[ferguess_k]

Yes, it's all about control. Control the platform. Control the access to the platform, and the world is your oyster. And the political and legislation system are their friends. It is the establishment.

The only way to fight is to indoctrinate the next generation, at home, and in school, to use FOSS. People tend to stick to whatever they used in childhood. We the software engineers should volunteer in giving speeches to students about this. It is much easier to sell ideologies to younger people when they are rebellious to the institutions.

[wiz21c]

I agree with you. But you do realize that it's been like that since about 20 years now. It started because of Microsoft (proprietary software), then Google (propriteary platform), now ChatGPT (proprietary knowledge).

And I tried to tell my kids. And it failed mostly.

But in the long run (a decade), what is exceptional and proprietary will become common FOSS. And everybody will benefit.

[ferguess_k]

I envision this as an ideology. We don't need every kid to follow it, and I don't expect the majority to follow. A 1-2% is good enough. That's why giving speeches to teenages might be the best bang for the buck. There are always kids who need to escape into some cool ideas and it could be the idea of FOSS.

[Workaccount2]

Really its probably the dumbass judge that told Google "The apple app store isn't anti-competitive because they don't allow any competitors on their platform" when google asked why the play store was ruled a monopoly and the app store wasn't.

I cannot think of a more detached and idiotic ruling than that.

[viktorcode]

The US anti trust legislation punishes the abuse of monopoly power, not being monopoly in itself. Google was found guilty in leveraging their dominating position on the platform to do just that.

On the other hand in the US Apple's App Store was not found to be a monopoly in the first place. Different cases about abusing dominating position also didn't go far.

[Gunax]

Hmm, having read that, I am starting to sympathize with Google if they are going to be punished for being open.

No one seems to care that Apple has never allowed freedom on their devices. Even the comments here don't seem to mention it. Google was at least open for a while.

Or maybe no one mentions it just because the closed iPhone is a fait accompli at this point.

[neuralRiot]

Perhaps because Apple never “promised” to be open, Google instead built itself by playing the good guy and started to switch when money called so those who chose them for that reason feel betrayed.

[ferguess_k]

I guess they are going to say whatever to prove the case. The legislation system is highly...closed and shun of laymen.

[tenuousemphasis]

It's the JUDGE that came up with that reasoning.

[xxpor]

Because that's the law, like it or not. Apple doesn't have a problem because the rules were the rules from day 1. Google did a bait and switch, legally.

[AnthonyMouse]

What does antitrust law have to do with "day 1"? So if Ford and GM are both already in all 50 states and then they try to divide up territory between them, that's illegal, but at the point when there were still areas one of them wasn't in, they could publicly announce a contractual agreement to not enter into the other's territory? That seems not just questionable but actively bad policy with an enormous perverse incentive.

And if you're going to say this:

> Because that's the law, like it or not.

I would ask you to point me to the text in the statute requiring the courts to do that.

[ferguess_k]

Yeah it's the judge.

[saturnite]

I think you missed the point that judges aren't part of the legislative branch. They're in the judicial branch.

[ferguess_k]

Please allow me to correct my bad English and replace it with "the law circle".

[Spivak]

But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive. You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product. Then your anticompetitive behavior can only be evaluated externally. But if you open yourself up to internal competition with other phone vendors, other stores, and then you flex your other business units (gapps) to force those other vendors to favor you then you're in big trouble.

[chii]

> But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive

That's just stupid, because being anti-competitive is an emergent outcome, rather than anything specific.

Apple is definitely anti-competitive, but they exploited such a ruling so that they can skirt it. Owning a platform that no other entrants are allowed is anti-competitive - whether you're small or large. It's only when you're large that you should become a target to purge via anti-competitive laws. This allows small players to grow, but always face the threat of purging - this makes them wary of trying to take advantage too much, which results in better consumer outcomes.

[amne]

That's like Karcher opening a megamall to sell all their offering, vacuums, pressure washers, floor washers, you name it .. and then you, Bosch, complaining you can't sell your vacuum in Karcher's megamall where all the people go.

What are you even saying?

Whereas google was letting Bosch sell vacuums in their megamall, but only if it uses Google dust filters and people buy only Google made dust filters and Bosch isn't allowed to sell their own dust filters in the megamall.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's like a company buying all the land within a 100 mile radius and then nominally "selling" plots to people but with terms of service attached that restrict what you can do with the land you bought and that allow the company to change the terms at any time. And then, after people have moved in, most of them having not even read the terms or realized it wasn't an ordinary sale, they start enforcing the terms against competitors. Which most people don't notice because they aren't competitors, and because the terms also prohibited anyone in the city from telling people what's going on[1]. Then people eventually notice and start to ask whether terms locking out competitors like that are an antitrust violation, and someone says that they're not because the people there agreed to them.

