”The complaint claims that the means used to effectuate the non-compete agreement included; (1) Google would share it's search profits with Apple; (2) Apple would give preferential treatment to Google for all Apple devices; (3) regular secret meetings between the executives of both companies; (4) annual multi-billion-dollar payments by Google to Apple not to compete in the search business; (5) suppression of the competition of smaller competitors and foreclosing competitors from the search market; (6) acquiring actual and potential competitors.”
Except for #6, this is literally “Google pays Apple to be the default search provider.”
The alternative option seems to be that Apple is for some reason required to use their position to enter the search market.
I’m guessing the issue is because there isn’t a lot of merit in saying Apple and Google are totally stitched up when the options change by region and for the plaintiff there are at least 4 additional options other than Google.
EG Ecosia is a recent entry, so it does seem that Apple does look into this and introduce new options that can serve their audience size with sufficient quality results. Getting included seems more about making a unique and useful product.
Other than downloading another web browser which features more fine tuning options for web browsing, one can also download safari extensions that increase the search capability in both mobile/desktop safari. One such extension is called xSearch, which presents the familiar idea of using shortcut terms to direct search queries to any number of custom configurable search providers. The share sheet extension also extends this into other apps, and similarly because it uses the standard URL scheme, it can push queries into entirely different apps other than Safari for the search to take place. (eg search this text in the Twitter app.)
Only Startpage uses Google, to my knowledge, as there isn’t an API you can enable to start getting Google’s search results (without entering into talks with their sales / exec team). Bing does, though, and that’s why Brave and DuckDuckGo use Bing under the hood a lot.
I've been using hyperweb for a couple of months now. Absolutely outstanding app -- it has completely transformed my mobile web experience. Custom ad blocking filters, automatically opening reddit links in Narwhal, custom css so I can browse HN with a dark theme... I kind of look at it as a single app that turns Safari into a slightly shittier Firefox. And since Apple has neutered browsers on iOS, this is absolutely as good as it gets.
Tab groups might do this since one of them is private browsing. If groups aren't isolated, implying they are by putting private browsing in there would be a huge UX fail.
I believe private browsing tabs in Safari have been isolated to some extent for a while already — if you sign into something in one tab, you aren't signed in in the other tab, suggesting separate cookies.
Some non-default browsers (e.g., Snowhaze, Firefox) support adding new search engines. However, if you highlight and "look up" a word on-page, the search link will always take you to the OS-default search engine.
Please tell me how ( I don't want the extension ).
I go to preferences -> search. Then to 'Default search engine', which gives me a combo which gives me Google/Bing/eBay/Wikipedia. But I can not add anything to the combo.
Further down, there is 'One-Click Search Engines' which contain the same options. No button to add one. Below is a 'Find more search engines' link which leads me to the plugins page.
Not op, but if you go to kagi.com and look in the search bar (edit: Firefox's own built in search bar) you'll see a little green plus over the magnifying glass. Click it and you'll see an option to add it to the search engine list.
Just to add to this, in firefox, you can use the extension "Add custom search engine"[1] and you can add any search engine to your firefox search engine list, and to the address bar.
Another benefit of using this, you can access your saved preferences while searching from the address bar. DDG, Startpage, Kagi all give you a bookmarklet URL which you can add through this extension.
I don't know why you get downvotes, this is true, at least for iOS. There's no way a user can add a new search engine, they can only choose one of the five choices.
Apple hates any sort of technical customization in their mass-market products. They always have, and keep stripping them down to the most dumbed-down settings screens they can figure out while still allowing the bare necessities (which they apparently don't consider adding an alternative search engine to be).
I don't like this approach, but it is very consistent in their products, features tend to disappear over time and new ones only pop up if they're very sexy and can be announced on-stage.
I’m sure Apple’s world-renowned UX team can innovate a way to allow new search engines to be added w/o bricking your phone. I’d rather have that than lack if real, capital-laden competition in search.
I’m not sure they can: adding “one more feature” here and there quickly overrides anything a UX team can do to prevent 10s of thousands of confused complaints and returned phones.
For example, my family member is a smart woman and I used to teach professionally. I haven’t yet found a way to teach her what a web browser is and isn’t.
This is relevant to the things she wants to get done (e.g. shortcuts don’t run in webview, gmail’s native app doesn’t support recipient groups but the web app does, etc)
After warmup, examples, Socratic questioning, task assignments, checking understanding and testing (with detailed feedback), it seems she approximately learns what a web browser is and when she is and isn’t in one, but then she doesn’t really understand it a couple days later.
She’s otherwise as clever and capable as everybody else or rather more clever.
At Apple’s scale, every added feature to a web browser adds thousands of clever people quitting in confusion.
That’s why they hide things like search engine selection under menus an average user will never see, even if accidentally pressing 37 not-quite-randomly wrong things during a session.
We here have the curse of expertise.
The best Apple UX can do for the majority of the population is say no to features more often than yes, and to hide deep under the hood any setting that persists after the device is restarted and could lead to confused angry consumers that can’t figure out what to do and don’t have nearby family members to solve it before they quit.
It is likely more that the Safari team anticipates non-scrupulous companies taking advantage of an option to add a default search engine inline. Things like modal prompting and site-specified explanatory text are exploited these days.
Likely the best bet would be a web extension manifest value to expose a potential search engine. That would mean on iOS that you still need to publish an app for your search engine option to show up.
Well, well. I just realized. I think that apple sets by default that IOS Safari can't use location services without going into settings. Which for a really significant chunk (majority?) of iphone users mean that any web app using location services is "broken"[1]. Which of course means that for those folks web apps are not a thing, but they go and buy an app in the app store. Well played. (#ssholes.)
[1] Due to circumstances, I have needed to demo a certain location web app to quite a few people. I am not exaggerating.
Safari is not privileged in terms of location access [1], so the user both has to let Safari have access to location information and let Safari share that location information with a site.
If the user rejected Safari's access to location, sites also will also not get location data. However, Safari has asked me for access the first time on several phone installs, so I believe Safari not having location services is still a user choosing to limit platform access at some point during setup or on demand in Safari.
Unfortunately the public often does not trust even the platform vendor with location access. I somewhat blame Google for leading the public narrative to that point - but it is admittedly a very easy topic to fearmonger about.
(Said as someone who often has to restore location access to Apple and Google maps on family members' phones as part of troubleshooting issues)
I don't agree entirely. I'm able to control my privacy settings to an, for an Android user's standpoint, absurd level of detail. In addition I can fiddle with so many settings hidden and tucked away quite nicely on my iPhone.
In addition, I'm only able to shut down JavaScript in Safari - and more, while not being able to do so in Firefox Focus. Options like that are counter-intuitive if you ask me.
This argument is very convenient for any options that are against them. But if they're so consistent, than I wouldn't be able to control my privacy settings to such a degree, because it'll confuse users and can be just as annoying if set incorrectly.
One incentive for them doing this is that they have to provide support and if they let everyone use random search engines that deliver malware etc. They end up having to pay their "geniuses" more to un-crud peoples infested machines.
No, you don't have to use Safari, which is limited to eight search engines. You can use Firefox, which allows more search engines. Yes, its renderer is the same, but it is different software, and this isn't a thread about the renderer.
I (and I imagine a lot of sysadmin/MSP types) don't care about grouping tabs as much as to be able to log into the same site with multiple login IDs at the same time.
I have eight options available to me in mobile safari other than using bookmarks to use any search engine that exists.
It is easy to conceive of reasons why a company would not want to enable native UI elements to rely on external services without having vetted those services or established a relationship with them for recourse in the event of issues. It is harder--though not impossible--to conceive of ways to avoid these issues.
If I add an arbitrary default search engine via URL, and that search engine is later compromised or serves up garbage or malware, that's a problem for Apple, even though we'd all like to believe we're above-average users who wouldn't blame Apple for our own choices.
That doesn't make sense. Why would someone who knows how to find a different search engine, change the setting be part of the group of people who are new or otherwise clueless?
I have to assume you're not trolling, and really can't conceive of an entire large category of people who might, in response to a Facebook post, follow step-by-step instructions to change their default search engine without understanding the ramifications thereof, or how to change it back.
