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Competitors Complain To EC That Free Android Is a 'Trojan Horse'
First time accepted submitter DW100 writes "Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle have taken it upon themselves to moan to the European Commission about Google's Android dominance, which they say is an underhand bid to control the entire mobile market. The firms are part of the FairSearch group, which has just filed a complaint that Google is using Android as a 'Trojan Horse' to take control of the mobile market and all the related advertising revenue. Microsoft would of course know all about this, being at the end of several similar anti-competitive complaints in the past."
...zero fucks were given
Company makes billions of dollars; wants more. Competitors not happy.
Now on to how Justin Bieber's pet monkey was confiscated at an airport...
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
If you don't like it, release your own free operating system where you package your search engine it.
F**k Microsoft Orcle and Nokia
Interesting. What Linux couldn't accomplish on the desktop, it's accomplishing everywhere else.
Proverbs 21:19
They are advertising conduits. Which advertising conduit do you want to purchase? This one has extra advertising!
Thank goodness for large corporations. Who else could properly define the purpose of a telephone?
Ballmer butthurtedly throws some chairs.
The group is concerned that as the online advertising market shifts increasingly to mobile platforms with the rise in smartphones and tablets, Google is giving itself an unfair head start.
“Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free’. But in reality, Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone,” the group argued.
“This disadvantages other providers, and puts Google’s Android in control of consumer data on a majority of smartphones shipped today. Google’s predatory distribution of Android at below-cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform.”
So, this is 'wrong' because Google doesn't charge for their OS? Man, MS is getting blatantly desperate sounding. Make an OS that people will want to use, then you might even get them to buy it!
If you don't like it, release your own free operating system where you package your search engine it.
Google is packaging its entire search engine on Android?! No wonder my Samsung Galaxy Nexus only has a battery life of 10 hours!
Google's nefarious release of Android-related material under the 'Google Public License'(which allows you to use the code; but requires that all web activity be logged and sent to Google) was truly a masterstroke for market dominance.
Oh, wait, you mean that Android is a mixture of Apache and GPL components, and Google has had somewhat indifferent luck with preventing other vendors(Amazon, Samsung, etc.) from quite successfully using it for their own purposes while cutting them out of the picture entirely? Oh, um, never mind then...
Whoa, slow down there. Nobody wants competition here. They want to manipulate the government into giving them an advantage through preferential legislation. You know, capitalism.
giggity
Google is really good at coming into markets and offering a free product and in doing that sort of stymieing the development of alternatives. We can see it with what happened with the introduction of Google Reader - the introduction of a good enough free reader from Google functionally nuked the development of alternatives. I imagine that if Microsoft had started giving away its operating systems for free back in the 90's (and finagling things so that they made their money further up the stack) there would have been less interest in Linux. When any of the world's big companies give away something for nothing, it's worth having a closer look at what the catch is.
...of Windows in the mobile market
Are complaining they can't get revenue from it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
There's Microsoft Office for Android now?
I seem to remember Google making similar complaints against Microsoft. Since it's Microsoft's turn I guess it's Tuesday.
I think that Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle are going in the stand-up comedy business. Because this complaint is certainly the funniest one I've seen.
:)
Open Source is more popular commercially than they are. Gee, who would have thought of that!
For years, I've always advocated that Microsoft should release DOS and then Windows for free at the very least for non-business use. If you need support, buy it from Microsoft.
They've been scoffing at open source for years and now, it's proven to work and its working on devices such as phones and tablets which are consumed even more than PCs, which is why they are sorely pissed and scared.
Eventually all of this means that tablets, phones and new generations of portable laptops/netbooks will have the powers of PCs and more and won't be running on Windows or any other proprietary platforms.
But that's called competition, and well, the thing is, while Google may be the leaders of Android, as we can plainly see, Android is free and customized by all as they see fit, so, it's not an actually anti-competitive at all.
Good Luck to Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle, for they will need it!
But, they did already own the platform so they didn't do it to generate new revenue but to try to keep what they already had (total dominance of the PC market).
There is a 'slight' difference. Nothing stops anyone from getting Android and building their own devices with it and not include any of Google's apps (Just look at custom ROMs). They could you know, build their own App Store and Search Engine with blackjack and hookers if they wanted and then sell those devices running Android without Google being able to do anything about it.
They want the government to give them an advantage by beating up an efficient competitor, same as happened with all anti-trust cases starting with Standard Oil, and moving on to Alcoa Aluminium and everything in between.
You know, central planning.
You can't handle the truth.
I thought it is more than free, isn't it Open Source?
If I don't like the default application packages, can't I make source code changes to it? I thought Careers or phone makers added their own. My Samsung has their own applications as well.
Microsoft would of course know all about this, being at the end of several similar anti-competitive complaints in the past."
That does not mean that Google should get off the hook, IIRC Microsoft got some heavy fines and so should Google if they are being Anti-Competitive.
Strip the meme overlays: Powerful using armed men to hamper competition. In the end, competition is hampered and cash flows into the hands of the armed men.
Europe, with a multimillenia history of kickbacks, continues feigning it is using the power correctly because of "the vote".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And apparently their mobile divisions all have a blind spot on the upper right hand side that prevents them from seeing the "fork me on github" buttons. ... but then they would have to admit that Linux was a better choice than their own
Nokia should fork Android, remove the Google part, make an Android phone. If you want to market Bing services with it do that, Amazon did it, China did it, lots of smaller players did it, why not Nokia?
Instead of wallowing around in failure why not turn this around into a success? There's no shame in making a sucky decision (WP7) is you learn from your mistakes.
Also Google's part of Android isn't free, handset makers pay for it, the free part doesn't include the Google pack, it just happens that most handset makers (minus the Amazon,... Chinese etc. pay for that bundle).
I think also Archos (the French company) make a media player without the Google part. I mean whining failure aside, they could get their act together, they just need to dump loser 'M'.
