> This is why it's so important, especially in the US, for government to begin aggressively enforcing antitrust law again
It already does and it didn’t particularly stop. The problem is that there is no obvious damage to consumers here (what US antitrust law is based on).
GCP and Azure are both significant players with similar offerings. The fact that people use proprietary Amazon APIs to manage stuff isn’t a high enough bar to show a monopoly.
“We are locked into their product because it’s a big engineering expense to move off” isn’t an argument for monopoly busting. It’s a reflection on poor business decisions by the complainer. It has never worked against Oracle/MS in the past, it won’t start now.
A whole generation of engineers is about to relearn the importance of open source that drove everyone to open source stacks 15 years ago.
> A whole generation of engineers is about to relearn the importance of open source
it's not really about open-source, but about inter-operability and open protocols.
Imagine if AOL internet was the defacto standard, and every website is their own walled garden? Oh wait, no we already have that - it's the mobile app ecosystem!
The reason the web is so successful (but not monopolistic) is that the http protocol is open, and the HTML standards are open (at least, until google started meddling now since they are almost a browser monopoly...)
So laws for anti-trust should now take that into account - platform monopolies can be beaten by forcing interoperability via legislation.
To the software wide of the equation --> open source is NOT the answer, abstractions ARE. The problem with programmers TODAY is that they take technical article written by a a cloud provider as gospel, and start slathering large layers of priority api calls/technical debt all over their solution - because thats what example code is designed todo, LOCK YOU IN. No need for contract nasties when your devs are doing the work for them!
Use an eggshell architecture, put your dependencies on the edge. global dependencies are the enermy.
It already does and it didn’t particularly stop. The problem is that there is no obvious damage to consumers here (what US antitrust law is based on).
GCP and Azure are both significant players with similar offerings. The fact that people use proprietary Amazon APIs to manage stuff isn’t a high enough bar to show a monopoly.
“We are locked into their product because it’s a big engineering expense to move off” isn’t an argument for monopoly busting. It’s a reflection on poor business decisions by the complainer. It has never worked against Oracle/MS in the past, it won’t start now.
A whole generation of engineers is about to relearn the importance of open source that drove everyone to open source stacks 15 years ago.