[tinus_hn]

You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone.

Phones have become an important generic computing platform, which is why in different jurisdictions there’s political action to force Apple to loosen control. That wouldn’t be happening if it was so obviously illegal monopoly abuse because then it wouldn’t be necessary. Yet it apparently is.

[arrosenberg]

Its not “obviously” monopoly abuse by virtue of the fact that the antitrust laws have not been updated to account for modern markets and technologies. Beyond that, its not hard to distinguish between Nintendo, a company that makes consoles and video games (and has several larger competitors); and Apple, a vertically integrated empire who controls a big chunk of the global communication and entertainment markets and does not have significant competition (just cartel-style competitors).

[tinus_hn]

Apple controls slightly less than 20% of the global smartphone market and has been bypassed by Samsung in market share. It’s just ridiculous to claim they do not have significant competition, they have less than 20% while that other over 80% is all Android.

Even in their biggest market, the US, they barely pass 50% and the rest is all one very successful competitor. Pretty significant competition.

[arrosenberg]

The global smartphone market is irrelevant, since the majority of global non-Apple purchases are cheap, one-time hardware purchases with low margin and no long tail revenue. Apple absolutely dominates the market in revenue (~65%) generated on those devices (which is recurring and high margin). They control the only roads that matter, and they only have 1 real competitor in Android. That's not a competitive market by any metric I am aware of.

Additionally, they have and continue to enforce regulatory authority on their platforms, which is the role of government, not a private company. It's anticompetitive for a massive private enterprise like Apple (or Google) to arbitrarily use its' distribution platform to control the economic fortunes of the companies built on that platform.

[tinus_hn]

They have a real competitor, yet it’s not a competitive market.

Remember how Microsoft had 95% market share and how they were actively and overtly abusing that position to embrace, extend and extinguish any threats? Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere. The worst they got was the EU forcing them to put up Windows without Windows Media Player, which then got bought by nobody, and the browser choice pop-up they got rid of after a few years.

If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.

[arrosenberg]

> They have a real competitor, yet it’s not a competitive market.

Yes, that's completely consistent with the Brandeis view of antitrust. Cartels are not a competitive market.

> Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere.

Not facts. It resulted in a successful prosecution by the Clinton DOJ, and Microsoft was ordered to breakup in 2000. The company appealed (dragging past the election) and it was settled by the Bush DOJ, which obviously resulted in weaker policies since the Bush lawyers subscribed to the Borkist view of antitrust.

> If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.

Guess we will see. Seems to already be happening based on the defensive moves these companies are making in response to more aggressive regulators, but I agree new laws would help move things along. I didn't "somehow" inflate it. I looked at the recurring revenue streams from the app store instead of device sales, because app store revenue is a massive stream of profit, and devices are low-margin commodities.

[jefftk]

> You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

DDG does track how you interact with their search results and search ads, same as Google.

[tinus_hn]

DDG does not set a cookie that identifies you and as such has absolutely no way to have your ads or anything else be influenced by what you searched for earlier or what results you clicked on, outside of the single page you get when you search.

Check it for yourself using your favorite browsers developer console, there are no cookies, unless you set preferences and if so, the cookie is a very short string that indicates your preferences and is obvious not usable as a user id.

What they do is log what is searched for and what results and ads are clicked and that is not tied to you. Because they don’t have a concept of ‘you’, only of that one search.

And that is definitely not ‘same as Google’, Google automatically sets a user identifying cookie once you open the homepage, tries all kinds of tricks to tie this user id to your Google account and tracks anything you do to that account and remembers it forever. That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks. Even if you clear your cookies. That’s Google tracking you. DuckDuckGo does not do that.

And it is really unfair to just accuse them of being ‘same as Google’. They are not same as Google, obviously they are not perfect but they do make the sacrifices while still making it work without tracking everything you do.

[jefftk]

Good point on the cookies!

> That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks.

I don't think that's right? If you search for things about cars and then click through to a page about cars you'll get tagged with all sorts of advertising cookies, same as if you did that with any other search engine. But I'm pretty sure just searching for something on Google won't affect either (a) what ads you see on future Google searches or (b) what ads you see on non-Google pages around the web.

(Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google, though not search ads.)

[SV_BubbleTime]

> That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

Interesting example. I found that their service is definitely going downhill.

I’ve been using them almost since they came on the scene. in the past two months I have had to double check search results against Google, where as I expected the results are far superior.

In the previous years I’ve almost never had to double check a result.

So, I don’t know about the future of Apple at all, but I hope the quality stays higher than your example.