Microsoft should know all about this since they did the same thing when they packaged IE with Windows. The EC ruled that Microsoft had to provide the user with an option to use a different browser when the user first logs in to the OS. However, Microsoft was a convicted monopolist in the OS market which was the basis for that decision. So is Microsoft trying to claim that Google has a monopoly on the mobile OS market? That would be a hard sell since there's still iOS, BB10, and Windows Phone. It sounds more like they're just sore about having one of the smallest market shares in the mobile space after dominating the desktop for so long.
There's Microsoft Office for Android now?
Not yet, there is "Kingsoft Office", which keeps improving with each new update.
They could release their own devices using Android. Or they could get handset manufacturers to use their search and advertising services. I don't want this to happen, but they really are just whining about nothing.
Monopolies are inherently ineffecient by their nature. There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation. Standard Oil should be grateful that the government won its case. The sum of the broken up parts became greater than the original company and still thrives today. US Steel won their antitrust case, and their bloated, inefficient monopoly caused them to sink under their own weight. IBM, AT&T, and now Microsoft have all suffered the inefficiencies of being a monopoly. The first two managed to adapt. We'll see if Microsoft can, too.
What you described is not capitalism, it is a variation on fascism. It is one variant of the economic system that you end up with when you ask the government to regulate ever more aspects of the economy in order to protect people from their own bad decisions. All of the variants look pretty much the same, the only question is whether the people who benefit are people who accumulated wealth before you started down that path and use it to acquire political power as this process goes forward or whether the people who benefit are people who accumulated political power before you started down that path and use it to acquire wealth as this process goes forward. Of course what often happens is some combination of the two. The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I've noticed a common thread in the triumvirate of Nokia, Orrible, and Microsoft: none of them has released a smartphone worth a damn since Android came out (Orrible has never released a viable smartphone at all, which is quite stupid given that they could have a nice vertically integrated phone with almost no investment that they're not already making). I guess we have the answer to "why are they doing this?"
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Capitalism requires the absence of government interference in the market, not the presence of it.
Did you honestly not know this, or were you trying to spread misinformation?
lets hope that the EU decide that users ought to be able to install which ever operating system they want on a phone.
if microsoft can make a good phone OS then i am sure plenty of people will want to install it on their nexus 4. likewise i would not mind lumia running tizen, qtmoko or android. everybody wins when you remove lock-in from a market (and by everyone i mean consumers and companies that make good products).
Whoosh. I think his point is that using government force to prevent free markets, and then calling it "capitalism" is one of today's most egregious examples of newspeak.
(I realize this is a EU story, yadda yadda...) Today isn't the first time you're hearing about Republicans, is it? Did you know that a Republican ran for president of the USA, just last year? And that he got over 5% of the vote? That's how well entrenched this newspeak is.
The complainant's argument seems to ring hollow. There's just as many iOS units sold as there are Android units sold. It would seem that it's not so much a matter of the OS being free (Apple's isn't; they don't even share theirs), but rather a matter of the product being compelling to a significant portion of the market. If Android were licensed at $25 / phone the way Windows Phone is, I suspect that it would still sell equally as well (it would mostly affect margins on the phones). Bundling apps with the platform a problem? Really? MS doesn't plan to bundle apps, and consumer's want to buy phones with no pre-installed apps, right?
We all fall short of our I guess. From a collective down to the individual, the ideal doesn't exist. The only metric worth considering might be to what degree you're being victimized by whatever ideology is popular at the time (government, economic, or otherwise).
I wonder if Google would put a real version of Android for Desktop if they could maybe crush Mircosoft in the Desktop too.WOuld be interresting to have 1 OS for all devices inclunding PC if it was possicle to do. ANd I dont mean a wathered down version of the OS.
TripAdvisor, Kayak, HotWire, Expedia, SideStep, Level.com, Foundem, ShopCity.com, Twenga, MarketPlace.com, Travel Tech Association, Buscape company, TheFind, and Allegro are all apart of FairSearch.org.
Why doesn't the summary or the story mention them? It is obvious that it doesn't fit V3's, DW100's, or timothy's agenda. Slashdot needs to get rid of these pathetic biased editors.
using government force to prevent free markets, and then calling it "capitalism" is one of today's most egregious examples of newspeak.
Thank God for the Democratic Party. They don't do that kind of thing.
Hey, look, it is a socialist piece of shit! If you hate capitalism so much, why don't you just work for free? Oh, wait, I forgot you are only against OTHER people making money.
Yeah, because Apple is exactly the opposite.
> There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation.
The mere potential for competition keeps firms competitive. If you dominate the market at $50 a widget and everyone else would require $60 a widget to make a profit, guess what price you would set, somewhere south of $60. It's not as if you can become number one and then sit on your ass forever. You have to keep others from catching up or entering the race.
Al Gore wanted to deregulate the telecoms industry back in the day but when he went to congress he said: “The response was ‘hell no: If we deregulate these guys, how will we raise money from them?’”
Bill: "They don't even charge for this.. this ANDROID.. They give it away! For Free! You know, to get a foothold in the market so nobody will ever switch away from it. This is just... strongarming"
Nokia: "Besides, they have this great OS but really, really crappy hardware. It's not even a 16MP camera!! It's an abomination I tell you. Remember the N800? Now there was ...."
Larry: "What's needed is some legislation to regulate licensing on the Android OS. What I propose is we charge by number of cpu core the OS is running on.. No, wait... Make that priced per megahertz of cpu core... yeah... and.. then divide that by 3.124 * the number of cores...uh...per year...per person.... multiplied by bandwidth used.. an..."
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The main difference is that they won't be doing it in plain view as Android is pretty much open source (would be trojan if anyone can see the code?), they would have the code hidden and with licenses that forbids you to know what they really do (the perfect environment to plant an entire army of trojan horses).
In your example there is no innovation. The innovation would come in where someone else designs a system where they could make the widget and sell it for $40 while making a profit, where the monopolist is still making and selling it for $50.. or someone else figures out how to make it better for the same price making the monopolist's product obsolete.
