment market in the US, as well, since they both ban all other forms of app payments on their app stores.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...
In such a situation you would see a degradation of store product quality vs price. It might not be so clear with internet search because Google’s ascendence was coincident with innovation that it has hoovered up. But once you see competition restored, with things like the return of a Search API, or of more transparent ranking metrics, or of customizable ranking algorithms then you will begin to see what you are missing.
I’m assuming they are less than that with regards to the advertisement market (I’m not super familiar with the space, but as I understand Facebook is a huge player there as well).
The vast majority of web users have their eyes and attention directly guided by one of these [0]. If they decide you do not exist, then you will effectively cease existing for billions of people on the web because they do not know a web outside of Google/YouTube or the Facebook ecosystem.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
This is the wrong way to think about it. How much would _Google_ be willing to pay to maintain that position? Well, Mozilla's primary source of revenue, is afaik, from having Google as the default search engine, so at least that much, for whatever percent of the browser market-share.
If search wasn't profitable then ads in search and SEO wouldn't exist.
when you see brand-name products on a shelf at wal-mart beside their own-brand, it's because wal-mart has purchased that product and is re-selling it. wal-mart has taken the risk of buying the stock in the first place. brands still have a chance to succeed.
when a brand acts as a marketplace, they aren't taking on the risk. they're selling shelf space, not buying things to put on the shelves. when they participate in the marketplace as well as operating it, they are competing with their own customers. that's the behaviour that's essentially a recipe to destroy competition.
Goods on the shelf at stores in general are a mix of items on consignment, the vendor provided the goods and the vendor will be paid only if or when the goods sell; goods that were purchased on net-30 or net-N terms where the goods are delivered but not paid for until 30 (or N) days later; and also some goods that were purchased and paid for before delivery to the store (or store warehouse). Of course, even when the goods aren't on consignment, larger stores often negotiate favorable terms for unsold goods; typically the vendor must refund the store as well as pay for return shipping or disposal. A large amount of risk still falls to the vendor.
Anyway, store brands are fine, IMHO, but there's two things Amazon does that weird me out: a) in some categories they apparently have several store brands and it's not always clear it's an amazon brand, whereas Costco uses a single brand and most other stores use just a couple; b) there have been reports that Amazon will request supplier information from merchants of products that are selling well, and then Amazon goes to those suppliers and negotiates bulk purchases; it seems to me, that's making your merchants do all the work to discover items of interest and where to get them made and then Amazon swoops in and takes over.
I think my answer is yesno. It isn't about the action of making and selling the competing products, but about how the internet and FAANG scale changes the customer-business dynamics. Consider that when you browse wares in a physical store like Costco or Walmart, the selection is constrained to what can fit within a building, thus the absolute worthless garbage junk and knockoffs will be culled to make space for less return-prone items ( At Costco, I don't see 5 pages or aisles of identical products listed under different brands that are mechanically indistinguishable from 'kirkland signature' products). Costco also seems to care about counterfeits and whether or not something they sold was found to be bad (this has happened to me, a food item at costco was found to be the source of a few food poisoning cases and was traced back to a single item at costco, and costo went around calling everyone who had that batch on their purchase history to let them know). I've wound up with counterfeit pieces of junk off Amazon that I'm not going to go through the effort of refunding/returning/complaining about, so it's all slippage that AMZN gets away with. Returns and replacements are so fast at brick and mortar stores 5 miles away from home!
Retailers stick their neck out to put an item on the shelf because space is limited. The product is made. It's on the shelf. If it doesn't sell then someone loses money. If Equate brand sucks I can choose an alternative. If everything on the shelf sucks I can go to another store.
in no way is it a "monopoly." If you look at growth rates Amazon is slowing and others are gaining
not to mention the comparison is foolish to begin with as Amazon doesn't have physical locations. a better comparison is total amount of sales, in which Amazon isn't even the plurality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
> ...any chemical "substantially similar" to a controlled substance listed in Schedule I or II to be treated as if it were listed in Schedule I
Look at attempts to prelegislate things which do not really exist yet and you get utter embarrassments of law at best and at worst hamstring your nation by laws which assume that a TI graphing calculator has the potential to go rogue and start deliberately killing people.
doesn't even have to be regulation. these companies can do it in good faith but alas, life's not fair.
The only way in which your analogy could possibly apply is if you're saying Netflix is free to create its own mobile OS ecosystem where they can impose asymmetric rules and taxes on Apple TV. But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware.
The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.
That is an option for Netflix. If they made their own platform they could offer a more competitive price.
Apple was created in 1996. Netflix was made in 1997. Maybe a good strategy of having a dominant streaming platform in 202x would have been to launch a mobile platform. Netflix had the same chance as Apple to take that path, but they didn't. Apple can now capitalize on good moves that it made in the past. In chess you can't just recognize that you are in a bad position and then ask a tournament organizer if you can be reset into an equal position again. Either you continue playing that bad position, or you resign.
>But it's neither possible nor desirable for every app maker to create their own OS and perhaps even their own hardware.