There are more people in that category than in the category of people who change their default search engine for good reason, knowing that it may deliver a less-optimal experience than Google under some circumstances.
Interacting with humans has shown me many, many examples of people who can follow steps written by a marketer to push their nonsense without any clue of how to reverse the process.
What doesn't make sense is believing that every human being is always intelligent and rational and never forgets anything.
They'd be doing it because Shmaleksandr O'Kogan built a Google wrapper with a cool This Is Your Digital Life feature. After Cambridge Analytica, it's pretty hard to believe that user opt-in is an effective defense against data privacy scandals.
I've often assumed HN is brigaded by some of the larger corporations. Whenever there is a negative article about google, the comment sections seem to fill with glowing reviews and whataboutsisms. During the Roku Google battle, the comment sections were chock full of the same critique of rokue over and over again. It seemed fairly obvious there.
Yea, I have no idea what the reasons are, that could totally be a factor. It's not a super high-quality commenter community, but the vote patterns are more bizarre than a lot of decidedly lower-quality fora, so there are clearly other factors.
But, the revenue Apple get from the deal/trust with Google is better than MSFT or Yahoo ever got by competing with them. It's also easy, risk free and pure profit. So, the deal essentially ensures that Apple will not compete.
Apple now also have an interest in maintaining their (alleged) trust. It's now in both parties interest to maintain Google's dominance of the space. It's also in both their interest to have a large ad market. Competition is not necessarily head-2-head. If Apple couldn't make money by funneling user to Google, they might prefer to just suppress ads. I'm sure if they asked users, users would want that. "Phone with fewer ads, ad-related tracking, etc.) is a potential selling point.
IANAL, and more to the point, I dislike both legal framework around antitrust and the intellectual framework implied by much of it. There's just a lot more to monopoly than either take into account.
Such deals are, IMO, evidence that monopoly^ in general is to the detriment of competition, innovation, churn and other such positive market outcomes. I also think more monopoly is concerning on "free culture" grounds, it perculates to politics/government, etc. Lets leave those aside though.
Apple & Google themselves were only able to innovate and prosper because monopolies did not yet control the microcomputer or the web. App stores, OTOH...
I'd imagine at some point depriving sites of revenue will lead to adversarial outcomes where many if not all will simply refuse to load. So if ad blockers become mainstream it will be interesting change to the web.
I was quite shocked when I discovered that some people with deep pockets think of ads as product information. Their behavior is entirely the opposite of ours. They click on all of them and buy stuff just to be sure they are not missing out. I on the other hand click 1 banner per year and I click search ads if I'm searching for that specific product. If I block ads on all pages except search (where I use them) google would benefit greatly. My clicks per impression would go up. Bids would follow.
At least some ad views have to convert to sales or companies would have long ago given up on the advertising medium.
It is hard to imagine someone who went through the age of Flash-based ads not looking at all injected advertisements with a sense of utter scorn, though. The split between content provider and advertising marketplace otherwise seems to mean that both consider the end user to only be valued in terms of their eyeballs.
I suspect it is because for some people, the advertisements actually are on-point and represent things they might be interested in.
I still find direct advertisement arrangements - such as temporarily co-branding a gaming site with a launching game, having a podcast talk about sponsors' products - to be much more on point.
I'm not sure I believe that. People with deep pockets (unless they got that way via inheritance, winning the lottery, etc) typically got that way by being smart about money, not FOMO.
They also attempt to summarize information when you do a system-level or browser-bar search. When the search shows me the local weather or a flight status or gives me a summary and direct link to Wikipedia as I type, they are taking that engagement from Google.
What Apple hasn't shown interest in so far is being a general-purpose internet search engine.
The alternative option seems to be that Apple is for some reason required to use their position to enter the search market.
Why is that the alternative? No one is saying Apple have to provide their own search engine; people are suggesting Mac products should give the user a clear choice.
A much more obvious alternative is that Apple (or any OS provider for that matter) shouldn't be able to sell the default search engine option on their products to the highest bidder without making it easy to change. When Microsoft lost their IE law suit they added a simple set of options to Windows as part of setup to pick a browser. Apple could do the same for search engines.
You could read the current situation as Apple using their position as the only provider of Mac OS software to make $20bn/year by refusing to give users a choice of search provider. It doesn't really matter that the search is a separate company - the issue is lack of choice that distorts the market in favor of two companies (Apple and Google) rather than consumers. That's bait for anti-trust lawyers.
That would be a very clear anti-trust violation where they would be abusing position in the OS market to influence their position in the search market.
I hope it is, because the alternative is that they're being allowed to get away with something that's against the law, bad for the free market, and anti-consumer.
So you're saying the only reason that Chrome isn't more dominant is that some consumers cannot use it because of Apple and somehow that's a good thing? If iOS users would switch to Chrome if given the chance, isn't that a sign that they are currently worse off?
No, iOS users can already use Chrome, they just can't use Blink. The difference is whether Google can leverage their developer base to drive people to Chrome without having to provide a superior product to the consumer. Today developers have to support WebKit to get iOS users, instead of just throwing Safari users a popup that says "fuck you, download Chrome" like they do on desktop. I think it's at least arguable that many would prefer to do that than continue to support WebKit.
> If iOS users would switch to Chrome if given the chance
They already have the option to switch to Chrome on iOS. It's not like most iOS users know that Chrome on iOS is just a re-skinned Safari. They would use Chrome if Safari was insufficient for their needs or Chrome had some compelling feature they wanted. I have Chrome installed on my phone but it's so I can use the password manager, but I still prefer to use Safari as my browser.
Almost any time anyone brings up accusations of anticompetitive behavior against Apple for the iOS ecosystem, notice that what they’re saying is “in order to make the smartphone market more competitive and give customers more choice, Apple should be forced to make their smartphone offerings less distinguishable from Android, the only other smartphone ecosystem.”
If more like chrome means more openness and choices for the public than who cares if it is like chrome or not like chrome.
If Apple decided there next phone would have no screen or phone it would automatically make it a better choice because it is so much more different from android? I don't buy that line of thinking.
> If more like chrome means more openness and choices for the public than who cares if it is like chrome or not like chrome.
Because it will make iPhones worse for a huge number of iPhone users. You might say “I don’t care if you’re less satisfied with your iPhone because you now have ‘more choice’ according to my limited definition.” But Apple presumably actually cares about how satisfied people are with their iPhones.
Probably because it’s not bad for consumers, for one thing. They’re also “getting away with” using their position in the OS market to influence their position in…every feature of their hardware and software.
Anti-trust law is not simple. In the case of MSFT and IE they were accused under the protects of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act[1] of using their monopoly position (Windows) to reduce consumer choice (bundling IE without letting users pick a different option). In the case of Apple and Google, it's more likely to fall under the Clayton Antitrust Act[2] as it's a matter of corporations collaborating to reduce consumer choice (but I am not a lawyer, and not even American, so I could be waaaay off the mark here.)
> That only applies when you dealing with markets with an absence of competition.
This is incorrect. From the FTC[1]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
> Except, as we keep being told by Apple fans here, that's not enough because Apple's OS isn't the most popular one.
Even that deflection is incorrect. When it comes to the mobile market in the US, Apple has over 60% of the market, and Google has the rest. When it comes to the mobile app distribution market, they're responsible for 100% more sales than Google is, and both companies make up that entire market.
In the US, Apple is the most used mobile and mobile app provider. And even if they weren't, they have a duopoly with Google in a dozen or more markets.
a) Apple has had their own search engine for years now. It powers Safari Suggestions.
b) They don't have an option to change it.
c) If they were to extend its use for all searches then I can't imagine there would be an issue. And if there was it would likely be across the entire mobile search industry.
It only allows, on my phone anyways, google bing yahoo and DuckDuckGo. I’m not sure if this changes with region but I don’t see Yandex or Baidu or a few other less popular ones. So why doesn’t apple just allow any engine? So yes it is easy to change for a few select engines. If you jailbreak you can add others.
> people are suggesting Mac products should give the user a clear choice.
People can suggest all they want. Apple doesn't have to take that suggestion. Apple doesn't have to give you the ability to add search engines period. They give 5 choices currently from what I have read. They can also take money for making one of those the default. None of that is illegal.