... may derive from the popular hew and cry about Android being "fragmented". Of course, this might open the door for Microsoft to plead, in the future, that their offerings are schizophrenic.
Exactly. They could even do as Amazon did and customize the interface so it doesn't look like a normal Android device. But it's easier to just complain that Google is somehow locking them out of the market (by producing a much better OS ----- whisper this last part and hope people don't hear you).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The innovation would come in where someone else designs a system where they could make the widget and sell it for $40 while making a profit, where the monopolist is still making and selling it for $50
At which point the monopolist hauls out some government-granted monopoly, such as an obscure patent or the right not to have a device's bootloader's lockout circumvented.
I don't want this to happen, but they really are just whining about nothing.
As I understand the article, they're whining about the combination of these facts: First, unlike Amazon and SlideME, Google has chosen not to make its store available to the public as an Android package. Second, Google has somehow convinced too many Android application publishers to make their applications exclusive to its store.
Windows was the thing people had to have, the non-free monopoly-like thing (I was never fully comfortable calling them a monopoly, but the courts disagreed, so whatever). And they gave away an application, MSIE, hoping people would use it to establish new legacies that required it, so they wouldn't be able to switch to standard browsers and MSIE's underlying OS would continue to be required.
The situation here is inverted. Android is the thing nobody really cares about; people they can take it or leave it, or even fork it and compete with Google if they want. But the applications, primarily Google Maps but also (this makes very little sense to me) Youtube and Google Play (seriously, at least we're going to admit these are relatively minor factors, I hope) are the proprietary stuff that Google is taking a hard line on. Google's applications correspond to Microsoft's 1990s OS, and Google's OS corresponds Microsoft's 1990s application.
The big difference, of course, is that nobody, I mean nobody has Google Maps as a dependency. You can throw every single bit of Android and every single Google application away, and not miss it very much, or at least not to the same degree that people suffered 20 years ago, where Windows APIs were required by a majority of "pop" software so lots of people had something they couldn't use without it. I'm not saying they're bad; most people (me included) think Google Maps is very nice. I'm just saying anyone who has the back-end data can fairly easily [*handwave*] build a map application, and if someone else does that, it's easy for users to switch.
Ask any Android user if they're "locked in" to Android. Most of them will laugh. Maybe there really is some particular app which only has an Android version available, which they depend on every day and can't lose and is creating a network effect. I don't know. But I bet it's not a Google application.
Google has lots of neat things for users, but not one single damn thing that a user needs, either directly or indirectly.
BTW, I actually bought an Android 4 tablet which didn't come with the Google applications. It was no problem at all. So people who say an Android box needs this stuff, are totally full of shit. They're not merely wrong; they're liars. This is a non-story.
Actually, my favorite part of TFA was the first sentence:
Looks like the usual suspects and mostly-nonproductive entities, hardly a "diverse group."
Now I'm pretty sure iThings greet you similarly wot with this iTunes thing, but iTunes is not the behemoth that Google is.
Seriously? Tell that to my 8 year old daughter who couldn't even power up her shiny new iTouch without first connecting it to iTunes. You can't even so much as look at the icons without iTunes.
I didn't need to connect my Nexux 7 to google until I wanted to use the play store and there was plenty I could do with it before deciding.
They could you know, build their own App Store and Search Engine with blackjack and hookers if they wanted
Say they went with Yandex or Bing instead of Google Search and built their own app store. But how would this store allow users of priced applications purchased from Google Play Store to transfer their purchases? Users of priced applications from Google Play Store are locked into Google Play Store if they don't want to have to re-buy all their applications.
Every time I think you can't really be that retarded, you insist on proving that you are.
You could fork it if you really wanted and the resources to do so. I personally don't, but I suspect Microsoft and it's subsiduary Nokia, or Oracle might if they really wanted.
Isn't one of the known goals of capitalism to drive prices to free?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Standard Oil managed to be competitive enough consistently lowering prices from 1969 all the way until it was broken up and in the meanwhile it managed to turn Rockefeller into one of the richest people in history, making modern time billionaires look like poor children.
I don't know what you mean by innovation, but clearly that company was able to innovate better than anybody else, once Standard was broken up prices for their product have never gone down again, only up.
You can't handle the truth.
Actually, it's their pride that keeps them from adopting the platform. They feel the need to "eat their own dog food". Even if the dogs just don't want it anymore.
If their home grown platform is non-competitive/obsolete, it makes perfect sense to pick another platform so they can continue with their innovations.
Microsoft, innovations? Hahaha, that is a thing of the past.
It's not a Trojan Horse if you're doing it openly. Suck it up, buttercups.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nobody's exposed to the price of the OS on mobile. The carrier doesn't add an OS fee to the phone and neither does the manufacturer. They don't offer a discount because the OS is free, or the high-end Android phones would be advertised as less expensive because of it. Believe me, advertising would get ahold of that and market the heck out of it because adding the word "free" to your marketing material attracts customers like flies to honey. No, they fix price points the same as their competition and say "sell this at that price point." So it's not about price, it's about the quality of the smartphone apps. Also price fixing that they somehow get away with.
iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, all those other device owners want to install Google's products (GMail, YouTube, Maps, Now, etc) on their devices where available. When those products aren't available, the actual device users - you know, the people who actually give the money to the carriers - get really cranky and consider jumping ship. And when those products become available, they set new records for number of downloads. Remember when Google Maps became available for iPhone?
So it's not that there are no alternatives, because there are quite a few. It's that the consumer preference is for Google products.
Everybody wants a slice of Google's market share, but they want to do it without making products that are better than Google's. I think that is what the EU manufacturers are trying to disguise by calling it a 'trojan horse'... The Trojan horse was an attempt to destroy something from within. Android taking over the market is not necessarily a malicious thing. (I'm sure there are some marketers who want it to be.) It offers apps that people want more than the alternatives. That's what skyrocketed the iPhone into dominance awhile back, and that's what Blackberry won at before that, and it's what WinMo has yet to achieve.
