They replied to the comment which said this and wrote, "I see no downsides." I don’t see where they admitted to the downsides.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Plus, they have those angles covered by token "open" BS like Android allowing sideloading, despite having total dominance on far more crucial for consumers and the economy in general areas that their OS, leaving Apple to be targeted.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1043061/lobbying-expense...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277063/lobbying-expenses...
Please free yourself from going to bat for a company that wouldn't care if you lived or died.
>Please free yourself from going to bat for a company that wouldn't care if you lived or died.
I care if my prefered mobile OS were to allow any kind of crap. How about that? Mind blown?
Now the consumer can chose between more competitors.
If Google and YouTube were split up, I could see a future where both start competing for text and video search against each other. This competition would drive down ad rates across both platforms. It would also allow space for other competitors to come in.
In general; let's take that whole monopoly thing serious again, together with regulatory capture.
I'm no free market liberal, quite the contrary. But competition is *good* and we should have more competition between these huge companies that basically make a living from extracting rent.
You sound at least a little bit as though you understand markets, though!
With markets I see it similarly as with democracy; it's the best of all the bad options we have. Given the challenges ahead (demographic crisis, climate crisis, environmental crisis) we must have a dynamic and flexible system to accommodate the to be expected strains, if we want to continue existing as a global civilization.
But markets also have flaws, such as externalization of costs and oligopolies that skew the market through their influence.
We've seen this with Google, that has started as a brilliant search engine, providing a valuable service. Nowadays it attempts to make more and more money through rent taking instead. Instead of creating value, these oligopolies capture value, sometimes even through illegal means (see; no-poaching agreements).
I'm not sure why the situation would be any different with iOS. It seems to me that the app store would still utterly dominate even if it were exposed to competition.
Meta lost tens of billions in market value (and an estimated $10 billion a year in revenue) when the new Apple App Store privacy rules went into effect. That's a powerful incentive.
Also, Nintendo products and Fortnight both were in the App Store store.
It also gives them the opportunity to normalize per-megacorp app stores across the board instead of them always being a weird Android thing like they be if Meta opened an App Store on Android now.
Also running a third party store does not have to mean being able to break privacy protections. If the ecosystem relies on app inspections that much it simply needs to be secured better.
How do you secure something without inspection? We have health code inspections for restaurants, car safety and emissions inspections, IAEA inspectors visiting nuclear facilities… Should we throw all those out too? What replaces them, the goodwill and word of people?
Autocorrect and a lack of editing are a bad combo.
W^X pages are one of the most widespread sources of RCE bugs, and banning them by default is a good idea.
How likely is this when Apple aren't getting paid for apps any more? Who should pay for it?
Why hasn't Meta had any luck doing that on Android?
I think malware on your phone could easily cost you much more than 43% of all your mobile app purchases.
Paid applications on iOS are dirt cheap, so I think the argument that that isn’t paid for by end users but by developers has at least some merit.
I also think it’s more like 18% for the majority of paid applications nowadays (Apple’s cut is 15% for less well selling apps nowadays, and I think there are many, many of those), but that’s a bit of nitpicking.
No, V8 has almost total monopoly because countries are ignoring anti-competitive practices. The EU is doing something about Apple in this case, and it should look at Google too.
You say that as if Apple was a powerless victim with no money and no lawyers.
I'd argue Apple having to straight face Google's domination and doing something about it on the open (basically forcing regulation) would be a better outcome than letting them take iOS users in hostage forever.
Apple has never been big on the web.
Google has the world's most popular web properties which it has used to both push Chrome and sabotage competition.
That may be true today, but I don't think it was true during the early days of the iPhone, where Steve Jobs wanted no third-party native code running on the iPhone, only web apps that connect to third-party services.[1][2] It wasn't until lots of developer backlash and subsequent success of the App Store that they decided to de-prioritize the web.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
That was 2007. Can you show me how exactly Apple was big on the web in 2007?