> "Google pays Apple to be the default search provider"
If that is the case they might not act anti-competetive but, rumours are [0] Apple received up to $20Bn per year in this deal. It is hard to believe that this payment is just for being the default search engine. I strongly suspect that Apple also agrees to not build their own search engine as long as this deal is on - and if that is the case, there will be a strong foundation for an anti-competetive lawsuit.
> It is hard to believe that this payment is just for being the default search engine. I strongly suspect that Apple also agrees to not build their own search engine as long as this deal is on
In practical terms, if Apple launched a search engine that wasn’t the default, would it see much uptake? It seems to me that Google don’t need an agreement for that.
This is Apple we’re talking about. That search engine would be a skunkworks project for several years and rapidly become the default soon after release.
Presumably, what Google gets out of this is the assurance that no such skunkworks project exists.
I'm assuming the agreement would not cover skunkworks projects as this would be clearly deemed anti-competitive (collusion) if that deal ever saw the light of day. Even a deal of not launching a product might be deemed as such. But I assume you can't really launch a search engine without a couple of years of user feedback, i.e. tracking what links get clicked and which not, to influence the ranking. And that would require an official launch from Apple, which would probably result in Google to terminate the agreement immediately on launch (even if it is not made the default search engine). So even without written/verbal agreement in that field, Apple knows that the minute they publicly launch a search engine, the deal is off. I think such a deal would fall into the tacit collusion category [0].
The FAANGs did obviously illegal collision on hiring before. Don't see why they wouldn't do so on other stuff. Probably have learned their lesson to not E-mail about it too.
No, but building a search engine doesn't happen overnight. They could launch it, and after 2-3 years of user feedback and testing, make the default configuration switch and cancelling the contract with Google.
I think it's very possible that the payment is just for being the default search engine. Because one alternative is that Apple picks another company to be the default search engine. And suddenly Google has lost the most affluent group of consumers and has gained a major competitor. They would pay almost any amount to prevent that from happening.
I don't think Apple would want to make itself the default. That would just invite all kinds of regulatory scrutiny, and would conflict with their pro privacy image. Why bother when they can squeeze Google and get paid billions with no work?
To add, I can see them arguing in court "Hey, if someone offers us say $21 billion, we'll start an auction between them and Google to see who offers us more. Obviously being the default search on iOS is worth billions."
> I don't think Apple would want to make itself the default. That would just invite all kinds of regulatory scrutiny, and would conflict with their pro privacy image.
They did it for other markets where they do compete - maps most notably.
Maps was different, I believe. Google wanted substantial concessions from Apple for them to continue using Google Maps (and to build out new features like turn-by-turn navigation), Apple balked, and Apple Maps was born.
My understanding was this happened during contract renewal for Apple's access to Google Maps and YouTube. This was back when Apple wrote the apps and had them preinstalled.
For Maps specifically, Google wanted Apple to
- push users to log into their Google account
- sharing location data upstream to Google
Supposedly, Google had withheld new feature access from Apple until they got location data reported upstream - turn by turn and vector tiles in particular hurt, as their absence made maps have a limited feature set and use significantly more bandwidth.
The buzz at the time made it sound like Google was still in negotiations when Apple announced at WWDC that they would be using their own maps. They were pretty much blindsided - one of the reasons it took a while before a Google Maps app actually launched for iOS.
Apple likely just decided to launch the product early. The quality of that early launch and how it was handled publicly (along with other internal disputes) is supposedly why Forstall was shown the door.
The first part of what you said lines up with my memories of that era. As for the negotiations, the scuttlebutt at the time was that Apple was worried negotiations with Google would break down, as tensions were already rising between the two, since there was some animosity over Eric Schmidt possibly using his knowledge of Apple's product roadmap (he was a member of Apple's board at the time) to help Android. Since the contract ended at the end of the calendar year, it would potentially leave Apple with a non-functional maps app; since Apple didn't (and still doesn't, although they're getting better about this) like to ship big feature updates outside of major OS releases, it was either release their own mapping service before it was fully-cooked or give in to Google's demands.
Because it is not $20B, but $10 / $12B. The range was partly confirmed during a trial where Google mentioned their percentage of profits paying to Apple as being default search engine.
Thanks to analyst and Macrumors continue to pump out and report BS the internet has never educated people on any issues. Although I dont doubt this could be the usual Apple PR play when they intend to negotiate a new deal with Google. As they have done so in the past 5-10 years with Qualcomm, Broadcom, Google, Intel etc.
To add some useful information to HN readers, Google has been paying roughly $10 per user to Apple for the past 8 years. So the growth of Google Default Search Engine placement has been growing steadily with Apple's active user. This exclude regions which does not use Google as Default Search Engine.
Unless there are dramatic changes in Google traffic accusation cost in their Quarterly report or going to make a change in 2022 ( Which I am not aware of ), that rumour is completely baseless.
Well the $12-10Bn are confirmed due to court documents, so assuming it grew in 2022 is not that wrong. What are a couple of billions here and there anyway :)
If I remember correctly the notion of Google Sharing Ad revenue with Apple came from Oracle in a trial and was never proven. Not to mention the number dont add up from 2014 - 2019. We will see how this play out once we have Google's number from quarterly report.
“Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues”
iOS users reportedly are bringing in above average ad revenues. So, I do not rule out they’re worth $30 billion of that. If so, “up to $20 billion” could be a reasonable deal for Google. It still brings in loads of memory and deprives the competition (e.g. Microsoft) from those valuable ad targets.
If that really is $20 billion, it also seems Google is willing to give Apple a cut of over (or at least about) 30% of the revenues they make on iOS, though. Would that make an argument for Apple in their disputes over their 30% cut on app revenues?
> $20B. It is hard to believe that this payment is just for being the default search engine.
Well ask yourself what the value of this placement is? Google earns about $200 per user, mostly in ad revenue. If Google search wasn't default, they'd probably lose half the users.
There are 1 billion iPhone users. At $200 each, Google stands to loose $200b. So a price tag of $20b to keep that...
At 10 cents per ad print, that’s only 2000 impressions, around 6 per day. Certainly sounds in the higher side of feasible. If the deal is for $20B, break even is a tenth that though, so there’s a lot of margin for error while still claiming enormous financial benefits.
It's a number that I thought should be in about the right ballpark. The point wasn't to be on the mark, it was to be explicit enough about the estimate that would be easy for somebody to correct me if it was wrong. Which, it turns out, I was: looking around some more, it's closer to 1c per impression. That said, it's still easily in the ballpark of what would be a net positive.
True, and iPhones are also more common in wealthier people. Worked on a Project once where our target audience was medical doctors in Germany, and we had >50% iOS users on based our user-agent metrics.
Curious how you accurately got that figure knowing how draconic Germans are on protecting their privacy, I highly doubt they're cool with knowing that as doctors they're being tracked for some app targeting.
But yeah, anecdotally, just from visiting their practices, I also noticed most doctors in Austria tend to be in the Apple ecosystem for private use, but their practices and the clinics tend to be Windows.
Collecting the user agent string is one of the most basic forms of web analytics. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "targeting" or violating privacy in any way, so it's strange that you brought it up in such a way.
I always sort of hoped that Apple would either enter the market at some point or acquire DuckDuckGo and try to build out to a larger user base. I realise this is pretty unrealistic, as I'm sure there are far more people out there who would much prefer DDG to remain independent of a megacorp.
I assumed the reason Apple haven't entered the market is that there's likely no way to make money at it without becoming Google, so it would cause them to have two diametrically opposed privacy stances in their business (and because they'd have a long road to build a worthy competitor).
From Kagi's FAQ:
"Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers."
So, apparently Kagi is scraping Google and Bing results via a browser extension. Is this legal ?
My interpretation of this is they pay for API access and sends anonymised queries to Google and/or Bing.
I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing.
Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
Anonymized request means that the client's IP is not passed to the server. Since both search engine have a paid search results API, it is enough to simply proxy the API request to achieve this claim.
Kagi is both paying Google for API access and using Google infrastructure (GCP), helping Google make revenue that is not ad-supported.