So you know, I'm not totally a fandroid here. I want products that are better than the Google products. In fact, I would really like Microsoft's Live Maps on my Android. That aerial view beats Google Maps hands down. I would also like various Apple-only live audio processing applications on Android or WinMo, but I can't, because those OSes do not currently have low-latency audio processing like IOS. Just saying, this is my assessment of the situation.
Monopolies are inherently ineffecient by their nature. There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation. Standard Oil should be grateful that the government won its case.
Standard Oil, perhaps; but probably not Standard Oil's stakeholders of the day. Monopolies might lead to rot in the long run; but in the long run we are all dead, and those of us who held monopoly power were able to extract substantial rents in the short and medium term...
Corporations may be immortal; but the people looking to profit from them definitely aren't, and their net present value calculations reflect that.
Like the cable companies, which keep dropping prices to... oh wait. Like Windows and Office, which got cheaper all of the way through the 1990s and 2000s until... oh wait. Like medical costs, which kept going down so nobody was clamoring for government subsidized health care. Oh wait. Like education, which kept getting cheaper until nobody wanted public schools or government assistance for education.
Look how Intel colluded with PC vendors to lock AMD out of parts of the market, and is in the process of finishing them off. If ARM hadn't started becoming a major player in the processor space, we'd be looking at $500 i3s. Look at the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Quicken, and a few other companies to avoid poaching each other's engineers in an artificial means to keep employee costs low.
I'm not a rah-rah-rah fan of big government. But businesses do get a position of power and ruthlessly exploit it. The market has no ethics, it's winner take all and illegal is only wrong if the cost of getting caught exceeds the savings by breaking the law.
The myth that people can provide things for free is at the heart of communism - the reality that everything costs something is why all experiments with communism fail, usually with vast suffering involved by any that were not at the top of the pyramid.
Capitalism in the pure form is a company charging a price that people are willing to pay, where on;y bad ideas go to free because no-one wants them. Good ideas people do in fact pay for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd bet Google is concentrating on Chrome OS for desktop use cases because that way it gets to take the 30% cut twice: once when a priced application is sold to a user of Chrome Web Store, and again when the Android version of the same application is sold to a user of Google Play Store.
OMG PONIES!!! Who doesn't like ponies?
Wow, could that summary be more biased and incorrect? The complaint isn't that Android is an underhanded bid to control the entire mobile market. The complaint is that Android is abusing their (potentially) monopoly position to unfairly position their other products in dominant positions, hindering competition. You know, things like positioning Google Docs in a preferred position on the home screen thereby harming competition with Microsoft Office (as an example).
This is EXACTLY the behaviour that got Microsoft into trouble when they used their dominant market position to push IE on users and hurt competition from other browsers. This is EXACTLY the sort of behaviour that most on Slashdot feel Microsoft was in the wrong for. But, I'm sure most on Slashdot are now going to claim Microsoft is getting their just desserts and its now ok because Google is doing it to them rather than being rightly offended at the actions, regardless of who does it and to whom it is done.
I'm not sure I buy that. My HTC phone has an HTC Sense home screen, even though the word "Googe" is etched across the back of the case.
In fact, I don't think a single widget on my phone's home screen is or ever was unmodified Google code.
I could be missing something, but I was definitely under the impression that the source code for the entire Android system is available for use and abuse (subject to licensing limits like GPL) and that third parties can pretty much adapt it at will. Nor am I aware that Google makes you sign in blood that you will present preferred Google apps over other possible apps before you can build and sell an Android product.
Yes, Android devices tend to like to "keep it in the family" and use other Google apps because they tend to play well together, but unlike Microsoft, Google apps generally don't lock you in to other Google apps, nor are you required by license to include any Google apps if you don't want to.
Free is now underhanded? Wait...What? So what is stopping one of these "Other Vendors" from using the free OS? Pride or just plain old stubbornness? Does anyone else find this hysterical?
"But how would this store allow users of priced applications purchased from Google Play Store to transfer their purchases?"
Firstly my apps are on Samsung App store not Google Apps, but I will defend them anyway.
The app seller is the one you have a gripe with, it's for them to support whatever store and whatever hardware your new phone has. Just as Amazon stuff is on their own Kindle store and on GPlay.
If they don't want to do that, it's not for Google to fix that for them, it's not their problem, and not their code to support. Really, the app seller has no obligation to let you transfer it anyway, why should he do the after sales work to make that happen? You can still run it on the phone you bought it for! Amazon do it for marketing, but some day they may withdraw their Amazon reader from GPlay and Samsung App store.
And why wouldn't your new maker simply license on of the other app stores? Why make a new one?
Thanks! I've successfully been doing this all morning (AOSP).
The urge to maximize profit and to increase share value (really another form of the same thing) suffices to drive device costs down, functionality and efficiencies up, push service upgrades, keep up with styles, etc.
Perhaps you're confusing innovation per se with "innovation outside the monopoly."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Bingo!
giggity
The grandson of Rockefeller (who owned Standard Oil) commented that his grandfather ended up making more money after he lost the anti-trust case and had his monopoly broken up than he did before in "The Men who built America" on the History Channel.
And so by logical inference, Google cannot possibly be a monopoly.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It is simple to do. What the hell are you even trying to say?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So maybe in about 10 years the EU will get around to pushing a popup on Android with a choice of 6 map apps with equal sized logos and randomly ordered... ?
> The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
Do you feel the same way about the EPA? How about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Do you get any benefit from the FCC? The FDA?
Surely some public good has come from these extensions to economic regulation. Rivers that don't catch fire. Nuclear waste that isn't simply dumped in the river. WiFi, wedged in where Amateur Radio used to be. (Alternately, spectrum preserves for Amateur Radio in the first place.) Meat packing plants whose products don't regularly contain rat feces or salmonella. Or drugs that often (but perhaps not always) are more effective than snake oil for having had to prove themselves.
Individual, specific laws that benefit specific corporations? Yeah, they happen. Yeah, they're often deplorable. But even if it is only a homeopathic baby, don't throw it out with the....