> It wasn't until lots of developer backlash and subsequent success of the App Store that they decided to de-prioritize the web
They never de-prioritised the web. Implementing Chrome-only non-standards isn't what being big on the web means.
Open a list of most-visited websites and show me Apple properties on it.
At some point they had a new browser that they provided to windows as well and could have expanded way further. They could have made Safari a true alternative to IE, Chrome, Firefox. They didn't, it didn't make sense for them.
So yes, Apple isn't big on the web, but it's in part of their own doing. Safari not being a viable browser outside of the mac and iOS is nobody's fault except Apple.
On wether Apple can face Google...let's put it in perspective:
- can Apple face Facebook: sure, at one point they killed their stock value overnight through a single policy change on iOS
- can Apple face Microsoft: a long time ago no. Today they're showing Microsoft the middle finger when they're trying to let users stream games on Apple's platform.
- can Apple face the US government: welp, they sure do. We've seen nothing coming out from any trial or policy happening in the US.
So, can Apple face Google ? I kinda think they can, yes. They have the money, the lawyers, the lobbies and politicians in their pocket. If they really wanted to, they could probably force Google to change on any front they're competing on.
Facebook is destroyed I tell you, completely obliterated.
> they could probably force Google to change on any front they're competing on.
Is Apple competing with Google in:
- web search?
- user generated content (Youtube)?
- email?
- developer tools (GCP)?
Should we also ask if Google is competing in TV production business, luxury watch bands, or computer wheels ?
To get back to the original point, Apple has a browser, and the means to raise a case against Google being too dominant in the browser space. They'd have plenty evidence of Google interfering with the market if they'd go all in and were faced with unfair practices. They never did and probably don't intend to, because they kinda don't care as long as Google isn't threatening their walled garden.
That's where the "Apple is the only defense against V8" falls flat to me.
That is shifting the discussion.
> To get back to the original point, Apple has a browser, and the means to raise a case against Google being too dominant in the browser space.
Yes, they could
Let me quote from a familiar case: "Antitrust laws ensure one company doesn't control the market, deplete consumer choice, and inflate prices. Microsoft was accused of trying to create a monopoly that led to the collapse of rival Netscape by giving its browser software for free."
Even now there’s programmers only product testing in Chrome that makes some web services not work in anything but Chrome.
But otherwise yes, there probably are some special, advanced, use cases.
But in the bigger picture it's currently really the only thing keeping developers somewhat true to making cross-browser sites working for Firefox users, since the Firefox devs has a larger chance of keeping up with what works on ChromeEdge+Safari rather than keeping up with the ChromeEdge pace alone, do you really trust Google (and MS) not to abuse things if FF and Safari became irrelevant?
Let's not pretend that Safari's raison d'être is to protect consumers from Google's browser.
So WebKit, Blink/Chromium, and Gecko are the main ones to my knowledge.
Of course it won't, because Apple restricts it to run only on devices built by Apple.
They had a Safari for Windows many years ago, then killed it.
WebKit itself runs on Windows fine, Mac and Linux. Both Mac and Linux have browsers supported by the WebKit project (Safari and GNOME Web).
However the only Webkit based browser that matters is Safari and the only company pushing it is Apple and only on their hardware.
Google should've been hit with an antitrust case on Chrome years ago and their recent shenanigans with the topics api only make that more relevant, where now Google is playing gatekeeper to an already technically dubious system meant to put the spying on users directly into the browser (all because they couldn't solve the fact that the topics api still makes fingerprinting rather easy). Eliminating the "competition" that Google has artificially made needs to be done though because otherwise it's just not obviously visible.
V8 isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense, at all. Google gives away the source code to most of Chrome that allows other people to make browsers with it, and they do. Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly. Microsoft could choose to make a browser engine, but they don't, and it's not because V8 is a monopoly.
I believe that something being sufficiently popular does make it a monopoly in the antitrust sense - there's language around "market dominance" in there [0].
I'm just an MBA not a lawyer, though.
Mm.
With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?
