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A Judge Can Break Up Google Right Now. Will He?
(www.thebignewsletter.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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The breakup this is referring to is splitting off the Android operating system from the rest of Google.
Even if you split Android off from Google, the Play store is still the Play store, nothing would change except it wouldn't be under Google anymore.
There's a problem too saying "it's a monopoly", as long as Apple is running their app store and Google has theirs, there's no monopoly. Change phones. Problem solved.
On iOS at the very least, being unable to download apps from a source other than Apple is monopolistic behavior, as it does not allow the free market to determine what the added fee for app hosting and payment processing should be (versus an artificial 30% fee that bolsters Apple's profit margins), as well as limiting what apps are or aren't available on the basis of Apple's own app store policies. Apple can run their app store as they see fit, but as a consumer I should have to option to download apps from competing app stores.
We call this vertical integration. Basically looking at any process you can make a table of different services for the process on the y axis and different providers of those services on the x axis.
The more width you get, the better. It means high competition, and that's healthy for a market now if it looks like a needle vertically, you got a problem. This is when we move closer to Monopoly, where a process can only be down by one chain of services. No competition. This means, that one provider can do what he wants, as people are bound to this provider and have to make do. Cue price increases.
Vertical integration means making your services interoperable to a degree where other providers can't keep up. If there's no other providers, there's no competition. Now you got a monopoly. That is what vertical integration is in it's final form.
That's a massive change.
Google is an ad company, so they have a vested interest in knowing what apps you use, how often you use them, and perhaps even what you do with those apps. Splitting that off means the app store needs to sustain itself without the massive ad network (I suppose they could sell the data).
It could even be split three ways:
That way the Play store would need to compete with alternatives, like vendor-specific stores and FOSS stores. Whether that's desirable is certainly up for debate, but it would definitely be a significant change.
That's a duopoly, so no, the problem is absolutely not solved. If there were more than three phone OS options, I'd agree with you. But right now there are pretty much just two major ones, which means they can get away with a lot of nonsense because their customers really only have one other option.