[1] https://som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-01/DTH-Apple-n...

But how is an agreement prohibiting people from patronizing competitors not an antitrust violation? It's not a matter of who agreed to it, it's matter of what they're requiring you to agree to.

[astafrig]

> nominally "selling" plots to people but with terms of service attached that restrict what you can do with the land you bought and that allow the company to change the terms at any time.

So, a lease.

[chii]

> Karcher opening a megamall to sell all their offering

And their mall is monopolistic if it is only for Karcher products. However, because a competitor can easily open a mall next door, it means this Karcher mall is small, and so the enforcers should leave it be. Until the day Karcher buys up all the mall space, in which case, they (regulators) start purging their mall monopoly.

The threat of being purged because you've acquired a large enough monopoly should _always_ be there. It's part of doing business in a fair environment.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product.

How is this not even more anti-competitive?

It's fine to be mad at Google for being duplicitous, but treachery is in the nature of false advertising or breach of contract. Antitrust is something else.

"You can monopolize the market as long as you commit to it from the start" seems like the text of the law a supervillain would be trying pass in order to destroy the world.

[Spivak]

You can't monopolize a market where there is no market. Nintendo can be anticompetitive in the wider games industry, but there is no market for software that runs on a Switch.

I didn't say I liked the ruling, just that it's correct. The opposite conclusion would be absurd, that you can invent a market where there isn't one and claim a company has a monopoly over it. You would be asking the court to declare that every computing device is a de facto marketplace for software that could run on it and that you can't privilege any specific software vendor. I would love if that were true but you can hopefully agree that such a thing would be a huge stretch legally.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can't monopolize a market where there is no market. The opposite conclusion would be absurd, that you can invent a market where there isn't one and claim a company has a monopoly over it.

There is no such thing as "there is no market". There is always a market. The question is, what's in the market? The typical strategy is to do the opposite -- have Nintendo claim that they're competing with Sony and Microsoft in the same market to try to claim that it isn't a monopoly.

But then the question is, are they the same market? So to take some traditional examples, third party software that could run on MS-DOS could also run on non-Microsoft flavors of DOS. OS/2 could run software for Windows. The various POSIX-compliant versions of Unix and Linux could run the same software as one another. Samsung phones can run the same apps as Pixel phones. Which puts these things in the same market as each other, because they're actually substitutes, even though they're made by different companies.

Conversely, you can't run iOS apps on Android or get iOS apps from Google Play or vice versa. It's not because they're different companies -- both of them could support both if they wanted to -- it's that they choose not to and choices have consequences.

If you intentionally avoid competing in the same market as another company then you're not competing in the same market as that company and the absurdity is trying to have it both ways by doing that and then still wanting to claim them as a competitor.

[Spivak]

You avoided the important part, there is no market for hardware that can play Nintendo Switch games and there is no market for software providers on Nintendo Switch. And they are legally allowed to do that. You can sell appliances that are bound to a single vendor and you are allowed to not license your hardware or software to 3rd parties.

Since that is a legally permissible action it would be an odd thing for a court to declare that doing such a thing is anticompetitive. If they did they would be declaring all locked down hardware effectively illegal. And while that might be nice it's a bit of a pipedream. Where Google fucked up is that they did license their software to 3rd parties—good for them. But then Google had some regrets and didn't like the fact that they didn't have control over those 3rd parties. But they did have some leverage in the form of Google Play and GSM because users expect it to be there on every Android phone. And then they used that leverage. That's the fuckup. They used Google Play and GSM access to make 3rd parties preinstall Chrome and kill 3rd party Android forks. They used anticompetitive practices on their competitors—other Android device manufacturers.

This situation can't occur for Apple or Nintendo because there aren't other iOS/Switch device manufacturers and they don't have to allow them to exist. They can be anticompetitive for other reasons but not this.

[sylos]

So basically you're saying we're fucked. People don't care about FOSS in general, let alone when their phone says it's dangerous.

[johnnyanmac]

If peopele cared about privacy as much as politics pretends they do, we'd have solved so many problems in society.

Fortunately, those fighting, albeit a minority, have done great work in protecting this. No reason to stop now.

[ferguess_k]

Yeah we are fucked, but as long as a small percentage of us, like 1% of the population knows, understands and agrees with the idea I think we are fine.

[eth0up]

We'll have to initiate solid self defense protocol though. I think the first thing we should do is get a new logical fallacy term officially coined.

Stallman/StallManned Abusing the principles of the Slippery Slope to discredit perfectly rational predictions

[fithisux]

Really difficult because you need to have two devices.

One mandated be the establishment and one mandated by visions and freedom.

But it would be a great start.

On my work laptop I am mandated to use Windows 11 but I run (and when I have time) I develop FOSS.

[motbus3]

Imagine needing to agree with a TOS that can lock you out of your phone when they change/add some random new policy