[Havoc]

>without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.

It's scary how true this is. Especially how it's only obvious in hindsight (to me at least). Yet clearly this was orchestrated.

In both Chrome & Androids case it's the non-free tie-in that's the catch. Either play store or DRM/codecs. hmm...who owns the biggest video site..ah right.

[Barrin92]

Amazon's anti-trust paradox by Lina Khan hit the nail on the head a few years ago. When anti-trust moved towards the chicago school logic of judging merely based on price rather than taking market structure and power into account, we really screwed ourselves over.

We've really only got ourselves to blame for elevating consumer satisfaction above all else and losing sight of the long term.

[ansmithz42]

Yes, the original definition of monopoly that created the Sherman act was all about control of the supply chain. In the late 1800s, the railroads pretty much controlled everything from the coal mine to the hotels at every station. Completed control of the supply chain, this is what Google, Facebook and Amazon are doing right now on the internet. A monopoly isn't about consumer it's about market control. We need to move off the "harm to the consumer" metric as it is in this case too slow to identify the problem.

[GoblinSlayer]

Errmm, why people say that monopolies don't harm the consumer? They always did, every time. How adblocking restriction in Chrome doesn't harm the consumer? And it's only the most recent example, history is littered with them.

[throwaway2048]

Especially when said monopolies actively manipulate consumer's perceptions of what a fair price is to begin with.

Witness the premium Intel put on 4+ core CPUs for ages, then suddenly when AMD picked up pace, they could deliver them at half or a third of the price...

[InvisibleCities]

Who is "we" in this scenario? Changes to antitrust legislation was largely foisted upon the public by financial oligarchs that used the new rules to cement their own wealth and power, and unfortunately for my great-grandchildren, I am not one of them.

[JamesBarney]

No it was the "Antitrust Paradox" by Bork who made a very compelling argument that at the time trust busting was too aggressive and we should focus not on the effect of monopolies on competitors but on consumers.

In the recent decide it might have swung too far in the other direction.

[dredmorbius]

Bork made the argument. But as with all ideologies, that was then embraced and, with the aid of monopoly-money billions (the real kind), reamplified throughout the "public" (monopoly-fed) discourse and corridors of policy definition (legislatures, regulators, academe). Jane Mayer's Dark Money tells much of that story.

Some who find themselves so embraced shun the contact. Bork reveled in it.

[taneq]

I've been complaining about Google Play Services ever since they started pushing it over Android's native APIs. It was one of the big early shots fired in the war to redefine "privacy" from "nobody collects data about you" to "Your Friend $Datacorp doesn't let anyone else get the data they collect about you."

[IshKebab]

I think the Google Play Services ploy was pretty obvious very early on - it started about when they stopped updating the AOSP apps (alarm, keyboard, etc.) and moved the GPS/IMU sensor fusion stuff into Play Services.