I get the hate on Google. I use a degoogled phone and got rid of google everywhere else. But I am not a fan of this. Its their store. Imagine a goverment comes to your own grocery store that you built and tells you whose products to put where and how much to charge for them. Instead of trying to build an alternative to compete with Play Store we will give more power to goverments. Thats not good.
If that were all this was, sure. In your analogy though, Google owns 95% of the grocery stores and has deals with 90% of the food vendors that if they allow you to stock their brands they lose access to sell in the Google grocery store. That practice is anticompetitive, because it functionally prevents you from opening your own store to compete.
If your grocery store "willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct".. then you'd be actively and purposefully affecting the ability for anyone to "try to build an alternative to compete with [it]".
They aren't asking Google to use a specific price, what they are asking is for them to stop offering special custom-made deals under the table for some of the partners with the intent of preventing competition. Nobody is stopping Google from offering the same fees to everyone indiscriminately... the issue is when they pick and choose with the purpose of minimizing/discouraging competition. Particularly when they are already the biggest one in their market by a wide margin, so they have a higher power/responsibility than a Mom'n'Pop store.
You really need to read the article, and specifically the linked article within that details the court proceedings. Anticompetitive behavior is illegal, and Google did lots of it, and did so blatantly, and deleted evidence of doing so.
The 30% they charge isn’t the issue. The issue is the anticompetitive actions they took to keep themselves from ever having to charge less than 30%.
Problem is that it not really is “just a store”. By using the google store you get access to the google play APIs, which are upgraded separately from the device OS - which is sensible from a security perspective, but they also were created by google specifically for regaining control over what goes on on Android devices.
A lot of applications are needlessly tied to play APIs - either because that way is a bit easier, or just because google is good at marketing them, and the developer didn’t think twice about it. Some relatively basic APIs are part of google play - for example maps, which needlessly is tied to google maps. Unlike Android itself the play APIs are not opensource.
Yandex tried about a decade ago to re-implement the play APIs to keep such applications working without the play store, by utilizing other services providing the same functionality, and tried to get other companies to join them. I’ve visited the Yandex office in Saint Petersburg a few times to discuss that back then (just checked, most of that seems to have been 2014 - that year Yandex was sponsoring my Russian visa). The effort failed for various reasons, unfortunately - the big one being that doing this required reverse engineering API changes on every play update google was pushing to stay compatible. There’s the microG project around now, but it seems to be less ambitious than what Yandex was trying to do back then.
My point is, as long as at least the API for play services isn’t maintained in a way that allows full open source reimplementations - or better, google releases parts as open source where we can plug different backends in - “use a different store” is not really a possible solution for many.
This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered "system-level" and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.
You can't simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.
Yeah, things are getting to the point where just having a mobile device running Linux and using Waydroid for some useful Android applications is less painful than trying to make Android work.
Honestly, Mozilla doesn’t even have the resources to maintain a proper WebKit-based version of Firefox on iPadOS, when a large amount of the work is handled for them by Apple. (See, for example, the fact that it still does not support multiple windows, a feature that has been available since 2019.) It would seem a mistake for them to try taking on a much larger load of work when they can’t handle what they’ve already taken on.
The Verges coverage of this has actually been really good. Most other media outlets that have covered it at all have had 1 or 2 that demonstrated a superficial understanding of the conflict.
The verge has been regularly keeping up with what’s going on and seem to have a pretty good grasp on the issues.
They're DMing mods. No one else is doing the investigative journalism on this.
I think someone at The Verge is really committed to this, and with good reason. Reddit is showing what can happen when you invest your energy into a corporate platform.
Apple does not care and will never care about open source other than the bits it has to care about because they’re a part of Darwin, their core.
They’re a company offering a particular “experience” and open source products do not fit into that model well at all. I use apple phones because I’m partially blind and for a very long time the accessibility story on Android was a screaming nightmare (I’m told it’s got better) but I have no illusions that they’re anything other than a profit seeking MegaCorp with all that implies.
