This is like Microsoft adding charts to Office, and then banning anyone from installing competing chart apps on Windows unless they pay a 30% tax. Or Ford voiding your entire warranty if you install aftermarket lights (this has been clearly ruled illegal).
The simple fact that these platforms started out with these anticompetitive restrictions (because they’re smart and play the long game) doesn’t change that these are active anticompetitive actions.
Saurik’s lawsuit highlighting Apple adding contractual restrictions, preventing App Store developers from publishing on Cydia, should be a slam dunk case.
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A perfectly legitimate example of bundling is Sherlock/Finder: Apple added a feature, Sherlock wasn't limited in any way.
An illegitimate example is Screen Time: when Apple added the feature, they went on a delisting spree banning any other parental control apps.
The zero marginal cost of digital goods and services makes it hard to judge fairness. It is difficult to make a cost based estimate of a platform tax; why a percentage and why 30%? Many use absolute profit as a simple heuristic to assess malfeasance.
Maybe I need to reread your piece again, but it seemed like you were focusing on the grey areas to the exclusion of clearly bad behavior. And missed mentioning some rather egregious (and illustrative) past examples, like "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".
Concentrating on the grey areas to make the point that it isn't all black and white is all very well, but the piece comes off as saying it is all just shades of grey and that nothing is ever clearly wrong except in retrospect after the wonks set policy.
You're also, I believe, making factual seeming statements about hyperbolic hypotheticals, like Yelp only wanting Google to show links to their site and never show any reviews or summaries inline with search results. Has anyone at Yelp actually said that?
Finally, you sort of missed a trick: Voice assistants and conversational interfaces provide far less 'room' for choices even compared to the constrained screen space of a smartphone.
If we ask for Chinese restaurants nearby, we just want an answer. We might want a qualifier appended if different data sources disagree, eg. "The Golden Garden Bistro is half a mile away on foot, and is rated 4.2 stars on Yelp, but only 2.5 stars by Google. They are pretty busy right now, and reservations are recommended. Do you want more information about this restaurant?".
Almost no-one is ever going to prefer "There are 15 results within one mile from here that are open right now, how do you want them sorted?", or "Two nearby places have current promotions you might be interested in.", or "Do you want them sorted by distance, sorted by price according to Yelp, sorted by overall popularity or how busy they currently are according to foot traffic data from Google, sorted by number of reviews from Yelp or Google, or sorted by average Yelp or Google review?".
Basically, having defaults will suck for competition, but anything that requires the user to make choices will also suck, like making the user be specific in their query, or having the assistant asking follow-up questions before giving answers. Making choices available but only if the user asks for them sucks differently as there is almost no 'surface area' for affordances.
So whatever policy decisions are made in these current cases after a couple of years of litigation, they may have to be revisited immediately, and the problem is going to get much harder because for many commercially valuable purposes people don't want a list of ten results, they just want an answer, and that makes the search engine a kingmaker.
Let them do as they please, but prevent acquisitions once they reach a certain dominance, and break them up once they exceed another level of dominance.
Of course breaking up a company is also a very messy, complicated and damaging process.
But companies would probably pre-empt a breakup by spinning of parts of their business and it may be still less harmful than the DoJ reviewing Gmail's roadmap, as Ben puts it.
If Google spun Youtube, Amazon spun AWS, Facebook spun Whatsapp and Apple spun Services, we would already be in a much healthier market without too much heavy damage.
> Another (simple, easy, maybe wrong) answer
because I realize that I may be wrong.
My goal was not to advocate for a specific solution, my goal was to bring another aspect to the discussion.
Beyond that it is quite easy to force car makers to create modular cars with parts that fit on any car. We create standards all of the time.
Each large nation could provide a team of experts and together they could draft a plan for a digital platform to run a government on. It might be able to run on mac, windows and linux, it might require some dedicated hardware.
If the standards are open and we can all develop add-ons for it I cant see any way for it to turn sour.
As for ways to turn sour, I'm afraid you're underestimating humans. We can't have nice things. (Ok, we can, we at least get some nice things with something like the square root of time... but we can't have all the nice things we could have had if we weren't so prone to defection)
Not to long ago in NL we had a paper form for everything. You would get a 100x photocopied document to fill out. They started with your name, then your address, your income, etc etc and then you had to provide evidence for each item. I managed to fail to produce the required information countless times. Usually the issue was that one had to fill out a similar form to obtain the proof ending in circular requirements or some misplaced document or form. Then it all had to be checked which replicated the same process behind the screen. I use to joke to them that asking me (the citizen) to gather information they already have is asking for me to make a mess from it. How do you tell I was the party who did it wrong with so much hand work? What if you get it wrong? Howmany new forms do I have to fill out with my name and my address and proof of address etc?
Today I get an email telling me to look at my inbox. I see what I'm entitled to, what bills I have to pay or it asks me to confirm something.
It works wonderfully compared to the way it use to work but the digital ID they provide cant be used by companies or other governments and a message in the inbox about a message in the other inbox is kinda wonky. Just give me an email address firmly tied to my real name. Legally binding emails. A place to socialize. A place to sell my private items and my professional products and services. Tie it into the tax system so that I do not every have to look at it. A place to list my resume and find employees. Hook my security cameras into the police system when I press the button. Alert me when me car starts moving without me in it. Give me encryption that only law enforcement can read. Make full product details available from my bank transaction history. Standardize the visum and immigration process. If I'm entitled to social support of some kind: put it in my bank account without asking me to do anything. If the social support obligates me to search for a job organize the job interviews. Make sure I can actually get there. Give me an agenda. Put API's on everything, let me code my own components if theirs doesn't do what I desire. Require the extensions to be modular or up to spec so that others can use it too or so that it can become part of the standard interface.
All the while making sure nothing or no one has access to data they don't need nor do things they shouldn't be doing with the data. (Delivering post or email requires only a key, no knowledge of the address)
Just be ambitious about it, make it work. I'm sure half the suggestions above raise serious questions that we can try to answer.
This is by far one of the most naive things I have read in a long, long time.
As for standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
The phones and apps are infinitely customizable, the dimensions though is user generated content. Instagrams have a standard “frame” but within that constraint (and benefiting from it) each subscriber can run free.
I actually agree that the unification of features in Google and FB is somehow wrong but, as the author says, it’s hard to draw a line dispassionately. I feel less so (also wrong but perhaps less so) about Apple, as they aren’t a majority in any market except perhaps tablets, and they make relatively few acquisitions. But because the line is so hard to draw this logic could be wrong too.
* my metaphor is probably out of date. please replace by whatever the bundle-du-jour may be. Happily use Facebook?
Edit: consistent for me would be to consistently be pro- or anti-bundling. If you have an argument for being pro-software-feature-bundling but anti-state-service-bundling, please make it.
> that this is a story for methodical and well-resourced on-going regulation, not slogans and breakups. It’s a story for legislation, much more than litigation.
When it comes to break-ups let's just focus on the biggest part i.e. Google and the way the ads market is run. The argument of Dina Srinivasan (on which Warren and the case leans) is of Google's integration of functions which exist in other financial brokered markets in competition and that healthy tension drives down prices there. Car and indicator or PC and word processors are not useful analogies here.
The letters and rules were written when Apple only had 5% of market shares, and Digital / Mobile economy isn't a necessity. Now that they are 50%+ and every things requires to work Digitally to compete especially during the pandemic, those rules just cant stay the same.
Unfortunately Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, as Jobs would probably have seen the problem. 30% on Spotify and Epic Games? Fine. But 30% of Educational / Teaching Streaming App?