I have stored some result pages in Joplin and will try to post some comparisons soon, but lunchbreak is over so not until later today - at earliest ;-)
But basically the results are good and if I don't immediately get exactly what I want one pair of doublequotes around a key phrase sorts the rest.
I've been using kagi after requesting an invite, which is something I usually don't even bother doing. Mostly because I'm extremely disappointed by queries not matching my search terms in all major engines - so I have essentially nowhere else to go.
It's ok so far. Looking at only search (ignoring the "lenses" and listicle-like content) I cannot say it's objectively better than using searx with filtering. At least not dramatically better that I would notice. It is however much better in returning results that actually contain my search terms.
For 600$ a year, it would need to offer full-text regex search and/or exact logical operators with controllable approximation (agrep-style).
I would instantly pay 5/mo$ already though, as long as it stays BS free, and doesn't use past search results to refine further queries. Search bubble is an issue in every single service where this is being used, and I'd like my search engine to be totally exempt from it, and/or have exact control over it.
> The alternative option seems to be that Apple is for some reason required to use their position to enter the search market.
Well, another alternative option is that Apple is forbidden from charging for being included in the list of search providers (as default or otherwise), they can't be pay-to-play, they can pick whatever providers they want they just can't charge for it, so they have to make decisions based on something other than who pays them the most.
Which, now that I think about it, doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world actually... but I really don't think US law requires it.
that "effectuate the non-compete agreement" is doing some work, it would be one thing if Google said to Apple, we want your guarantee that you will not be entering the search engine market and in return we will give you this - then it is a non-compete agreement - but as it is it is a default search engine agreement.
No idea what (3) regular secret meetings between the executives of both companies; means - but it sure sounds realllly bad and nefarious!
In a competitive market where they are not allowed to accept these sorts of payments from Google it would seem natural for them to enter the search market. They may choose not to and that's fine, users would be no worse off then they are now.
all that says is: Google have the money and power to buy people out. Thats business 101, nothing new. Yeah it sucks but if you don't agree with it stop using google and apple products.
I've always found this fight for search choice on iOS to be bad for Apple. If they had to give a choice for search engine on setup or make it easy to switch the default, 99.99% of people would still choose Google and Apple would lose $BB. I agree that Google results have gotten worse over the last 5 years or so but we have to remember that they aren't optimizing for usefulness, they are optimizing for profit.
The putative class they're suing to represent is apparently "All consumers and businesses who paid Google to place advertising on Google search in the United States since January 1, 2005."
I think the basic argument is "Apple might have created a competing search engine business, but Google paid them not to, which hurt people buying Google ads because competition would imply those Google ads may have been cheaper, therefore Apple and Google need to pay the better part of a trillion dollars to these customers and then be broken up into smaller companies."
US antitrust law right now basically operates on the principle that the only time anything is illegal is if it hurts consumer prices.
So that probably explains the convoluted cause of action, in that the only legal way to challenge it is probably with a weird convoluted cause of action like that, because it has to come back to consumer prices somehow to have a chance in court.
Google (or anyone) can have a monopoly and engage in anticompetitive practices, it's only illegal if you can show it hurt consumer prices.
The law didn't always work that way and doesn't need to, but that's more or less how it is now.
> I think the basic argument is "Apple might have created a competing search engine business, but Google paid them not to
That's the feeling I got. I mean if this was the case, then Apple could be sued by Google for extortion - "pay us or we'll build a competitor". This lawsuit makes no sense.
AIUI in US competition law price is the only consideration, so this is smart. It will hinge on whether or not Apple had any concrete plans to build a search engine, and if their abandonment of it can be linked to the deal with Google.
Which is to say it is a tall order and might not succeed. But if it does.. goodness, what a hit they'll take.
So the assumption is that Apple would run Ads against search?
There is a good chance that if Apple did have a search engine it would be Ad free, which might still depress prices of Google ads, but it would also decrease effectiveness of those ads.
I doubt it. Alphabet generates $175B+ in Ad revenue yearly and Apples always looking for ways to increase stock value. Apple recently introduced ways to scan while depersonalizing your data which implies it would be easier to read and serve ads to users over it. Not to mention that they can afford the development time and have the userbase and consumer loyalty necessary to build and launch a competitor to Google.
Going into the search AD business would significantly hurt one of the iPhone's most significant selling factors, privacy. Because at the end of the day "Apple makes money by selling overpriced hardware, not by selling your data." The moment that changes trust will be much harder to keep.
They use Google Ads: I Googled "crane schools in california" and one of the results was an ad for California Crane School. Apparently they think that they are paying too much on those ads: "The complaint alleges that advertising rates are higher than rates would be in a competitive system".
They're entirely correct. Google and Apple operate as a cartel.
If the web experience wasn't 90% Google (outside of social media), and the phone experience wasn't 50% Apple / 50% Google, everything would be cheaper due to competition.
Just look at the percentages app developers pay. In a free market with five alternatives, there probably wouldn't even be an app store. We'd do native app downloads over the web and invest a ton of energy into security and privacy controls.
> We'd do native app downloads over the web and invest a ton of energy into security and privacy controls.
This has been demonstrated to be false. This scenario is exactly what we used to have in the windows PC era and no one invested "a ton of energy into security and privacy controls".
That unfulfilled need is exactly what propelled Apple to the #1 spot when it came to the mobile era.
> That unfulfilled need is exactly what propelled Apple to the #1 spot when it came to the mobile era.
iPod is what propelled Apple to the #1 spot. They had a significant lead on touch, cool brand, music, luxury, and slick UI. It has nothing to do with their app store or software distribution model or other such "nerdy" topics that most consumers aren't even aware of.
the part of my web experience that Google is responsible is exceedingly inexpensive and I have a hard time understanding how competition could reduce the price I pay. Economies of scale don't work in favor of competition unfortunately.
The phone market isn't 50% Google unless you count Samsung as a subsidiary of it. Nor does the existence of Apple help me, the consumer, since they obviously don't compete on price.
Would more competition actually drive advertising rates down?
Buyers don't have the option to buy from just one supplier. They want to reach everybody in their niche. Thus, they have to buy from every supplier and cannot negotiate the price down. If they leave, a competitor will take those clients and pay whatever those users are worth.
Yes. This is necessary, because US anti-trust law is grounded in consumer harm. It's not enough to say "hey, these two companies are colluding;" if a suit is to be brought, it has to be of the form "These two companies are colluding and as a result I'm getting screwed."
The whole structure of antitrust regulation is, by negligence or design, weird and weak.
#1 Why does there need to be a plaintiff? A trust affects consumers and society broadly detrimentally, not some specific competitor. The competitor google is likely trying to suppress is some theoretical startup anyway, they probably don't exist to sue.
#2 Why the focus on specific damages? The specific harm of such a trust are inherently unknowable.
The Google-Apple deal isn't new, and has been widely reported on. Google pays more to apple than 2nd place (MST/YAHOO) has ever delivered in topline revenue. Apple can (a)take pure profit with no effort or risk, (b)build a competing business with much worse best-case prospects, or (c) leave room in the market for someone else to try. It's not really a choice.
Meanwhile, Google's largest investments (eg chrome, android) are just an insourced version of the Apple-Google trust. Monopolistic deals and strategies aren't a side-show, they're the primary activity of these companies.
To me, it's increasingly obvious that monopoly issues are structural. It's not what Google/Apple do, it's what they are. Dealing with antitrust in an infraction->lawsuit manner, post facto, is a designed to fail structure.
IMO there are two choices, besides just accepting the prevalence of monopolies, cartels & trusts. (1) They can be broken up. (2) They can become "regulated monopolies," with a regulatory structure designed to prevent monopolistic harms before they happen. Yes, it will harm their profitability.
The questions you are asking are fundamental to the legal system - they are not specific to antitrust laws.
All cases must have standing (a damaged party) and must demonstrate damage.
This is first year law stuff. Without these requirements, anyone could sue anyone for all sorts of made up baloney - and the suits themselves would be the punitive.
I don't want to speak for anyone, but I think the idea is more akin to conspiracy to commit murder or something. Maybe driving while intoxicated?
The target of the murder shouldn't have to be murdered for there to be some grounds for a lawsuit. Similarly, you might arrest someone for driving while intoxicated even though they haven't done any actual damage to person or property.
