We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".
Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.
Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.
The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.
Andoid users install google play because the applications they want to use is only available on google play, regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their applications on google play because that is the only places where they can access enough number of users, which has nothing to do with developer choice.
It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.
>Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
For the devs' part, some of them did port their apps to Huawei's store (at least from my observation in Indonesia). Samsung also has their own app store on their own phones that's mostly for their built-in stuff.
> By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.
… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.
About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.
If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.
Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
Amazon chooses not to advertise third party products on those surfaces. They realize they have product synergy in giving away free films and movies to their customers, which is why they do it. It's a massively unfair platform advantage.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
Yeah, the root of many monopolies today is an IP monopoly explicitly granted by government. Government policy is prohibiting monopolies via one relatively weak pathway, and literally establishing them via the IP pathway.
A finding that preventing or discouraging installation of apps from anywhere but the first-party store constitutes use of market power to exclude competitors and fix prices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a great solution to me.
It's my understanding that availability of alternatives is a major factor in determining whether a company has market power. Someone looking for interactive entertainment has a multitude of options beyond gaming consoles, so the manufacturer using technical means to extract a payment from anyone selling games is less likely to be considered anticompetitive. Furthermore, people with gaming consoles often have more than one brand, PC games, and games on mobile devices.
There is no viable alternative to an Android or iOS powered smartphone for most people, and even switching between the two is enough of a challenge that few people do it once they've picked one. That gives their respective vendors substantially more power to fix prices and exclude competitors.
No, the solution is web installs without platform scare walls.
We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics, and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.