I believe that most of the benefits that are attributed to the EPA are a result of the legislation that predates its creation. Certainly the EPA has long ago fulfilled the mandate for which it was created and has operated as a barrier to entry to new entities protecting established businesses for the last twenty years. Your reference to meat packing plants is perfect. The regulation of meat packing plants has led to the closure of small, local butchers, even though almost all outbreaks of food borne illness occurred as a result of improper hygiene at companies already inspected by the USDA (or another government agency). The government has used every outbreak of food borne illness in the last 30 years as an excuse to force smaller companies to comply with more stringent regulatory requirements even though it was the large companies which were theoretically already subject to those requirements that were the source of the outbreak.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
He is trying to claim that Google has not released the source, its been a common argument that has been proven false before.
The argument you just made is known as the "no true scotsman" argument. You are claiming that despite the fact that this kind of thing happens ALL THE FUKCING TIME IN EVERY CAPITALIST COUNTRY, it is still not "capitalism".
At this point, here is what the typical slashdot liberTARDian sounds like:
That is one interpretation of an ambiguous statement. He could also be claiming that the source code is available, but it is obfuscated in such a way that making changes is rendered difficult or nearly impossible. Your interpretation is the most obvious one, but not necessarily the correct one.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Microsoft and Oracle are pitching their argument at brain-dead betas, just as when they try to tell you that software products should be seen as software services.
There is a very limit set of circumstances where a company is breaking the law when providing free goods. Essentially, this revolves around CONSPIRACY where a company uses its wealth and market position to drive out the competition by under-cutting them in a way that is clearly NOT sustainable in the mid-to-long term. This has NOTHING to do with the concept of a company choosing to provide free goods or services.
Microsoft makes VAST amounts of money from a truly putrid and ageing Operating System codebase. Google helps provide a free modern and rapidly improving OS code base reach a growing number of computer devices, and chooses to make its money in more honest ways. The open-source nature of Android means it would be deeply immoral to even attempt to charge for it.
Microsoft and Oracle ignore the incredible number of decent people that loathe both companies, and dream of the day when neither still exist. They think instead of the politicians they have paid billions to in bribes. Al Capone fashion, Microsoft and Oracle are still expecting a return on their corrupt payments.
The age of the 'tommy-gun' gangsters ended when a new breed of vastly smarter criminals arose. Google is infinitely more evil than Microsoft, but Google is today's 'criminal'. The gangsters that came after Al Capone ensured they had massively greater aspects of legitimacy to disguise their growing criminal networks, and Google is the same. There is nothing dishonest about Android. Why on Earth should anyone be paying anything for a modern OS, when the code for that OS is mostly provided for free by individuals and companies? Just so filthy old Bill gates can get richer, and invade the privacy of your children even more with his projects to share every last personal detail from your child's school with ANY third party willing to put money into Gates' pocket?
Open source is a big winner in Europe (you know, the place where the modern Internet was invented). Sure, European politicians have enjoyed the giant bungs from MS and Oracle, but these have been old corrupt men on their way out. The vibrant dynamic part of European Humanity (from top to bottom) has no time or sympathy for the dinosaur IT criminals like Microsoft. They are hungry for the real 'new', not the laughable old-man 'hipness' of crap like Windows 8.
Microsoft, Intel, and those that need to cling to the shirt-tails of either or both, are going to wither and die. ARM and AMD will eat every aspect of Intel's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, kills itself by refusing to move to the successful business models of today and tomorrow. MS' last 'great' business strategy is to CLONE every aspect of Apple's business methods without any regard to why this could possibly benefit Microsoft.
People like Windows, and the Windows ecosystem on the desktop. They do NOT like Microsoft coercing them to 'upgrade'. They do NOT like being told that perfect versions of Windows (like XP) can no longer be used. They do NOT like MS paying armies of shills to fill forums with posts attacking users of 'older' MS products. They do NOT like crippled versions of Windows (like RT), or proper versions of Windows configured to force people to opt for the crippled 'Metro' interface. When MS attacks Android, it simply makes all Windows users dream of the day when Android can replace Windows on the desktop. Google and ARM will ensure that day comes no later than the end of 2014.
Now there's something you don't see everyday..
Open Source - GTFO Microsoft.
Standard Oil managed to be competitive enough consistently lowering prices from 1969 all the way until it was broken up
That is a terrible excuse for a metric, there. Standard Oil wasn't competing, they were just seeing reducing costs because they were tapping in to new oil fields all the time. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this planet we live on has a limited total volume, and eventually a point was reached where the amount of oil that was being tapped easily was starting to decrease while the more difficult-to-reach oil was the source of new reserves. Standard Oil just happened to be broken up very near that tipping point.
Besides, you free market fascists are supposed to be telling us that competition is good for the market, right? Half of the messages you have posted lately have been about how government is "choosing winners" and needs to let all the players run unobstructed. Here the government was lowering barriers to entry for new companies and you are attacking it. Of course this kind of hypocrisy is hardly new for you.
in the meanwhile it managed to turn Rockefeller into one of the richest people in history, making modern time billionaires look like poor children.
How is that good for anyone? What is the benefit to society when one person is unimaginably rich?
I don't know what you mean by innovation, but clearly that company was able to innovate better than anybody else
Holy unsubstantiated claim, batman! I can think of a large number of innovations that have come from the petroleum industry since the break-up of Standard Oil.
once Standard was broken up prices for their product have never gone down again, only up.
Depending on what you call "their product", one could say that it has indeed gone down on many occasions. Even more so, you are making an incredibly stupid assumption that the cost of a product with limited supply could somehow be prevented from eventually going up. Anyone who passed Econ 101 knows that as demand goes up - or as supply goes down - the meeting point of the two curves is one of higher price. I'm sorry you cannot grasp even this very simple economic concept.
I am also sorry that you still yearn for the times when giant companies like Standard Oil could hold a complete monopoly on a product and its production. You clearly endorse a company having unlimited power over the market and its employees. You clearly want to deliver more power to fewer people. You clearly want to bring fascism for the people.