Along these lines, I think the idea is that someone shouldn't have to show specific demonstrable harms that have already occurred in cases of antitrust.
It's a gray area but it seems like with some things, harm should be implied or something to be avoided?
Because so far, no-one (within the US legal system) has come up with a formulation for "monopoly" and "market" that does not have
(a) unpleasant side effects for businesses that would normally not be considered monopolists
(b) a system that is easily gamed by businesses that are trying to monopolise a market.
Not saying it can't be done, just that it seems to be fairly hard.
the "market" seems to be betting that these monopolies will persist more or less exactly as they are (see eg the 3 trillion apple valuation that is really an unfathomable number unless you condition that basically the entire US economy will be co-controlled by those entities)
so it seems to me that disastrously bad regulation has created self-sustaining monsters. which market worshiping politician would dare burst that multi trn-bubble?
I don't think this is even worthy of being reported on. There is a high likelihood of this being thrown out in summary judgement. You can't claim something without at least some facts that indicates that Apple was going to build a search engine and the payments made by Google made Apple stop development. My guess is this is more of a PR stunt than a real lawsuit.
Summary judgment motions come after the discovery process (the expensive process that often leads to tech companies' dirty little secrets reaching the light of day). If the dollar figure is right, the companies would probably try to settle before summary judgment.
A motion to dismiss, on the other hand, is a pre-discovery mechanism to dismiss claims. These are relatively cheap (by large company standards). I think there's a decent chance this case gets bounced on an MTD.
If it gets past the MTD and into discovery, there's probably an early settlement where the lawyers get paid off.
I have always found it problematic that on mobile safari you cannot change search providers. They have a small list to choose from (bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, google). but no way to add anything else. You have to jailbreak the device just to add a different search provider. This seems anticompetitive IMO.
> China has screwed up a lot with the messaging behind their regulations on tech companies, but the spirit of promoting competition from them was good.
This is an article about allegations of anti-competitive behavior, and China has just spent a year enacting many new rules to foster competition among their tech companies.
In many areas they went too far, and their approach to enacting the rules led to mass, unnecessary fear, but the spirit behind a lot of the changes was good. e.g. Alibaba can't ban links to competitors within their social apps.
Apple does not allow use of custom search engines, unless you pay to get on their list, or consumer has to go through hoops with extensions.
Do I need to draw more lines to make the dots connect for you?
I know nobody asked me, but personally I think your POV is right. I was listening to this podcast the other day about just this and the impression I got was "Wow, this may be good for the average Chinese person", I'm talking exclusively about the drive to enhance protections for citizens.
It's narrated by an Asian-American guy, the article is written by a Chinese guy called Ren Yi.
I only learned a few things about China, so I'm uneducated on the matter, but I think we underestimate how massive their rural population is, and how huge the rift is between the rich and poor, but like I said, I'm uneducated on the matter.
I think it's not a bad thing if China adopts EU style protections from big companies for citizens. I don't see the problem with that. If I understood correctly, the avg CN citizen is racked with debt, schools are borderline torturous, can barely afford a home, a lot of the water is leaded, the land is contaminated, mothers can't trust the domestic baby formula or anything really, huge sexism issue for women, rape is common, theft is common, scams are everywhere and a million other issues, it reminds you of the avg US citizen and their million other issues. Imagine if the avg CN citizen ends up living a healthier life than the avg US citizen, despite the huge head-start, now that would be really sad, because it would shine a light on how stagnant life is for the avg US person.
Yes, I'm no fan of China's authoritarian nature, but the rules they are enacting must be judged on their own merits. And frankly, many of them are appropriate and coming from the perspective of increasing competition.
Basic economics implies that increased competition is good for the consumer.
The place where china really misstepped was doing everything suddenly and abruptly, which sparked tons of fear and scared investor capital away from their companies.
This part is a bad outcome due to increased cost of financing/debt for their companies, less competitive on engineer comp due to lowered share price and so on.
They could have done the same regulations but with much more forward notice and detailed their thinking rather than handing down abrupt decrees
It seems the dissenters here aren't able to separate the art from the artist. It's not a view I can respect, but one I can understand.
Here's a hint, whether a regulation passes through a democratic process or through authoritarian decree, it's the same rule at the end of the day, and should be judged on its own merits.
Everybody dissenting here has provided no rebuke or detailed response, just seemingly uninformed quips. I'd rather hold discussion to a higher standard of objectivity, personally
The government of China does not want non state-owned companies to become so large and powerful that they can push back against the government. They don't want any institution powerful enough to push back - not a religion, not a publisher, not a political movement, not a business. All of those have faced breakups and shutdowns for years.
The humorous version.[1]
The network effect is so strong in some areas that you tend to end up with a monopoly or near-monopoly. This isn't good for either a communist or a capitalist society.
The US tends toward oligopoly. Three big banks, three big cell phone companies, three big drugstore chains, four big meat packers. In tech, the magic number seems to be two. Two big search engines, two big smartphone platforms, two big desktop systems, two big auction providers, two big social networks.
The “article” is a PR release written by the plaintiff’s firm for release. By all means, read the complaint and discuss the case. But keep that in mind as to the link.
I cannot get over how much moaning and whinging people on HN do about supposedly not being able to choose their search-engine on iOS "without jail-breaking" their device when simply switching to another browser like iCab Mobile means they can choose absolutely any search engine they want in addition to the 25 that are included by default.
For goodness sake do the minimum amount of research before squealing helplessly about needing to jailbreak your device.
Defaults matter, and defaults encode the behavioral choices of like 80% of users. The downstream effects of this are that the default options have the most support. Its totally rational to complain about a bad default option.
I highly doubt that, since it would imply 99% of users are using Samsung Internet on Samsung devices rather than Chrome, which doesn't seem to be true. If iOS users are largely using Safari, it's because Safari is actually a good enough browser that it isn't worth switching.
Defaults do matter, I agree, and it's also ok to complain about any given default option if one thinks it's a bad option.
That doesn't make it ok to lie and mislead people in the process of making that complaint, though. It's very very easy to change the default search engine setting in iOS. It's about as easy as Apple could possibly make it. To allege otherwise, or to state that "jail-breaking" is somehow required, is simply a lie.
On the other hand, I did change the default iOS browser easily. However, it would have been annoying to have a list of hundreds of options to choose from rather than the major ones.
Ha! You're complaining about HNers while also being one?
You missing a crucial point here. Using an alternative browser on iOS is not actually that helpful. Nine-times out of ten, I use spotlight (swiping down from the home screen) to type search queries because it's much faster than entering an app. This will always use the built-in search provider. Secondly, I use siri to do quick lookups, "search for ravioli recipe" which also uses default search provider. Any context menu like "Lookup" or "Search on X" uses the built-in provider.
A blanket statement such as yours suppresses ideas. Let people talk... isn't that why HN exists.
I for one think allowing the ability to add a custom search is a no-brainer and I think this deal may be a real reason why it doesn't exist. It's so easy to add this that it seems real shady it doesn't exist...
Just a reminder here folks that anyone can sue for anything. That doesn't mean that evidence will show any of the claims are true, but it will be interesting to follow and see what evidence they claim to have. Note Google is now incorporated in Delaware so it does seem that venue may be an issue.
A lawsuit would need to progress to discovery in order to get emails. It is more likely it would be dismissed before then, and then my guess is some right-wing group will claim a conspiracy because of it.
> Just a reminder here folks that anyone can sue for anything.
California Crane School Inc seem to be a provider of training for crane operators, so I'm curious why they're suing Google over this particular allegation. I wonder: is there any possibility that they're a proxy for some other party or parties?
Slighlty off topic but has anyone else noticed the following trend on HN recently?
Post == Article Critical of Google
Top Comment === Plays down the severity of said criticism
The upvotes don't seem to have much correlation between the post title and the comments. I wonder is such behavior caused by certain UI features on this site/app, or are comments graded differently?
The top comment on HN for any given topic is usually contrarian. It's in our cultural DNA. Perhaps the effect is intensified for some topics like tech giants — I haven't noticed — but keep an eye out and you'll see it happening everywhere.