At least in principle. I couldn't describe the specifics of such laws even if a lawyer helped me out.
There has to be a link. How does one influence the other?
I don't think "making sure that non-crappy web browsers exist" is enough.
If there were calls for V8 to be considered a monopoly, you’d first have to prove that there are viable competitors available and they were being harmed. And particularly — was that harm impacting consumers. Anti trust only gets involved when consumers are being harmed (usually though higher prices or lack of choice).
SpiderMonkey exists and is pretty viable for many use-cases. But, the open source nature of V8 makes it hard to argue that it was really a monopoly. If Google did anything anti-competitive in V8, other developers are free to fork it, revert the change, and distribute that version.
And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.
> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.
This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.
Yes but it also frequently ground to a halt trying to multitask tabs. Chrome didn't so we all switched to chrome.
If you have time to edit your comment: there’s a “not” missing (“not rhetorically”)
Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.
Correct. Antitrust is about monopolization. You can have a monopoly without monopolization, and you can do monopolization without having a monopoly.
For example, suppose there was a small maker of farm implements, Dirty Hoes, and that one of the stores that sold Dirty Hoes hoes was Sneed's Seed and Feed (formerly Chuck's).
Sneed's also sells hoes made by another small company in a small town in Suffolk County New York, Hoes of Babylon.
Dirty Hoes tells Sneed's that unless Sneed's stops selling Hoes of Babylon hoes Dirty Hoes will stop selling to Sneed's.
That could be an antitrust problem of Dirty Hoes, even though they aren't anywhere near having a monopoly, because it could be seen as attempted monopolization.
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In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up (kind of, Firefox had to give up on anything involving PWAs to do it and they take a large sum of money from the big G for putting their search engine as the default).
Similarly, just look at how many web RFCs amount to "this was implemented by Chrome and technically a Chrome fork is a second implementation, so it can be OK stamped", which has squeezed the market for third parties to be able to develop their own browser just by making the amount of "required" features so large nobody could meaningfully implement them.[0]
And then there's the utterly dismal state of the Android platform, where Google just uses their control over OEMs and the ROM to outright prevent anyone from easily replacing the System WebView (the browser Android uses to render stuff "in-apps", basically if you've ever used an app that seemingly opens external links without launching chrome, that's the System WebView) with a non-chrome engine (basically, Google lets OEMs specify a hash on what the System WebView should be - almost all mainstream OEMs lock it to the Google implementation -or Chrome Canary which is just the same fucking browser-, leaving the only option to circumvent it to be rooting, which has its own issues and limitations).
There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own. The Vanadium dev also stopped anyone from using his work in the future by setting his System WebView implementation to GPLv2-only to prevent folks from forking it), since nobody wants to bother.
Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
No - MS could too. They choose not to. Others could too, but it's not worth it. Either way, this is not a monopoly in the sense relevant to this discussion, as anyone can start a browser business and write from scratch, or use Chromium or Firefox as an enormous existing base on which to write a browser.
> There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own
If they lack the manpower to do something, but Chrome gives them with zero strings attached the core of itself, that's a good thing, not a bad one. Chromium enables browsers to be built that couldn't otherwise be.
> Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
Still though - competition over what? JS implementations? HTML rendering implementations? You're stating facts - in the most negative way possible - but without saying what you'd like to happen. If Chromium were never open sourced, would that be better?
Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users.
[1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.
Being on the standards board for "what browsers need to do", having the standards board under your thumb, and continually adding in requirements that only the highest spenders can afford to implement securely, that does indicate a monopoly.
Embrace (web standards), extend (with a billion features), extinguish (rival browser engines)
Also, there is no legal requirement to implement every single API that the standards body specifies. The point of having standards is to make sure that _if_ a browser maker decides to provide some functionality, then they can implement the standardised API rather than inventing their own.
This is a good thing in spite of the fact that it doesn't solve other problems related to market dominance.
What do you think google should do to avoid getting punished? What kind of action would you like to see from Google regarding the near monopoly of Chrome and Blink?