Imagine starting [a subreddit], hyping it up, patiently providing four-fifths of the content until people show up, moderating spam, moderating jerks, growing it gradually over time. Setting rules, establishing tone, running the weekly topical threads. Would you feel like that /r/whateverItWas existed because of Reddit the company? Would you feel like it fundamentally belonged to his Royal Highness Steve, and Steve was just delegating it to you to run? No! You started it! You shaped it! You collaborated with the people it attracted to make it what it is! Even those users – they could switch tomorrow to /r/whateverItWasTwo and you couldn’t do a thing about it – if they decided they didn’t like your vision for /r/whateverItWas, they would, so the fact that they’re still here is a kind of voting with your feet, it validates what you’re doing… To the extent that /r/whateverItWas exists as a thing within Reddit as a whole, to be run or misrun, managed or mismanaged? It feels like yours.
But at the same time, to an external observer – you can see how they would feel that this is pretty silly, right? The thing that’s “yours” is nothing but rows and columns in Reddit’s databases13, a series of flags giving you the power to moderate. The only thing you have is set in Reddit’s systems, a permission to edit stuff under a certain scope a bit differently than other users, wowee aren’t you important. It’s not you who has a license to the user posts, it’s not you who controls anything but a tiny little square of grass Reddit let you mow. You’re gonna protest over that? The world at large already doesn’t understand why you might volunteer for this work, why you might care enough to do it unpaid – you seem like a schmuck to them, a victim.
or a power tripper.
I’ll admit that some mods probably are on a power trip. A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited. They care about the online space they’ve built, not that they have a ban hammer and can wield it with prejudice. I’d imagine a lot of other mods are pretty similar. Knowledge about their niche community, though probably not as much as the people on r/askhistorians, a certain subreddit culture that they don’t want to collapse and fall apart… they’d rather preserve the online space they and many other people enjoy. Even if it just looks like free labor and power tripping to outsiders whenever they don’t want to just up and abandon Reddit.
Yeah, as someone who modded for several years, there were two insults people loved to throw at us: Either we were power tripping or we were janitors who didn’t matter.
Either of these were used whenever we enforced the rules of our community and kicked out people who didn’t want to play nice with the rest of it. Of course, they will never have a positive opinion of people who enforce a community’s rules.
And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind.
"And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind."
Who is asking them to leave it all behind?
The only way you can be part of a community is by being a mod?
If mods are feeling as wronged by Reddit as how they say they feel, why not resign as a mod and just join the community as a member?
I mean you would still be part of the community you say they hold so dear but in a different capacity.
I would think stepping down has some risks at the moment because you don’t know who’s replacing you. Someone who also cares about the niche topic just like you, or someone on r/redditrequest who just wants to collect the subreddit as their 483th moderated sub and won’t do anything? Less of a big deal if you have several mods, but if you’re the only one…
"I would think stepping down has some risks at the moment because you don’t know who’s replacing you"
You could literally give an notice to the Reddit admin or whoever you are in contact with that you disagree with the way they handle things, that you are gonna step down but would like to pick your replacement personally.
Reddit would likely agree because it means that they don't have to search for a mod themselves and if the mods have such a strong connection with the community than finding a replacement should be in the realm of possibility.
The whole striking saga gives a whole lot of "We tried nothing and we are all out of ideas" vibe.
"A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited."
Call it what you want. It is power tripping or having a sense of superiority or higher self for whatever reason.
Since when is Reddit the beacon of all that is right in regards of information? Why not pack up and start an community somewhere else?
Reddit is just a medium and nothing more.
The problem I have with these statements and the course of action overall is the following;
Why even protest? The most ironic thing should be that r/AskHistorians should know of all people what happens with mutinies or strikes that have weak or no resolve.
Why would you even strike when you would fold by the first sign of friction that is coming your way?
Just again, keep modding your community and ignore everything but don't act like they are so very wronged and need to have some sort of sympathy when they are literally happily providing labor...for free.
For example:
2 months ago there were strikes in my country regarding distribution centres of one or the biggest supermarket chain in the country.
In these distribution centres are working around 5500 people and 2700 of them are "migrant workers".
Quoting the union;
"The temporary workers in the distribution centers are almost all migrant workers. Hundreds of them have joined the strikes. That is special and very courageous, because they are in a weaker position and are often put under pressure to keep working."
The end result?
"After months of negotiations and eleven days of strike, the Union has achieved a result with the supermarket group. In it, salaries will increase by 10% and austerity of the Sunday allowance is off the table. Temporary workers also get more certainty about their schedules."
theverge.com
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