I have a hazy memory of even seeing this effect on HN given a proper name at some point in the past.
As to why, I think it's largely cultural or found in personality traits that techies and hackers often have. Most us techies have a desire to "well, actually", even if we know it's rude and have learned to suppress or positively channel that urge. But at the end of the day, by proving something wrong, however pedantic, we get to prove we're smart. That's why the percentage of pedantry is probably higher on here and Wikipedia than on TikTok and Snapchat.
does this mean hners prefer expressing their opinion by picking apart strawman arguments? It's certainly one way to start a conversation. "I'm going to upvote this article because it gives me a chance to debunk the argument."
In my opinion Apple is already in the search business. At least Siri prevents a regular web search if Siri found the webpage I was looking for. It offers me directly the link to the page in the suggestions.
Instant answers are provided by Apple, but when search answers are provided these are Google. Apple needs to still crawl to provide instant answers.
Statement from Apple in 2017 when they switched to Google from Bing:
> Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari.
Right, so when I type something into the Safari search bar on iOS, it gives me Apple-sourced suggestions from the web, even though I have "Search Engine Suggestions" turned off (because I don't want my URL typing history leaking to a search engine).
That qualifies as "already in the search business" IMO.
> That qualifies as "already in the search business" IMO.
Well they are definitely in the search business anyway, as >20% of Apple's annual revenue is from search.
It's just that all the revenue apple makes from search comes directly from Google in the form of a $20bn payment, and Google powers almost all their actual web searches (i.e. not instant suggestions), so I think it's hardly an independent 'search business' and more of a 'search partnership with Google'.
I'm honestly not seeing the difference you're drawing between "web searches" and "instant suggestions".
If I type some characters into a search box, and the phone displays the title and domain of a website that it thinks I might be looking for, that counts as a "web search" to me. iOS Safari does that using an Apple-powered web index.
The difference is the index size and generality for me - for instance I can search "lkasdjfai" in Google and it will show me the one time that someone once said that on Flickr.
Siri only needs to return a result when it thinks its got a worthwhile result to show, it won't search all documents to find the phrase I want (and returns nothing if I search lkasdjfai, and falls back to Google results). It never even says "siri found no matches for lkasdjfai".
I can't use Siri to search for my cousin for instance (I just tried) but with Google he comes up straight away.
So for me, a web search is when you are searching any arbitrary phrase and bringing back results for any query, where instant suggestions is an optional response when you think you have a good result.
Though collusion between two tech giants is obviously distasteful and anticompetitive, how is this ultimately addressed? Sure, governments could force Google and Apple to break into smaller entities...but as long as humans still largely choose the best software, there will still be network effects that lead to dominant players emerging. In turn, there will be new giants.
So...either there are general paradigms/regulations/principles to apply, or we'll simply return to this state repeatedly, no?
Returning to this state repeatedly, aka a cyclic system, isn't all that bad, if it means we ultimately don't exceed the current threshold.
IMHO the collective furor necessary to drive development in the space (eg, Google and Apple both maintain whole web browsers) is necessarily weakly-coordinated at scale and will probably always inevitably cue this sort of thing to rise up.
Would Apple be a monopoly if they did enter the 'search' business? Google at least can leave Android free, and people that ship it able to customize as well as customers able to switch search providers. Apple would have a very vertically integrated stack, and would they allow anyone else making a phone equal access?
While not perfect, MicroG [1] + Aurora [2] on LineageOS [3] is good enough to get by without Google Play. I've got every app I need running on it, and haven't run into any major issues.
You do not understand how it is not free: It's sold to OEMs in exchange for control of their devices and mandatory placements. In countries who have working antitrust law, Google now charges OEMs for Play Services access per device, where they cannot legally force the OEM to default to Chrome and Google Search. And you, as the consumer, pay for it with literally all of your privacy.
really? What cost? Is that public information? My understanding was that play services was no longer part of Android core because Google didn't want phone manufacturers mucking with it (creating an inconsistent and frankly worse experience on some devices), not because they were trying to charge a fee for it.
They're all an oligopoly. Together, they monopolized government and reserve bank money printers.
It's a scheme, people take loans to buy Apple shares, then future generations will take even bigger loans to buy Apple shares from the previous people for 10x the price, then repeat ad infinitum. They don't even need to do any productive work anymore. Just busy-work, like Bitcoin is doing using ASIC miners to burn electricity.
I used to think this way too but recent cases against the iPhones App Store have shown that some courts are willing to look at the iPhone as one market.
What that means is that Apple entering search doesn’t by default make them a monopoly nor anti-competitive. But if they then change iPhones to only support “Apple Search” with no option to change that default, then Apple could be liable for claims including abuse of monopoly.
DDG+Apple user here, in the past days there were several threads on poor/SEO-spammed search results on Google and DDG. Unfortunately DDG is not really better in avoiding SEO spam than Google, so another competitor (even if its Apple) might be beneficial to everyone. Especially since google does not really have broad competition. Another poster correctly commented on why Google's results have become so bad: "Google is not making money by presenting you with the best result, it is making money by keeping you searching".
Apple is a monopoly in tech just like Louis Vuitton is a monopoly in luggage, so no. Okay, maybe for US it's Samsonite but for the rest of the world Apple is more like Louis Vuitton - a premium brand that is one of the leaders in design that everyone else follows. Just being popular in some circles doesn't change the fact that they hold a minority share in the market. Maybe people in Orange County might believe that Louis Vuitton is a monopoly but it's not.
Apple do control the reach of search engines to their customers in a similar manner of LV might choose to allow Cartier sell bracelets in their shops instead designing and selling their own bracelets. The point is, people can always go to Chanel if that arrangement doesn't fit them.
At worst, it could be a situation where the clients of a company are not happy with the recent products and they need to start buying from another shop.
I don't see how regulators should intervene in this. If not happy, go buy Samsung or Google pixel.
Apple has 60% of the mobile market in the US[1], and more than double the revenue from their dominant stake in the mobile app distribution market than Google[2], both off which make up over 99% of that market.
Also, our layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[3]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process.
I would say, Apple is very popular in the US but I don't see how it can be a monopoly when you can just order another device from Amazon and that device being just good or maybe better. In many other rich countries, people are choosing Samsung, Americans can do that too if they want.
ok the discussion is about if Apple is a monopoly by the legal definition, if we followed your prescription it would mean we would be unable to have this discussion.
One of the most important discussions in tech has to do with what companies are monopolies, in essence you are saying Hacker News cannot have this important discussion!
I can't really comment more on this idea as I feel I would be compelled to violate HN guidelines.
We can have that discussion, fiction is a popular genre and I don't see why we can't have a lawsuit fiction. Just don't confuse it with reality.
Anyway, I don't like to pretend that we are in a court. Law is simply a system that countries find useful to deal with issues and it is its own thing that not always just and can change over time and need specialisation for doing correctly.
Just remember, Alan Turing was lawfully castrated back in the 50s. Let's not pretend that the lawful process is analogous to justice, it's simply a rules system where actors are executing the rules based on the available information and cannot be performed when rules, actors or information is missing.
Even if we were judges, how are we supposed to execute the legal process without collecting the necessary data, have the claims and defences? Therefore, the legal definition is irrelevant and it's actually wrecking the discussion by pushing it to a position where we don't have the tools to work on.
That's just it; I don't think you can speak of a monopoly as long as you have a reasonable choice. Which, in the US, you DON'T have for a lot of things like internet.
> As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process.
I would love to make this argument the next time vaccines are mentioned. Remember vaccines cause autism and turn the frogs gay. Any attempt to correct this using medical jargon or methods is literally out of scope for the average hacker news commenter and should be avoided.
For legal process we need to have Apple, Google and others provide us with their documents and arguments - which is not happening. We can't even have well educated guess as these things need cooperating parties or enforcement power to obtain.
On the other hand, when discussing vaccines and viruses there are numerous research in the open that we can use to build on. Any use of correct medical jargon or methods is fine as it is not a protected information. Of course you can misunderstand it but you can also understand it properly since the research and data is in the open.
Discussing what's just based on information and observations we have is like discussing vaccines and viruses based on the research and observations we have access to.