I'm not a rah-rah-rah fan of big government. But businesses do get a position of power and ruthlessly exploit it.
Big government does not exactly have a stellar reputation in this regard, either. The common element here is that centralized power tends towards tyranny...you may like your benevolent dictator today, but things can change by tomorrow.
If anything Android is under serious threat, by both manufacturers that refuse to release phones with unmolested Android as they want to differentiate and carriers that long for the good ole days of a locked down, zombified OS.
Ironically, what Android is *not* threatened by is the stillborn WinPhone.
At the end, is it difficult to change the code? I never try changing the code, but I believe the most difficult part is to move away from Google Market/Google Play.
The whole purpose of using Android (to me) is to find more apps from Google Play, and if the tracking/monitoring system is within Google Market/Google Play (daemon), then it makes no difference for me to change the Android source code. I might even use a BlackBerry if I can use those Google apps with it (and still be tracked). So the real question is, is it really about Android OS? All these MS complains, is it about the OS? Or is it because the Google Play platform that hook up with the Cloud system that may give Google a much powerful connection to the digital world?
Yes, you are missing something. That something being you are a lying piece of shit. Your phone came with Google search prominently displayed right in the middle of the fucking screen.
A long long (long) time ago, you would go to the butcher, and you would weigh a piece of meat on the butchers scale, and a little tiny piece weighed 95 pounds, yet on your scale it said 2 pounds. At some point, the government (that darn government) weighed in, and forced everyone to play by the same rules, and made your scale and the butchers scale show the same amount, and likewise everyone elses, so what was 2.5 pounds here, was 2.5 pounds everywhere. For its first 15 years, the internet was the wild west. No standards. What worked on internet exploder was broken everywhere else, and predatory monopolies tried to break other peoples experience (and were successful for a long time). Finally open standards and competition means Firefox and chrome show W3C standardized pages like everyone elses. The mobile market is the wild west now. Interoperability? Hello? Phone chargers that look like a mini USB connector? Apps that you download once and can run anywhere? Phones that let you switch networks easily? Not anywhere in sight. There are no standards, and everyone is whining and bitching, yet they all offer their exclusive proprietary crap inside a walled garden. Now in this case, Apple and Microsoft are bitching the loudest, yet they have the most proprietary crap, and the biggest walls around their gardens. People perhaps chose android because its open, phones can be unlocked, and data pulled and moved most easily. I am willing to bet the data formats for the android stuff are easily available, but the data formats for Apples and Microsofts are not. Rat bastards! Likewise, they offer 'converters' to take customer open-format data, and turn it into their proprietary crap, but would find it 'impossible' even under court order to make a program that exports from their proprietary crap format to and open format. Rat Bastards!! My hope is that the EU tells them to suck it!
> even though almost all outbreaks of food borne illness occurred as a result of improper hygiene at companies already inspected by the USDA
Fucking A! The answer is obviously that NO companies should be inspected! Let the free market sort out those meat packing companies that occasionally kill people from those that kill people more often!
You're as free as anyone to buy a different phone.
And if you're complaining that the programs you bought aren't portable, then you'd better get Apple and Microsoft in court NOW.
I am sure that you are always there to make the same argument about communism, too.
And your analogy sucks. It does not quack like a duck, it is not shaped like a duck, it has different colors than a duck--what we have instead is a turd that you keep insisting is a duck. It is not a scotsman fallacy because there are clear definitions as to what capitalism is and isn't. As with most disagreements, though, this comes down to the starting premise...what is the definition of capitalism? Is it only Laissez-Faire, pure capitalism or does state capitalism get grouped in, as well; something that any libertarian would argue is not?
You see child, grown-ups make arguments based on logic and reasoning and not by making ad hominem attacks (another important logical fallacy that you should know about).
The EU manufacturers being Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle.
Not yet, there is "Kingsoft Office", which keeps improving with each new update.
While improving with each update is good (Microsoft ME, Vista, etc...) in principle, it doesn't necessarily make Kingsoft Office usable or worth considering. What is the current status of the suite, how often are updates released, are the improvements noticeable, etc, and so on?
Perhaps these fuckwads should read up on the Android Open Handset Alliance first? From the FAQ
If the Open Handset Alliance is giving it all away for free, how will the platform be differentiated?
Because the Apache license does not have a copyleft clause, industry players can add proprietary functionality to their products based on Android without needing to contribute anything back to the platform. As the entire platform is open, companies can remove functionality if they choose. Applications are not set in stone, and differentiation is always possible. For example, if you want to include Hotmail instead of Gmail, it will not be an issue.
(emph. added)
Not yet, there is "Kingsoft Office", which keeps improving with each new update.
While improving with each update is good (Microsoft ME, Vista, etc...) in principle, it doesn't necessarily make Kingsoft Office usable or worth considering. What is the current status of the suite, how often are updates released, are the improvements noticeable, etc, and so on?
It was last updated on March 8, 2013. 47,000 users give it 5/5 stars, with hardly any negative comments. It's free, compact (less than 5 mb), seems to be the best office suite available for Android, though I personally haven't explored it in depth yet. :-)
Or maybe he is saying that no matter what political/economic system you choose, no matter how 'perfect' or 'pristine' it starts out as, it will end up perverted by those in power.
Android is nothing more than Linux w/ a custom UI. Nokia had it's opportunity with Linux [Meego] and chose to abandon it. Oracle markets it own version of Linux. When it comes down to it, Microsoft is free to follow Facebook's lead and build a phone around Linux as well :)
Microsoft should have used that argument about Netscape. "If you don't like it, release your own operating system where you integrate your web browser into it."
Standard Oil managed to be competitive enough consistently lowering prices from 1969 all the way until it was broken up
Are you measuring these prices in intrinsically valuable rhodium or palladium backed currencies, or inflationary paper theft money?
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Let's assume that the complaint is upheld. The following year, Microsoft complains about free linux being a trojan horse. And Oracle complains about free MariaDB and free PostgreSQL being trojan horses.
