You don’t pre-emptively punish people not causing harm. That’s a bad way to go.
Please let an outcome from this enable users to change the default Android search from Google search 🙏
Nice… Now do it… Break them
No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they’re eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn’t get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we’ll see more of it.
They’ve got Amazon in the works
Would be nice if we didn’t let them kill off so many other businesses first before doing something about it.
Steam…
SHHHH!!!
Monopolies and authoritarians aren’t bad as long as people like them! Hadn’t you heard?
Join a decentralized platform because fuck Spez, defend a centralized platform because yay Gaben!
Their market dominance isn’t because of anticompetitive practices, it’s because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
people like it
So?
So if people trust a platform it’s hard to build an anti-trust case because the owner has a majority share.
It’s okay if you don’t like them for whatever reason, but comparing them to google, apple and Disney is ignorant at best, dishonest at the very least.
Rethink this stuff before you put yourself up as a reactionary lmao
Alright then, let’s do nothing until Newell dies and they become controlled by someone else that people don’t like as much, maybe you guys will wake up then.
Rethink this stuff before you put yourself up as a reactionary
immediately reacts
“Let’s wait for them to start doing illegal stuff before we use the law against them.” Yeah, of course.
So let’s wait for the behemoth to really hurt the market enough that we notice it before we do something to prevent it from happening.
And people wonder why the world is turning to shit.
Majority also like Google. Like it or not, they still provide the best search engine.
Lol, they absolutely do not. Their search results have turned to shit.
What’s a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
My current favorite search engine. Just pick one that’s running out of your country or close to it. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me.
I bought a Kagi subscription within hours of finding the site. They’ll eventually enshittify but they’re very good for now.
I’ve been using kagi for a few months (6 according to my bank). It is paid. It is great. It’s so good I’ve switched my wife to it since Google was giving her a lot of garbage (she’s a non techie) and she says “it feels like Google used to be. The answers are what I was looking for. I forgot I was using Kagi”
There are lots of articles about how they make their search results worse on purpose for more profit. They alter search queries on the server side to give results for a search which is more aligned with an advertising partner. They inject AI into search results which can be wildly wrong.
I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.
Thing is we can’t know for sure they’re not abusing their power… Oh wait, we can in fact!
Game price is based on wanting a return on investment after a certain number of sales, the amount of money needed to make a profit is based on the development cost, every time someone in the distribution chain takes a cut the price increases. Valve takes a 30% cut and that’s enough to have made their owner a billionaire, those billions come from money you and me and all other Steam users spent that we didn’t need to.
It’s the same logic as in any other market, the only difference is that other companies are trading publically so people get angry because their numbers are public and we can easily see that they’re making billions in profit off of us to enrich investors, well with Valve there’s only one investor.
And again, do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance? Newell could die tomorrow and the company could then be made public and turn to shit, what then? “Dang, we should have done something while we had the chance I guess…”???
Steam isn’t actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
You don’t need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there’s Apple and Linux that get market shares.
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having good on 70% of the market isn’t a good thing?
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn’t sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
It’s in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they’re not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don’t worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire… so maybe you should be angry about that if you don’t care about the rest.)
Have you read the filings? The complaints are that steam listings for a game have to match the lowest price for the game, that keys can’t be sold for less than the steam listing (I’m not really sure how this is a different thing from the low pricing), and that steam takes too big a cut of the proceeds. That last one is particularly hilarious, in that they are bringing this lawsuit to a court that respects USA business laws, which pointedly do not hold that ‘being too greedy’ is a problem (outside of price-gouging laws, which are not relevant here…)
You know anyone can be sued for anything right?
Being sued doesn’t mean a damn thing, the case judgement is what matters.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?
Hot take: if they aren’t hurting me or others, money wise or not, I don’t care if they have majority market share. In this case it makes sense, they treat their customers right and don’t bully the market.
This simply isn’t the fight.
But they’re hurting you, their market dominance means they don’t have to compete for pricing, the reason Newell is a billionaire is because the games they sell are sold for more than they’re worth.
You know Valve doesn’t set the prices right? The developers do
The devs determine they need to sell X copies at Y$/copy, they then calculate what Valve’s cut will be and add it over Y$
Example: You think you’ll sell a million copy and want to make 10 millions to recoup your cost and make a profit so you need 10$ per. But the truth is that after everyone else gets their cut (publisher, distributor, taxes…) you’re left with about 50% of the sale price going to you, that means your need to sell the game for 20$ to end up with 10$/copy going to you. If everyone else had lower margins and you got 70% of the sale price ending up in your pocket you would need to sell your game for 14.30$ a copy to end up with 10$ going to you. Everyone else in this example are the people who aren’t part of the actual development cost, their margins are huge compared to the amount of work they accomplish, the proof of that is that they’re making billions in profit, profit is revenue - cost, their cost is basically nothing, hosting content and distributing it costs peanuts these days and prices are only going down, so their profit is actually increasing passively over time.
You don’t get to decide for me who I think is or isn’t hurting me, I do.