Discussing the legal process is like discussing the FDA application of a drug. It can happen only if you are part of the process or after it comes to a conclusion and information used in the ruling is made public.
If you’re not happy with Apple and Google behaving monopolistically “buy Google Pixel” doesn’t seem like a great solution. Nor does buy a phone running Google’s operating system feel like a great answer.
If you are not happy with the competition too, I guess you can watch Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to cheer you up or go make your own device.
The allegation is these companies are not competing with each other, they are working together. This includes working together to prevent competitors making their own devices. There are very limited alternatives if you want to avoid Google and Apple completely.
I'm not familiar with the Eurovision show you mention, so not sure of the relevance.
Each of those countries could easily bring suit. They wouldn't care at all that in some other country Apple is not the largest player.
Louis Vuitton is a bad example as their market share is tiny. AFAIK there is no clothing brand with a market percent as large as Apple's mobile market percent. Maybe Luxotica in eyewear but some articles claim their market is only around 20%
That's hardly a monopoly, there's hardly any absence of competition. Even if it was a monopoly it would't be illegal by default but it's not a monopoly anyway. It's more like %50 to %70 of the people in US/JP/UK have chosen to purchase the products of that company but they could have chosen any other brand that is available to them. In fact, people in countries of similar affluence have chosen the other way around with France %63, Netherlands %54, Germany %58, Spain %78 Android and there's nothing stopping the UK/US/JP do the exactly the same as the alternatives are available and competative.
It looks like Apple managed to design devices that Americans like more than the ones the other brands designed and there's nothing wrong about it.
Can Apple abuse it's position position in the market, even the smallest company can do that but the key is that if that happens people do have the option to do purchases from somewhere else.
In the UK a market share of 40% is enough for the competition authorities to investigate a company for monopolistic practices. It's less about market share and more about if the company is using its position in one market to create an unfair advantage in another. iOS and Android are both in a position with market power in many countries.
> So do you feel that anything other than 100% market share counts as a monopoly?
No I did not say that. I say, there's a healthy competition and there's no monopoly as people have viable alternatives and in many other countries people choose these alternatives and people where Apple is dominant do have the same alternatives to choose from.
There's no such thing as "right of minimum market share" that Apple violates by selling too many devices.
People do have the options and if they still buy Apple that's not monopoly, that's success.
No, I'm very annoyed by Google as their product quality keeps declining year after year and I do not have a real choice.
In fact, I have no practical ability to change my e-mail address as I'm using it since 1st of April 2004 and Google does not offer me to keep the address if I want to switch to another provider.
My arguments are in defence of Apple, not Google. I can move away from Apple at any time but I can't do the same with Google.
iMessage: WhatsApp, Signal, SMS etc. No One uses iMessage outside of the US, alternatives are very good and available on all platforms. You don't lose access to your social circle by switching away from iMessage.
Apple Watch: Just another device that has numerous alternatives. Many excel in some way, not crappy alternatives.
iCould: There are numerous alternatives, free and paid and work very well.
So, if you like to get rid of Apple, you simply tell the people you care that they can reach you from WhatsApp or your favourite alternative. Buy the new device, follow the transfer data and setting instructions, erase your iPhone&watch, give them away or sell them and you are done.
Same things can be said about your email address at Google. I moved to an alternative within a year, manually, by changing all services one after another. It was hard but worth it.
> However everyone agrees that Apple created a walled garden which is hard to escape.
An obviously false statement.
> Try to use their watches without an iPhone.
Their watches are an iPhone accessory advertised as requiring an iPhone in order to work.
Anyone who buys one thinking otherwise has been misinformed by someone other than Apple, and can return it to the store for a full refund. Then they can buy one of many Android wear or other smartwatches instead.
From my second link: "Apple iOS and other mobile devices, which are restricted to running pre-approved applications from a digital distribution service." If you find The Guardian and Time references unsatisfactory, consider this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191.
I really don't understand why you are so much defending Apple.
Except there is already precedence regarding their App Store. So if Apple defaulted to their own search engine and didn’t allow a way of changing that default then the courts might well find that anti-competitive too.
You don't need to disallow changing the default search engine because the average user doesn't even know or bother how to change it. That is the reason Google pays everyone (Apple, Mozilla, Android OEMs through GService allowance) a buttload of money to be the default.
While that is true, offering the option to change the default might still be enough to avoid any anticompetitive claims (which I think was the point the GP was making).
That said, Microsoft were still forced to present a randomized list of browser options to the user upon first install so there is also precedence of changeable defaults not being enough to satisfy complaints of anticompetitive business.
This is all hypothetical though because it's still far from clear that Apple have ever wanted to enter the search market, let alone got paid not to, let alone what might happen to the iPhone if they did.
Apple is a OS monopoly on the Apple hardware platform which affects millions of people with marked effects which can make switching away from it costy and hard.
It abuses this Monopoly position to force through other products, like it's app store, and give major advantage to it's services over the competition. Sometimes outright debiting l denying it's competition marked entry.
Even if we only look at a while phone OS marked it's a dis dual pool with Google (all attendings a minor enough to not matter). And both abuse this close to Monopol position, though one more then the other.
Sorry you're being downvoted but this is HN and it's common to give Apple benefit of the doubt.
You are right, and the term is monopolistic power, which is different from monopoly. Monopolistic power involves platform abuse which is what you're describing.
Additionally they use their position to enforce their own services, so their forced rollout of Apple Login was an example. Another example is all browsers being forced to use Safari under the hood. It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
> It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
Is it though? Safari seems to be pretty close to the HTML standard and at least not implement any proprietary features. Sure there may be bugs or they may lag behind but they are making an effort to be compliant.
I'd say Google seems to be the one leading a lot of decisions regarding to standards and implement them the way they want before they are actually standardizes and because they have the biggest market share Apple and Firefox just have to follow their decision.
Ideally Apple would allow third party browsers on iOS, but I think it's beneficial for users that they don't. I do believe that without it Chrome would have a much bigger market share and developers wouldn't be forced to support browsers other than Chrome and Google would have even more power over web standards than today. I guess Chromium being open source would make it a bit better.
- Missing features, supper buggy to a absurd point where you need to wonder if Apple isn't intentionally
crippling it. But hey, because some many people in management use it companies tend to work around all this bugs spending millions on it.
For users Chrome is like IE in the past.
- Having all kind of new features no one else has and people developing sites which only work for it correctly.
Still that has little to with the original comment.
I mean how is Apple outright banning competition (for example like Steam) from a marked coverying hundreds of million of people not a massive abuse of power which needs to be stopped for all the same reasons a monopoly is bad.
To just name one point (((there are other like absurd cuts for something which is just a payment service (in-app payments after paying for an app), often abusive/absurd behaviour on publishing apps, stiffing innovation (if not made/controlled by them), intentionally hindering repeatability and repair-ability regulation, including creation of an repair program where they pretend to help but actually just make sure you can't provide a proper repair service under it (let's see what will happen with the more recently announced program), intentionally vendor lock-in for developer all through their eco-system, surprisingly bad software quality for many parts facing developers at least parts which are not iOs, a whole bunch of subtle things which forces people to write apps instead of e.g. just providing a website or similar service, etc. etc. etc.))) Oh did I forgot to mention how they use the marked power to push down the prices of suppliers that they basically only can make profit by employing bs. like inhuman working conditions
or resources mined with child labor and similar and then pretending it's not their problem because they also forced the supplier to sign a contract that they don't do that.
Just because it's "per definition" not a monopoly doesn't mean it hasn't the same bad effects and other equally bad, not monopoly specific effect.
Also tbh. the problem with Safari isn't that it's slow in adapting standards Google forces through. The problem is that it's complete unreasonable buggy including on many old features with absurd bugs sometimes, and that they also lack behind on features which widely agreed to not "have been forcefully pushed through by google", like WASM. Often they support this things on paper but so buggy that it's unusable/very expensive to support them. And guess what most of this problems are focused on more "web appish" features instead of classical "web siteish" features, but that is surely a coincidence that this greatly benefits them by forcing people into the app store.
"Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments."
And those are global numbers. Now what do you think their US numbers look like, or their app store numbers? They hold plenty of monopolistic power to enable abuse, and that's enough to be regulated if the government was so inclined.