Right now, Chrome is compromised in terms of meaningful user privacy and user security because Googles bottom line largely relies on them not making those features as good as they can, while pretending they do. They can't just block 3rd party cookies to reduce tracking, it has to come with their Topics API so that Google can keep its ad monopoly (and that API consolidates Googles powers even more, especially considering the current implementation has Google playing literal gatekeeper over who can and can't use it instead of solving the privacy issue that the Topics API has).
For another example; WebManifest v3 was intended as a security update to the mess of v2... but it also conveniently takes a wrecking ball to adblockers (a major issue for Google the ad company) and guess what Google (the browser developer) is basically completely non-responsive about. They could respond to this and work out an actual solution, but the only thing they do is keep pushing back the permanent end date for V2 to avoid the bad PR.
Finally, as for avoiding punishment; Google could do all of the above and make an agreement (with legal consequences upon violation) that the Chrome team/subsidiary is wholly independent from the rest of Google when it comes to making executive decisions on where to take a browser. That way, they wouldn't have to break it off and can still take in the profits/fund the development of Chrome without it being compromised into serving Google.
That’s nice in theory, but historically, browser only companies haven’t been very successful in the market. No one wants to pay for a browser and monetizing one is a full of a big pool of dark patterns.
The most successful browser engines have always been those that we tied to another source of income, namely, the OS or search. Doesn’t Firefox still get the bulk of its funding from Google?
Even as a separate company, Chrome would be beholden to some external entity (likely Google search) for money, and that still carries with it the same risks as now, just formalized with contracts.
Would it, though? Paying to be the default search engine is not the same as controlling the whole stack.
Written from Firefox.
In a world where everybody uses Chromium, which is paid by surveillance capitalism.
I really don't know, but I could imagine a world where some people would pay for their browser (many would use the "community edition", probably), and where search engines would pay to be the default.
Google would probably still contribute to Chromium, they would just not directly have control over its governance. Maybe overall the web tech would move slower, but I don't think that would necessarily be bad.
Can't they still do that outside of the EU? Also, firefox funding is for their search business, so it's at least one level of indirection.
Next up in EU land: EU tells Google to open everything web related to its rivals :-D
IIRC most of the revenue is games, and most of game revenue is microtransactions. In this context, 43% (or whatever the lower number is that they announced a while back to reduce the heat) is just sending the same money to a greater evil.
As for "worse"… we already have cryptocurrency miners (leading to app store rules saying no to this because of the battery drain), and encryption-ransomware locking away all your data; financial fraud is only protected to the extent that it can be unwound, which means fraudsters in that domain look for things that can't be reversed.
If we do end up with a laissez-faire free-for-all — which is a possible scenario, but not a necessary one, it depends on the details of how alt-stores are done in practice — then you have to worry not just about your own device being malwared but also those of anyone nearby, because a hot mic in someone else's pocket can clone your voice, and there's already more than one demonstration of how wifi can be repurposed to function as a wall-penetrating radar.
Or this could read as: Apple mandating WebKit is the thing preventing Firefox (and others) from properly competing against v8.
But Chrome certainly would make huge inroads.
I think both WebKit and JSC have merits of their own and are installed by default, so I don’t think they are in existencial danger.
That said, since iOS is not a monopoly, I think Apple has the right to do whatever it wants with its platform and the security, privacy and battery life concerns are valid.
Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly, while WebKit itself has no chance of being a monopoly in the forseeable future, so I doubt there's a good anti-competitive case to be made for forcing Apple to stop doing this. It would only accelerate the monopolisation of the browser market if this happened. It would be good for consumers in the short term to allow v8 on iOS but I deeply distrust Google.
Breaking the App Store monopoly there is a much stronger case for. There is a security argument for the app store, which I would accept were it not for Apple adding 43% to the purchase price of most paid applications, which is much worse for the end user than the average piece of malware. Not to mention the expenses it imposes on developers, like requiring them to maintain a subscription and buy Apple hardware.