With these takes, what I really want to know is: Who hurt you?
Oh so you believe that margins high enough that the owner is a billionaire don’t hurt your wallet?
You say that like your only option is to buy games from steam.
There are many other online stores you can use. Sorry you don’t like the most popular/oldest/one that reflects the wishes of the consumer the most.
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
Do PG&E
I still don’t understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn’t the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK PG&E
Fuck them. If there was ever a case to be made for government owned utilities (and like why is that even a debate in the first place?) these assholes would be the poster child.
Because the governor owns a looot of shares. It’s just basic blatant corruption.
I don’t think they’ll ever do anything serious to apple. That shit is untouchable.
The food companies fly low under the radar. They definitely need a wake up call.
Cable companies too please.
Fine: About $3.50
Punitive damages: lol
The fine isnt important, its if any breaking up of the company comes of it
Maybe we should not let companies to work in a lot of areas. For example Amazon, SaaS IaaS Paas Ecommerce, ARM processors, among others. Maybe we should contain megadiversified enterprises??
Not sure why ARM is on your angry list. They are more than happy to sell rights to other manufacturers. As far as I can tell, they have not done anything wrong, yet.
The example is Amazon who have their own ARM CPUs for their datacenters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS_Graviton
FUCK YEAH!!! NOW BREAK THOSE BASTARDS UP!!!
Might not do much for the upcoming Manifest v3 doomsday but at least the current government recognises the ills of big tech as it currently stands.
But is this just tactics to win an election? Will they go the distance on any trust issue, or is it all vapour?
You don’t need to bring your library. Having your library split between multiple platforms isn’t a big deal and most people do it. You just don’t give them any more money.
People didn’t not buy DVDs because they had a library of VHSs.
Uh yes many of us did not buy dvds because we had vhs and couldn’t afford to switch to a new medium.
Just like if we had a dvd collection we didn’t go to HDDVD / Blueray. Many people never got into Blu-ray at all
But eventually we had to and now we have issues with drm and losing purchased digital media on streaming services
I’m not talking about replacing your VHS collection but buying DVDs in addition. You would still watch both. Maybe buying a DVD player was a barrier. But it wasn’t that you owned VHS.
Yes it was for many many people. You seem to find this hard to believe.
Blueray/HDDvd was out before the majority of people stopped using their vhs collections.
As tvs went digital and high def it took a long time for people to care enough to upgrade/replace
Blueray/HDDvd was out before the majority of people stopped using their vhs collections.
Do you have a citation on this? Personally I was DVD only until I got an Xbox One, which could play Blurays.
And we got DVDs because my brother marketed getting a PS2 to my family as a DVD player and a Video Game system, as one of those alone cost the same as a PS2 at the time.
And we gave up VHS tapes long before, as space is at a premium for us. Worse quality, worse features, more work to rewatch something, bigger format, etc.
Ok then switch to streaming. My point was just that just because you have a VHS collection doesn’t mean you can’t get media in another way and still use your VHS collection. And most people would use both while they transitioned. Throwing out all your VHSs for the hot new thing isn’t something a lot of people did. Or throwing out all your DVDs because streaming is a thing. People aren’t restricted to one thing.
Will this mean that no one will be able to pay to be the default search, or just that Google will no longer be allowed?
Honestly, Google is still the best free search even though it isn’t as good as it used to be… and if this ruling means that no one can pay to be the default then Google will still win based on name recognition and performance. Plus they will save money by not needing to give it to Apple.
The real loser here is Apple who is going to lose a fairly large revenue stream.
I imagine that, if regulators go hard enough, it’ll make sweeping changes company-wide. Google does a lot of anti-competitive behaviors that don’t involve money and are very sneaky, and as a result, we might see a lot of features be changed in the long term.
The biggest loser is Mozilla, who will lose about 80% of their revenue. If they enforce this, Firefox will pretty much be dead.
Okay, now loop in reddit’s bullshit exclusivity agreement to search results and make it so no one can favor any one search engine crawler or demand payment to be shown in search. If your content is publicly accessible it should be fair game to all.
Most companies will want their site to show up on other search engines but they knew what they were doing, you only search for it on google to find results because google’s own are an SEO ad riddled mess.
This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we’re years away from a final disposition.
For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.
Clarence Thomas is hiding behind a tree in a yellow suit rubbing his hands together for all the shit Google is gonna give to him to get this immediately overturned…
I was about to comment that this is going to be appealed, and unless something changes with SCOTUS, my money is in it being reversed to some degree.
Stop making me sad, sir!!!
depends on when it hits the supreme court, for sure.
didn’t someone just say google was ‘very bad’ and should be ‘shut down’? …someone that helped stack the court to its current composition?
Ooooooooooh shit. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Will go to SCOTUS, a few bribes will happen, then it will die.
‘Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century’ so far…
tbh i care more about meta because of EEE
Eee?
you need to get checked out, every fediverse user knows that means Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I thought it meant “Elegant Electric Elephant”
