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My opinion on that is well-known, but I'm wondering what you think about it and whether you would characterize these challenges as monopolistic and/or a hindrance to developers and users. 2/2

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I don't think they should be forced to support installing other OSes on their own phones at all. Pixels have a tiny market share. Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to provide Pixel exclusive advantages from their other services, such as free photo storage, but beyond that...

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... it all has to do with Play services and the licensing arrangements for it. Don't really see much that's anti-competitive about Pixels themselves aside from minor cases where they offer advantages to using a Pixel based on their services like past free photo storage deals.

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The reason I ask is that other monopoly cases have relied on looking at specific products as hardware+software combos. This was true re: Microsoft ruling and x86, and one of the reasons Gates was asked about alternative OS's and if there were barriers to installing them on x86 1/

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It was also why "Linux" was mentioned as part of the claim that Microsoft was not a monopoly. I'm interested in the Google product line partially for this reason, but also some other potential legal arguments re: consumer protection I've been ruminating on. 2/2

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Their monopoly is on push notifications, search, maps, and the other APIs they provide to apps. Apple has a similar monopoly on their own platform. Both are highly anti-competitive. They advantage their own apps and services in ways that aren't available to other apps.

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Due to their monopolies on these APIs / services, phones without Play services aren't competitive, and their design prevents users from installing it on an Android compatible device. It has to be built into the OS with those special privileges unavailable to other apps.

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Should be possible for a company like Amazon or Facebook to do a lawsuit about the push service alone. They should be able to offer a competing push service that's not disadvantaged (Android) or completely incapable of working (iOS) without wrapping the Apple / Google services.

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Though I agree on all points, Google still has strong arguments supporting the right to provide that functionality exclusively via Google services (and there are many precedents). This is esp. true since alternatives exist, however bad or limited (Websockets, SSE, OpenPush, etc.)

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it's going to be a tough fight, I think moreso because Google is prepared to defend nearly every aspect of Android because they're battle-hardened from the fight with Oracle.

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I don't think there's much that's relevant from the fight with Oracle. That case has been about whether the software industry as a whole will be able to continue in the US based on whether APIs can be copyrighted and whether reimplementing them is fair use. Not really connected.

7:31 AM · Oct 21, 2020Twitter Web App

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right. but you're thinking too technically :) I mean in the sense that their legal team has looked Android up down and sideways and thought through arguments and counterarguments for any scenarios they will likely face in regard to Android. Over the course of years.

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Doesn't mean they will win. It's not looking good for them or the rest of the US software industry (Oracle included) based on how that Supreme Court case seems to be going. Seems the software industry as a whole has made bad assumptions about how copyright law will be applied.

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