European Union set to release anti-competition hounds on Google The European Union looks to be formulating plans to charge Google with anti-competitive conduct over the Android operating system. The move coincides with a flank attack on Google, with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp filing a complaint about the legality of the Alphabet subsidiary's search and news services. The grounds for the …
Quote 'They managed pretty well with their handsets before they became correctly perceived as old-fashioned bricks when the market flew past them.'End Quote
Reality check,
Apple produced a pile of over priced, over sized dung devoid of useful features for those who wanted a communication tool. Meaning I have been unable to find something to replace my increasingly elderly but still superior, (for me) old Nokia. But he ho dream on dazzled by the shear ugliness of something that constantly demands to be looked at while robbing you of your life. I never look at a phone while using it, because hands free allows me to avoid all that pointless hassle and get several days use even from the 8 year old battery. Oh, I do not have to worry about someone wanting to break its encryption, there is nothing to find on my mobile telephone phone. Try that on an Apple, iWhatever. How many times would that have to be regraded over 8 years and at what stupid cost?.
Do you know that robots.txt doesn't enforce anything? Maybe you can stop Google crawlers at the firewall, the issue is you want your news to be found, but also that search index bring people to your site, not someone's else. And here we get to another Google monopoly, the worst one, it controls access to contents and where they are found (at least for most of the Western world)... it can make you "disappear", or suck your blood out of you. Even Microsoft never achieved such power, despite controlling the desktop, but it aims was to sell more software of its, not controlling contents.
the issue is you want your news to be found, but also that search index bring people to your site, not someone's else
Google's crawlers announce themselves. It's a pretty easy job to create a subset of the data when a specific UA is received.
That way, you can control exactly what Google sees - and therefore what Google can show others.
Vic.
"Google diminishing News Corp's revenues? Not evil in my book."
The EU failing to do something about News Corp as well? Evil in my book. I find the Murdoch empire far more sinister than the Google one. Google makes it easy to find things. News Corp tries to make sure that the only things you find are what it wants you to see (it won't furnish you with the details of Whittingdale, for instance.)
"Do you believe Google is totally neutral about what you find? How naive... it already demonstrated it is not."
Google is a tiny bit like the Delphic oracle - you have to phrase the question carefully. But if you do, you generally get what you want. The Murdoch media don't exactly like you asking questions in the first place.
WTF
Go back and reread what MS were doing such as forcing PC makers to sale only with windows installed or not have access to windows, writing their code to cripple competitors software such as Wordperfect, preinstalling IE and making it near impossible to uninstall and so on.
In comparison Google have an ASOP version of Android that others such as Cyanogen use to provide their own version of Android without google included.
etc etc
WTF
Microsoft was doing it where the money was then - desktop productivity software.
Doubleclick (it is no longer the science driven company serving unobtrusive ads users liked and called Google as it was known prior to the Doubleclick merger) is doing it where the money is now - search, application store, advertisement and social.
There is bugger all difference.
Depends on the version of Cyanogemod you've got installed. If it's 7 there's still a ton of Google stuff pre-installed in the bare bones version. See https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Barebones#GApps_Note
That said, from the reduction in Google things in version 10, I suspect Google has been working to at least somewhat decouple itself from Android and instead rely on the licencing agreements mentioned in the article to get themselves installed after the fact
And MS fully deserved the ruling EU made then (even, if, believe me, WordPerfect and Lotus crippled themselves - I used them....)
Just Google today is acting the same way. Even then you could replace Windows on a PC if you liked - just, as you pointed out, most people use what they found already installed, and today on most mobile phones that's Android and its Google applications - very few will take the hassle of using Cyanogen or the like.
And while MS never controlled access to contents, Google does exactly that - while slurping your data also. That's why the Android monopoly is even worse than the Windows one.
When last did you look at AOSP? Apart from the kernel and some base libraries, the "standard" applications have been left to rot as Google moved more and more stuff into its "Google Play Services" black box. Even Cyanogen's given in and are now shipping Play Services and consequently, all the other Google apps that they're forced to bundle with Play Services.
tl;dr: AOSP is very far from offering remotely (commercially) competitive product.
"In comparison Google have an ASOP version of Android that others such as Cyanogen use to provide their own version of Android without google included."
Of course, without the Google binary blob, many functions are utterly crippled. It's not like you can say. I want the Play store and nothing else, you have to have all the other bollocks they force you to have.
Tried uninstalling all the crud, but leave the bits you want?
It's internet explorer tie in, just delivered in a clever way to avoid this sort of investigation.
It's open source just because Google wanted to spend little and took advantage of existing open source code, and upon it built its walled garden and left some bones for the FOSS dogs. After all its business is to slurp data and serve ads, not creating operating systems. It even attempted to steal Java in a worse way than MS did with Java.... but of course the version of Java made by MS was evil the version made by Google is holy...
How many successful commercial forks exist? None. Even Amazon went nowhere.
Why? Look at the Android license...
Even when Windows was dominating you could have used OS/2, if you liked. I did, I bought it. Many others preferred their pirated copy of Windows... then complained Windows was everywhere...
We'll have left the EU soon and then we can negotiate with international corporations as a small independent nation rather than a large, powerful trading block. I'll be glad of the extra protection that Theresa May and David Cameron give us once their hands are no longer tied.
"Your point is slightly undermined by the fact that both Cameron and May are members of the Remain campaign to keep Britain in the EU."
You have a point. The two right wing journalists, Johnson and Gove, along with their very rich friend Jeremy Hunt, will do a fantastic job when they have to negotiate with real, experienced politicians rather than just bullying teachers and doctors, and talking up the City.
I have bought and used Android phones since the Nexus 2 - basically because I was fed up with the other companies continuous efforts to install crap on the phone and up sell me with various services like email access. And then Google introduced the "Play Store" ... my Nexus 6 phone is now stuffed with apps that I do not, and will not, ever use.
I'd switch to another vendor except everyone else is worse ... but my actual voice to voice talk time on the phone is down about 80% over the last 10 years - I'm inclined to think that voice phones, like pagers, may be on their way out.
What I don't get that each and everytime Apple seems to get away with everything...
Is it the naievity or the dumbness of our European politicians to be convinced that the Apple devices (all iExpensives) are all-in-one packages that cannot we divided up?
That their (stock) hardware can only run iOS, and that iOS need the safari browser by default, and that the Apple store is the only store it can work with!?
That you, as a developer, NEED to buy a mac to develop iOS apps!?
That's a huge monopoly, for a company charging too much money for its devices, while being produced in questionable countries and working circumstances while not caring about the environment, and in the meantime giving a huge fuck you to all governments by avoiding taxes as much as they can.....
It's actually hugely strange to see all those designergeeks with a heart for nature and all things beatiful to blindly idolize this deceiving company....and so do politicians apparently...because that's what they all use and like (and know)....
"That their (stock) hardware can only run iOS, and that iOS need the safari browser by default, and that the Apple store is the only store it can work with!?"
What planet do you think you're living on?
You're expecting Apple to stop what they're doing and rewrite their development tools for MScrap because...why?
Why would Microsoft allow hacking on Xbox? Wouldn't the most popular hack ultimately be to enable the use of pirated content?
If you create all of the system, you get to write your own terms of use.
Therefore, Apple.
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