How exactly does a jury trial work in a case like this? Aren’t juries supposed to be “peers” of the accused? How can a corporation be tried by a jury of its peers?
GPS, mobile network tracking, IP, region the device is sold in (us iphones have a block of plastic where everyone else has a sim card slot), apple store region.
Also VPN, fake apple store region. If detected during download/install also RF-shielding to prevent GPS and mobile network (if download, also needs a wifi signal inside the shield to download at all).
Lot of workarounds for lot of possible detections.
That doesn’t answer the question. Sure, in isolation, Android app ecosystem isn’t ideal. But it’s so so much better at allowing competition than the apple one.
From what i read about it, Apple has a walled garden but charges a flat fee for everyone and has no special deals. Everyone pays the same and they make a little money off of the store but also the hardware sold.
Whereas Google has been caught treating certain parties differently, such as Spotify, something called Project Hug, where they gave extra benefits to parties at risk of leaving the play store, among other unequal dealings.
So the crux of the question is not about the monopoly itself, but the fact that Google is treating market players differently and throwing its weight around to influence the market to its advantage.
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.
I’ve been trying to warn folks to store your precious* family photos locally. A ton of people are gonna be bummed when they realize their photos are being held hostage behind API or data transfer payment plans. Sure they will let you view a 50x50 thumbnail to prove the photos are still alive. All cloud photo storage will essentially turn into ransomware.
That is the wrong answer entirely. You should try to dictate prices to ISPs. The better approach is to work to increase competition. That will drive down prices and increase speeds.
Its worked in my city as prices for fiber are cheap and there is like 6-7 companies who will do it.
Telecom is a natural monopoly: even if you’ve got 6-7 companies marketing to the public, chances are only one of them is actually running the lines (maybe two, if we’re talking about both fiber and coaxial) and the others are just resellers. In other words, the competition is kinda artificial since the one with the infrastructure should (in theory – barring regulations disallowing it) always be able to undercut the others, who are just middlemen taking out an extra chunk of profit.
Although I guess you could argue that deregulation is better than the regulatory-captured status quo, fully regulating the telecom provider as the monopoly it is (if not nationalizing it entirely) would be inherently more efficient.
This is why I think that the lines should be owned by the municipalities (or a multi-community partnership) and access to them resold. Not even just for fiber, do all of them. The town already handles the water and the sewer, why can’t they lay the pipe for the gas?
They don’t need to be the ISP, or the cable company, or electric company, or whatever (though they can be). Just own and maintain the infra. Obtain right of way. Lease access.
Safety on the road has been improved so far by having public orgs and governments pressuring companies with regulations. Without them there would be no seatbelts and dashboards might still be dotted with stylish pointy metal spikes.
Unfortunately safety regulations have solely focused on the occupants of the concerned vehicle. It follows that any feature that protects the occupant at the expense of everyone else is still measured as a net positive. Ultimately this is leading to an arms race.
Vehicle safety needs to expand to the other side of the windshield.
Vehicle safety needs to expand to the other side of the windshield.
I would take it further and day that regulations should prioritize the safety of the people outside the vehicle over the people inside, for the simple reason that the people buying the vehicle already have a strong incentive to maximize their own safety, while they currently have zero concerns about the safety of pedestrians.
Pedestrians, on the other hand, don’t have the freedom to choose which vehicle runs them over, so it is up to regulations to advocate for them because nobody else will.
I’ve legit heard people say things along the lines of “The largest SUV or trucks are safer for Americans because it can hold up better in a collision with deer which we have a lot of.” (Because apparently large wildlife aren’t common anywhere at all in the rest of the world.)
They have a point though, and they’ll hold up especially well against a specific, extremely common subspecies of deer called “humans.”
Punish them for their complete inability to block spam calls. Million bucks per successfully connected call would fix it overnight and then our phone would be worthwhile as phones once again.
You realize the telcos themselves know exactly where the spam calls are coming from, right? You can be damn sure that functionality was a top priority from day 1 because (just like for all subscribers) they need to know the spammers’ usage in order to bill them for it.
They just don’t bother passing that information along to end users or law enforcement because nobody’s forcing them to.
They dont actually thanks to VoIP and other countries telcos being shit and pushing through whatever is sent with the call, which is exactly where that disconnect happens. Ive been in Telecom a long time, and the push to fix that problem was very real long before Indian scammers were spoofing calls for IT scams. Once you go to IP, the “real” link isnt there, and CID becomes no more than a data string which is no longer tied to anything physical as far as telecom infrastructure, which they have to accept in the current set up, which is why said the whole thing has to start from scratch.
The other issue is the way non ILECs send the CID is exactly how the scammers spoof, to cut that off, all CLECs would loose the ability to send CID data, businesses wouldn’t be able to send a main phone from their 3000+ extensions etc. Its far from a simple soulution which is why its still an issue.
You can be damn sure that functionality was a top priority from day 1 because (just like for all subscribers) they need to know the spammers’ usage in order to bill them for it.
CID data being injected has absolutely nothing to do with a line being used regardless of what the outbound DID actually is.
frequency of 'spam' calls should have significant gone down with the implementation of cid verification (stir/shaken). it has on all our lines; home and office--cellular and pots.
FCC recently begged congress to let them punish spam calls. It turns out that they currently have to research then forward to the justice department for it to do its own research then file an order against a specific name, then the company changes its name and throws the fine in the trash can, and the cycle repeats
For the last decade I’ve paid for high speed fiber cable from Comcast, and that monthly 1tb limit was a killer with a family. So I paid the extra $50 (for a few years, then $30 these last 2) for unlimited. All for a total low package price of $250. My buddy in a nearby town with better speeds and multiple options has never paid for this add on, because he has competition in the area. I had zero choice, there were zero network improvements in my area until this year when a new local fiber company started burying fiber in my area. Today I pay $100 for 2gb symmetrical unlimited internet, way cheaper than the $250 I’ve paid for years for a forced tv/phone/internet package.
I hope there’s a class action for this. Fuck Comcast.
there's enough ways around charges of 'discriminating' based on the disallowed criteria of household income or race, that it will still be 'business as usual' for providers. they'll use other excuses, such as differences in local market (competition) and population/customer density, or the 'extreme' costs of upgrading aging infrastructure in previously-"avoided" areas, which would be 'allowed'.
Geez really? I had no idea that pedestrians were so careless, what is it about larger trucks that makes people jump out in front of them.
I like to see things as an opportunity, and I think we can use this as a lesson to do things differently. Like, let’s make trucks louder so you hear them before you see them. More Turbo, and how about vertical tail pipe stack. Next we can increase the number of lights, and make them brighter so that everyone can see. Let’s add more cameras and computers so the driver can see their blind spots simply by looking at the command console screen. We can even make these features available for free for a small amount of non invasive advertising.
Do you remember how trains solved the problems of cows derailing trains. They put a guard on the front. So let’s make an even bigger steel bumper.
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