A lot of compainies fear Open Source. This isn't a new idea either. It was present 9 years ago when Bill Thompson wrote about SCO for BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3537165.stm
> At the moment Microsoft is under attack because GNU/Linux is an operating
> system which can replace Windows.
> But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on
> those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open
> source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see
> Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
... in Microsoft's opinion, I don't think there's much preventing them from open-sourcing their own software to get that same advantage.
Certainly. But I'm not trying to argue that big government is inherently better than unfettered capitalism, just that unfettered capitalism has problems too.
Or OSX vs Windows?
Mac OS X users have been able to dual boot Windows for more than half a decade.
Or Xbox 360 vs PS3 vs Wii?
This isn't the same thing either. With consoles, it isn't too inconvenient to keep the old console around to play old purchases, and it isn't any more expensive to keep two consoles on a home WLAN than one. With mobile devices, on the other hand, more platforms means more physical bulk and weight, and more phone platforms means more cellular voice and data plans, especially in the United States where CDMA2000 carriers don't use CSIMs.
The notion that Android being a "trojan" is in itself a very very sick joke
That this insanely inane thing be turned into an official complaint submitted to the European Commission (EC), and that EC actually accepted this utterly ridiculous complaint is so mind-boggling that I can't help but to wonder the true usefulness of the European Commission in the first place
What is the use of an "European Commission" if anybody (with deep pocket) can submit any kind of complaint - even the frivolous ones - and the EC has to waste time and effort and money to decide on the complaints ???
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Because Microsoft was giving away their OS?
> I am sure that you are always there to make the same argument about communism, too.
Absolutely. In fact it was in arguing with communists that I first realized that libertardians make almost identical arguments when talking about economics.
And sure you can "define" a duck to be a large four legged spider with bat wings, but if you never actually SEE one by that definition then no, it still isn't a duck.
> You see child, grown-ups make arguments based on logic and reasoning and not by making ad hominem attacks (another important logical fallacy that you should know about).
LOL. So you basically admit that you got nothing? Dipshit.
The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
Really?
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US? Or Standard Oil the oil monopoly? Do you support Intel's antritrust actions against AMD, or Microsoft's antitrust actions against general computing and IT progress? What if the SEC ceased to exist and business to manipulate markets for their own profit-driven motives and muscling out competitors and small-name investors (in fact, if they were doing a decent job, then there wouldn't be valueless high-frequency trading either)? How about the FCC which has been somewhat preserving net neutrality, and ensuring that electromagnetic devices don't cause interference with other users of the EM spectrum? Does the FAA serve no purpose in ensuring that people can fly safely (you can argue that they go overboard, but it's better than the opposite extreme? Do you think the EPA serves no purpose as well? and the FDA? Do you think the US is better off as it is with an unregulated health insurance industry, compared to (other) developed nations?
It's not unreasonable to think that government regulation in any country is a hassle or is not done properly. But to suggest that all government regulation is bad is stupid.
And finally, if you're so worried about the common man, do consider that unregulated capitalism will pretty much always gravitate towards a concentration of wealth at the top which pathologically exploits and oppresses all other social and wealth classes; at that point, a capitalist economy is indistinguishable from a fascist whatsit.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Yes, we can probably be assured it's just the usual semi-innocent profit-seeking capitalism encourages us to partake in.
I do find it amusing they chose to single out Google, though. It's really the pot calling the kettle black, although time-lapsed by a decade or so.
Personally, I think they should have targeted Apple if they were going for the "Hail Mary" approach to deal with their own unpopularity.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
All M$, oracle and nokia have to do is come up with a better free OS, with more and better apps. They either can't, or more likely don't want to have to try. Oh Wait...M$ did try with their Surface tablet running Win8. Too bad it is quickly becoming the Zune of the tablet world, just like their Windows Phone 8 did... Nokia is gonna go the same way now that M$ owns it. Oracle has made nothing but bad decisions since the bought Sun, so no one trusts them either.
So if you can't compete honestly on the quality of your products, you try to litigate the competirors out of the market like (Cr)apple, or now complain that the competitor has an unfair advantage? All of the above mentioned companies have made their own beds (of nails) and now don't want to have to lay in them!
There's Microsoft Office for Android now?
Not yet, there is "Kingsoft Office", which keeps improving with each new update.
Thanks, it's free so I'll check it out.
One of the biggest problems with stores touting umpteen million applications is that it's hard to find gems that get buried under thousands of crappy talking cat or sepia filter applications... Until someone comes along and points it out for you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The price of oil dramatically *declined* in Standard Oil's heyday, specifically because monopolies are generally more efficient in distribution than competing parallel networks. Similarly, developing for a fixed platform like Windows rather than trying to support MacOS, OS/2, etc. is more efficient. Where it is weaker is that monopolies are generally slower to adapt and innovate - Ma Bell wouldn't have LTE at this point for instance and an unthreatened Microsoft might have kept Vista or Win7 for a long time like they did with WinXP.
Yes, you are missing something. That something being you are a lying piece of shit. Your phone came with Google search prominently displayed right in the middle of the fucking screen.
Oh, you saw my phone when I bought it. mr. polite person?
HTC Sense is a multi-screen UI, and the phone doesn't have a very large screen, since it's not one of the modern-day units that thinks it has to be a tablet-in-a-pocket
If Google Search was ever on the home screen, I removed it, because it isn't now and hasn't been there any time recently.
Not quite the same thing as having a Bing search right smack in the middle of things.
I wasn't lying. I really don't have any Google-specific widgets on the home screen, and Google didn't force me to.
No, let the free market (and lawsuits) shut down those big companies that are too big for the consumer to know whether or not they produce food that is not safe for human consumption. Before government regulation of meat packing every town had two or three butchers, you would know the person who packed the meat you ate. If someone got sick because Jerry the Butcher did not clean his equipment properly, people stopped going to Jerry the Butcher, or more likely, if Jerry the Butcher didn't properly clean his equipment word would get around town long before anyone got sick and he would lose customers. Very few people bought meat that was packed a long way away because no one trusted it. The exceptions would be that sometimes people bought from a local butcher who bought from those big meat packing plants, but people would expect the local butcher to check out where he got his meat from.