And, this lawsuit isn't just about Apple, it's about Google too. Certainly you don't have any doubts about their monopoly status.
> I don't see how regulators should intervene in this.
TFA proposes some remedies in very broad strokes. Looks good to me. Unregulated monopolies and oligopolies extract excessive profits from consumers and limit choice through anti-competitive practices. You might be fine with that. I'm not.
Making more money by selling less implies large margins and I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly.
Actually, it means that their customers are so happy with the Apple product that they are willing to pay a premium to have it. Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch.
You can verify that people are not paying Apple more because they don't have an option not to do so by by checking the shops for availability of other brands(they are available) and their viability(They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple).
> I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly.
> Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch.
In a functioning free market, competitors would have picked up the slack long ago (iPhone is 14 years old now), and cashed in on those high profit margins too.
Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices.
That doesn't deny the popularity of Apple's products, by the way. Believe it or not they can be both genuinely popular and monopolistic / anti-competitive, with both of those factors contributing to insanely above-market profit margins.
"You can buy LG" just shows that you don't understand the distinction between concentrated market power power, anti competitive business practices, and actual monopoly, nor the fact that antitrust regulations do not require their target to be an actual monopoly with zero competitors available for sale (and for good reason).
> They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple
Bing and DDG are also available and viable, and "[some] techies say" that they're better than Google. So what. This metric is utterly irrelevant.
> Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices.
The simpler explanation is they are not willing to invest the cash needed to create the Apple premium user experience.
See Microsoft pulling the plug on Windows phone and Microsoft stores. They decided to rest on their laurels (licensing fees for Excel almost pure profit and Azure rather than plow tens of billions into creating quality hardware and software and a retail experience for customers.
No, MSFT (and others) failed at mobile because there is no amount of money you can invest to break into that industry anymore, due to all the moat the duopoly has built up. It's literally impossible. Google started early and got on the last train with Android. Windows phone started when iOS App Store already had ~300K apps, and Play store had ~100K apps. That was a couple years too late. The duopoly was always an order of magnitude ahead of MSFT, and in this kind of market that's what matters.
I just posted this same comment on the ddg story, but I'm going to post it here as well.
Google forced my search engine (gigablast) basically out of business. I had ixquick.com as a big client at one time; I was providing them with search results from my custom web search engine. Then their CEO called me one day and told me he was cancelling, even though he'd been a client for over 10 years. He said it was because of some change Google had made to their agreement. Ixquick needed Google's results and ads for their startpage.com website, and, even though my results were shown on their ixquick.com and later ixquick.eu site, apparently Google wasn't good with that.
I'm not convinced Apple could make a viable search product to compete with Google. Their Maps app is OK, but not as good as Google's, and I can't imagine anyone other than the privacy conscious installing an Apple Maps app on their Android phone. It's possible Apple knows it has no interest in the search business, but Google doesn't know that, so they might as well squeeze a few extra dollars out of them.
> Their Maps app is OK, but not as good as Google's
Except Apple Maps has definitely been improving and Google Maps doesn't seem to be substantially improving anymore. At the current apparent trajectory Maps will catch up quickly.
That's assuming apple maps will actually serve you reliable navigation one day. I'm tired of uturns, unprotected lefts, and not finding local restaurants that are on google and every single grubhub type service on the internet except apple maps seemingly.
Maybe it depends on the city but apple maps is pretty worthless in LA for this, as well as not having a lot of businesses in their catalog for whatever reason. Looking up a local place that comes easily on google maps can bring up something halfway across the country in Apple maps. Waze was also notoriously bad at this, I about had it one day and just pulled over uninstalled the app when it asked me yet again to make an unprotected left. I shopped around for sure, but only google maps seems to avoid the unprotected moves as well as get all the local businesses. Even some food trucks are on google maps.
I wouldn't bet against Apple if they were incentivized to compete in this space. Their whole shtick is using feats of engineering to dominate lazy competitors.
If keeping Apple from developing search functionality is the goal, this appears to not be working, since Apple already uses it's own web search functionality for Siri results and Spotlight Suggestions.
>Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot.
Since I have a hard time staying emotionally invested in this (I'm as frustrated with the state of tech as everyone else), I just want to share the first thing that came to mind when I read this headline, a quote from Catch-22:
"His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the country."
> (4) annual multi-billion-dollar payments by Google to Apple not to compete in the search business;
Assuming the allegation is correct, what recourse would Google have if Apple took the multi-billion-dollar payment and then entered the search business?
Surely a lawsuit would only set Google up for anti-trust complaints, so would their only recourse be to not fork over subsequent multi-billion-dollar payments to Apple? It seems analogous to a broken agreement between criminals -- one or more parties is outside the protection of the law.
Could this reasoning also be used to defend against the allegation, i.e. surely Google wouldn't put themselves in such a situation where they could have no guarantee or surety that Apple wouldn't just take the money and run?
Most of the comments talk about the ease, or lack of it, of adding a different search engine to Safari. I'm sure Apple would love for everyone to focus on that, and then they can make a big noise about settling the suit by allowing more choice.
I think the complainants are really asking "why don't they do Apple Search, just as they now do Apple Maps, i.e. their own search?"
How would this make Google unhappy and willing to pay billions to prevent it? They could buy DDG or Bing or some other product to get a head start, and then pour their limitless $$$ into improving it. It might not succeed any more than Apple Maps has, but then, a $3T competitor is not to be taken lightly.
> [...] alleging violations of the Antitrust Laws of the United States.
> The complaint charges that Google and Apple agreed that Apple would not compete in the internet search business against Google. [...]
IANAL, but how credible a threat must the potential competition be, for a sober judge to get interested? If Bob's Pizza Parlor got $10/year from Google for not competing in the internet search business - would that be anything but a bizarre joke? Similar for Apple - sure, they've got $billions. But also shareholders who don't want those $billions squandered. Apple's in-house expertise in developing and running internet search engines is ~nill. And how many companies, ever, have managed to create and profitably run an internet search engine - in a market with at least one established and profitable competitor?
With $lots_of_billions on the table, Apple's head negotiator might say all sorts of things, to squeeze yet more $$$ out of Google. (1)"Bing is offering us more." (2)"Customers are complaining that your search results are getting crappy." (3)"We'll set up our own search engine." (4)"We'll invent a time machine, and set both of Larry Page's grandmothers up with better husbands."
How many of those statements are credible? Legal? If (2) and (3) hit at Google's deep-seated fears, but (3) is not actually credible, is this any different (beyond the emotional cheap shot) than (4)?
This doesn't seem like a real problem considering users can choose DDG on iOS and macOS, or pick another browser. If Apple only allowed Google Search, then it would be a problem. Or if an Android OS only allowed GS or Edge only allowed Bing, then it would similarly be a problem too.
"The complaint charges that Google and Apple agreed that Apple would not compete in the internet search business against Google. [...] The complaint also calls for [...] the breakup of Apple into separate and independent companies"
This doesn't really make sense in my layman's view: They complain that Apple stays out of search (which is not their core business) and then want to break up Apple. For what reason? Because they are operating outside of their core business?
Perhaps Apple has a slight bit of self reflection and just realises that after the catastrophe that was Apple Maps that they'd be no good at making a search engine?
They have no in-house expertise and the small scale search products they do make are very, very bad.
It does not surprise me. Search is bread, butter and oxygen for Google. Spending a few billion dollars a year to sustain a revenue of hundreds of billions of dollars seems logical. Not sure right or wrong. But understandable.
While Apple does have a war chest they don’t seem to have the culture for it. Back when I was in the industry they imported a bunch of eBay rejects. Although if Google keeps getting worse then maybe eventually.
Person claims thing, may or may not have evidence, claim made in such a way it is not subject to defamation etc and can be repeated without any chance for a reply.
If this hearsay were the case, it wouldn't be the business of anyone beyond Google and Apple stockholders. Antitrust legislation is awful, and only works jeopardizes competition despite supposedly helping it.
Except for #6, this is literally “Google pays Apple to be the default search provider.”
The alternative option seems to be that Apple is for some reason required to use their position to enter the search market.