If you have no choice but to charge more than your competitors and you can't justify the extra cost with extra features or whatever and people stop using your service and you go bankrupt then you have lost the game.
>The definition of "competitive" you seem to be using here is not useful.
It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.
It may be an option for Netflix. It may be an option for Facebook. But it's not an option for 99.999% of app makers and it would be bad for consumers. Very bad. Imagine you had to buy one device per service you're using. I don't want to buy a Netflix device to watch Netflix movies. This is just bonkers.
>It seems useful to me. It's the basis of what makes this game interesting.
No. It's more than just useless. It is a great demonstration of how every ideology becomes insanity if you take it to its extremes.
Then you will just have to live with being disadvantaged to a platform's creator when competing on their platform. They have the home field advantage.
>No. It's more than just useless. It is a great demonstration of how every ideology becomes insanity if you take it to its extremes.
You are the one making it extreme. If you think the strategic decision of developing your own mobile ecosystem is silly then there is always the option to not do it.
There is no rule in this game that it has to be profitable to release stuff on the app store. Apple could just decide one day that third party apps are a security and privacy problem and then remove them all leaving only Apple apps.
But you're wrong about me just having to live with being disadvantaged. Apple is built on top of a platform as well. It's called society. And society makes some rules that govern what advantages platform operators like Apple can enjoy as a benefit of having created a successful platform and what advantages are unfair and/or damaging for consumers. So we'll see about who has to live with what.
I never did that. Take for example the capture the flag game made. Some parts of maps are stronger for one team than the other. That doesn't mean the game is not competitive it just means that it is something you need to take in mind. What I described is a spot on the map where Apple has an advantage.
>But you're wrong about me just having to live with being disadvantaged. Apple is built on top of a platform as well. It's called society.
Sure, but it's with existing base ideas like freedom of association Apple can just not work with Netflix at all.
Anyway, Apple began in 1976, not 1996. And by '96 they had both an established hardware brand and decades more expertise than when Netflix launched.
This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well.
While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeeaaaaal hard time finding any way that this sort of thing harms consumers.
Amazon doesn’t work like a supermarket: a closer analogy would be a shopping mall also providing cash registers to the stores. Amazon doesn’t buy from the producers nor act as a distributor on most transactions. The risk is all externalized, and they face minimal penalty (no loss of shell space, no stocking risk) by having their product alongside the original one.
There's also a matter of the level of dominance that the platform has. Something like half of e-commerce takes place on Amazon; most online ads are via Google; and Apple literally invented the name "App Store".
As for consumer harm, when the market is manipulated to remove competition, we are all harmed. Not today, not directly, but every day after that.
I think that you'll find that most grocery retailers have nearly as large a monopoly inside their geographic area as Amazon does in the retail space.
The analogy seems spurious to me. Do brick and mortar retailers charge other brands for being a market-place ? Don't they actually buy products of other brands ?
Brick and mortar stores are dealers, Amazon is a broker. Dealers have inventories - they purchase items from the suppliers and resell them - if they misjudge demand, they're left off with useless goods. Brokers simply facilitate a transaction between two parties - there's no risk involved. The fact that brokers get to charge a higher mark-up than dealers is just bizarre
Everything is negotiable. If a retailer has more power than a supplier, then the retailer can demand a guaranteed sale clause in the contract, requiring the supplier to take back unsold goods and refund them.
https://www.comcapfactoring.com/blog/walmart-vendor-financin...
They tend to exist only where there is a huge asymmetry in power between retailer (usually large chains) and suppliers.
Anyways, large chains don't deal exclusively in consignment either.
I bet there are clauses in those agreements that state that the retailer should "make my brand of ketchup the first brand that customers see" and that they cater to that clause "for a small fee".
Joe's corner store and Walmart work differently, only one negotiates brand deals.
Looking at what’s happening now, Apple and Google are not under scrutiny because of our collective petitioning or votes, it’s solely because of competitors with deep enough pockets to duck it in court.
As a proof of that, there’s no one to fight Facebook so not much effectively changes on that front, despite all the outcry and editorials thrown at them.
Like the government?
If the government is not meeting the demands of the people, we elect a different one (in theory).
Because if you are only talking about opening a stand and selling your lemonade, then you don't have the same foothold as Apple, Google or Amazon.
Yes, this is the problem. Participating in the market they create is not. If that were true every grocery store that has a bakery, deli, or meat counter is a problem.
They are too big. Monopolistic forces are the problem.
Well, not sold in this case, but given away for free to increase the moat, then banned.
The Music app which now has a streaming service…
iTunes is not a subscription service like Spotify.
Why is it bad? Especially bad enough to be regulated by a new law?
Antitrust law doesn't come into effect just because something is bad in the abstract sense though, it comes into effect when there is harm to the consumer as a result (that's my understanding anyway). The harm here is due to the market distortion primarily (I would think).
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
And it's not exactly new. Common carrier regulations have been a thing forever.
Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge.
It's all very profitable.
If we cannot trust large companies to not abuse this kind of power, then they should be prevented by law from playing both sides. This may result in the breakup of some very large companies, akin to the 1934 Air Mail Act that broke up Boeing.