Ultimately thought the problem is that the way government regulators deal with a problem is that when a big company is the source of a food borne illness outbreak the government introduces new regulations that they require everyone to follow, even though it usually turns out that the problem was caused by that big company ignoring the regulations that were already on the books. If the big company was already ignoring the regulations why would anyone think that new regulations would help?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US?
You mean the monopoly that the government helped them acquire in the first place? The monopoly that government regulations kept in place for so many years? The only reason it required government intervention to break up AT&T was because government regulation built AT&T in the first place.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm not a historian, but I imagine that the USG didn't fund AT&T to create a monopoly. Instead, they invested in AT&T as a private sector contractor to build a telecommunications network which they then managed as a monopoly (perhaps in collusion with a portion of the government). It's still the government/the public/the people's voice (back when it actually was a voice) that broke it up. You can't just trust the private sector to be nice people and do it to themselves. Greedy people are inherently evil.
But now that you bring it up, the internet itself also originated from government funding and development, except that flourished because they gave that money to universities rather than private corporations to build up; and then of course the private sector came in and started managing more and more of the network, and then started consolidating, effectively creating a monopoly/duopoly in pretty much all areas. The Supreme Court's mistake didn't help when they ruled that cable companies don't have to share their lines. Again, if the people had any voice in the US anymore, that horrible mistake could have been fixed by now.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well. Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
At&T did not become a monopoly because of government funding but because government regulators managed the regulations intentionally to favor AT&T over its smaller competitors in the early days of telephony. If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up. For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
And the best part is, most of the built in components have drop-in equivalents -- even without rooting or custom ROMs.
For example, if Garmin developed their application properly, their GPS navigation can be seamlessly replaced by the user (or the mfg) with about 3 clicks - (Install, select Garmin, click Always). This also applies to the browser, music player, and pretty much every other "built in" (Gapps) software.
This can't be said for most other platforms.
Just a random comment, but if Windows Phone uses the NT Kernel, I would find it hard to imagine it not having low latency recording given the presence of massive amounts of pro-audio apps for Windows. Or is that a function of DirectX or some other add-on which isn't present in the Windows Phone version of the kernel?
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I feel sure the European Commission and USA FCC/FTC... know Google's Android is a Linux distribution with community services and support.
I feel sure Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle and others continue to not innovate and compete with Open Source Software business models and companies.
There could be a Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle or other Mobile...Intel... Linux distribution, but (IMO) anti-capitalist and closed-market icons like Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle spend their time and money on lobbying governments and writing laws for passage by corrupt/stupid/treasonous politicians to maintain market share/control.
When one of US/EU is fycked, so are we all serviced in like mode! Bring back democratic capitalist meritocracies, hang a C*O or politician.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I'm not sure if it's due to lack of direct access to the hardware on other platforms, or something else, but Apple is the only one who's successfully done this on mobile. It was a design goal that nobody else had and they had already done it on the desktop with Core Audio. Yes, pro audio has had tremendous success in the past few years on Windows with low-latency audio. Almost everything is selling much better on Windows now and most of the former Mac-only manufacturers are going cross-platform. It's gotten so much better that it's taking market share back from Apple (I think I saw a figure of 70% of studios are on Win7 x64 now), but that's not thanks to the platform-specific APIs. WINAPI isn't exactly useful for realtime priority I/O and leaves you having to roll your own implementation to avoid a lot of issues like dropouts at short buffer lengths needed for realtime. There are a lot of pieces that were not ported from the desktop to the phone. DirectX is a bit better, but I don't think it's fully-featured on the phone, and it's still going to have too large of a buffer for realtime audio processing. Typically, high-end Windows studio applications license Steinberg's ASIO technology to provide low-latency multichannel audio I/O via specialty audio hardware and drivers, but that's not a trivial expense. ASIO4ALL helps but it's just a driver wrapper and you're still subject to the limitations of your audio hardware. Phone audio hardware could be the reason, I suppose, but I think it's more of a design goals issue - it wasn't meant to do that, so it wasn't built with that capability. Android doesn't have it because the kernel doesn't have that feature yet. Android 4.1 and 4.2 are approximately equal to DirectX's performance but it's not quite low enough for a high quality experience yet.
What's the latency picture look like on WinNT? I find it hard to stay precisely on rhythm with more than 7-8ms of latency. I run at 4ms with an ASIO device and multiple streams. Some people want less, and I've heard of 2ms. DirectX mode usually gives me 20-30ms at best. That's fine for voice chat and gaming. MME/WDM (aka WINAPI) is more like 100+ms one way. That's only useful for multimedia playback and some games. It gets to the point where you play a note and then you hear it echoed back after a noticeable delay. Add a couple of effects processors in the middle, and it can add up to a second or two of latency.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies [citation needed]. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well [citation needed].
Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
Absolutely false, and a counterexample would be the many airline companies which operate that the FAA has to regulate for operator and passenger safety. The purpose of government regulation is not to manipulate the market as a whole; it is instead to ensure that no single or small number of entities manipulate it for their own personal interests at the expense of consumers. This is why we have privacy probes into Google, apart from the several examples that I mentioned in my initial post, where numerous government agencies which have stepped in to ensure better markets for consumers. Anyone with the slightest understanding of economics understands that the profit motive will drive companies to consolidate, which leads to greater market influence and position, and therefore allows them to parasitically offer fewer services and charge more. It is this VERY purpose that antitrust regulation is meant to prevent.
If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up.
This is completely hypothetical and refuted by the many examples of trusts which were broken up by the government in other examples. To repeat: Net Neutrality, Standard Oil, Microsoft, many price-fixing schemes (DRAM, LCDs).
For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
This is once again completely hypothetical and lacking citation.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Um, why hasn't anyone taken Apple down for the deliberate lockdown, lockout policies it has engaged in for the last 8 years?