- Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.
All of those scenarios are where there was a terms of service violation. When Google or Apple decide to ban their competition for no reason other than it being competition, it's anti-competitive.
The law being observed here is not about giving platform users freedom of choice whiting the platform (that law doesn't even exist), the law here is about anti competition practices by monopolist companies.
It ought to be illegal for a 100B+ market cap company to operate in this way. They can just pour money at the problem until the incumbents shrivel up and die. Hyper fucking bad behavior that leaves the true innovators and people that care out in the cold.
On the other hand, it should be possible for consumers to claim products they own on different platforms by peering a list of their their owned (licensed) products.
There's also laws like that in the US, and in most places. However, it seems this is being overlooked because it's not really for the purpose of creating a monopoly, as everyone is doing this, as it's actually just to get consumers' feet in the door to the ecosystem/platform.
To be fair, anti-trust laws are based on that principle. There's nothing inherently wrong (or illegal) with having a billion users, but a company that takes advantage of that power is a bad thing.
One of the key ones in that list is advertising supported software, which is in my opinion less moral than proprietary software. Android and Chrome fit squarely into that bucket.
Wonderful. So when, as an individual, I watch a company:
- evading most taxes,
- offering 0 support to users,
- breaking the user experience to force users through their “app funnel,”
- shutting down independent developers without recourse,
- bullying any small fish in their path,
- conspiring to depress labour salaries, and
- shirking any societal or moral obligations,
...that’s just business.
But then when, having observed their psychopathic behaviour, I decide that I don’t want to be part of funding this evil entity, now I’m holding a double standard by accessing the content this monopoly has become the sole gatekeeper for.
Give me a break.
(Leaving untouched the fact that their business model revolves around collecting as much private information as possible.)
I find it unfortunate that the combination of greed and failed oversight and responsibility by government to ensure people's rights, has essentially led to the wholesale destruction of the distributed and decentralized internet in the post-facebook era.
Ascribing non-malicious intentions to Shopify, it seems their success has equally gone to their heads as it has gone to all the other tech companies, who have been inexcusably allowed to accumulate power far beyond what should have ever been permitted.
We must start insisting on that people's rights simply cannot be abused because a corporate entity claims to have more rights to choose than a private person. The standard for antitrust should be that if there are no alternatives for legal products and services in an industry, it is a clear sign that a monopoly exists and the companies must be broken up or must fund competitors until a state of equilibrium and rights are restored.
If you were to actually sit and read those agreements for everything you use, more than half of all productive time for humanity would be reading licensing agreements. You can refuse to click on these things,but these companies continue to try to insert themselves into more and more of society until we get to the point that you can either chose to spend all day confirming companies aren't taking advantage of you, or checking out of society.
This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far
Just more evidence that large platform and device owners will try to gate-keep and landgrab as much as they can and try to destroy the open web and force competitors into financial agreements to collect economic rent.
There finally needs to be regulation on this. No banning of end user services as long as they're legal, I don't want a phone maker controlling what I do on the internet. It's ridiculous. Microsoft in the 90s doesn't even compare to this, it's on an entirely different level. If competition regulation would actually still exist we'd tear apple a new one.
It's not unreasonable when you consider this in terms anticompetitiveness and related laws.
Imagine if Microsoft just came along one day and literally banned any office software, including LibreOffice etc. from running on it's OSs.
Imagine if Nissan bought up a bunch of gas chains in the US and refused to sell gas to ... to let's say ... GM cars.
Or the electric company, which had invested in some solar panel outlays, decided to ban all other 3rd party solar panels from the grid.
These things are always a little fuzzy, but they are real.
Also - the lack of user clear consent is another one ie telling users that apps 'cannot extract their data' but in reality, they are selling it to Netflix.
FB can legitimately explain a way a lot of issues lately, but this one is bad. I think it's far worse than the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which case they weren't really doing anything wrong, just late to maybe close off said APIs.
It's not really a free market that's why these tech companies all have anti trust investigations. This is censorship. It's just censorship lots of us agree with.
This isn't narrowing down markets until we find a monopoly. This is a trillion dollar company abusing access to their captive market. The only option for users is to leave their ecosystem and lose access to all of their purchases. If that isn't covered by current anti-trust law, then the law is outdated and should be changed.
Gotta say... best post title I've seen in a while.
But still a very valid point. I would really support legislation governing online marketplaces, so that this kind of abuse couldn't take place. A company shouldn't have to be a monopoly, for anticompetitive behavior to become illegal.
- Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.
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