
In other news: Pope's Catholic leanings revealed.
The US Department of Justice released a series of documents in its antitrust trial against Google yesterday, including documents that reveal Apple made its default search deal with the Chocolate Factory despite considerable privacy reservations. Among the dump of documents released by the DoJ Thursday was an internal Apple …
Your thoughts made me remember and laugh to create an update... "The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of mattress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted, but these days I just search on Google and print the results on a packet of paper sheets."
- A Brendan Behan quote updated after thinking about the normal Google search results that are 50% helpful and 50% adverts.
Exactly. Lumping Apple in with the rest of "big tech" reveals profound ignorance of what each company does.
Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet, or even large sections of it, to millions of people. Google, Amazon, and (sadly) Meta are. Nor is Apple a monopoly over anything except its own mobile-device app store, which is not a monopoly in its market either.
The only legitimate aggrieved party in Apple's case is developers, and even their grievances are limited to Apple's lies and capricious behavior in regard to its app store.
> Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet
Wait, what? You can't browse the Internet on an iPhone without using Apple's browser and they make sure not to allow any competition. They force you to use their store where ads is one of their biggest money maker, and they have absolutely no interpretability with any other OS. They hold users hostages to their ecosystem and they sell access to them to the highest bidder for $20B per year.
It could be, but other evidence has been published which suggested that Google's payments to Apple occurred in a context in which Google was very keen than Apple should not attempt to make a better one.And, of course, it's not just about search technology - that's part of a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the advertising business that funds it. There is also an allegation that Google's iron grip on the advertising market is also a competitive obstacle.
The court's decision won't simply affect Google (positively or negatively), it will set a legal benchmark for acceptable business practice. Or it will eventually - whatever the outcome it's the kind of case that's likely to be appealed.
There's a bit more to this. For Google's strategy to work it needs access to everything and everyone. They can't have large chunks of the population dark to them.
Apple's in the same boat but also a junior partner. Applications like Safari and iTunes have been available on non-Apple platforms but they haven't got a whole lot of traction outside the Apple ecosystem.
As for Google/Android etc. being a "Massive Tracking Device" the obvious question is "What took you so long to figure this out?". Its an extension of the old saw that "If the product is free then you are the product".
"Apple's in the same boat but also a junior partner. Applications like Safari and iTunes have been available on non-Apple platforms but they haven't got a whole lot of traction outside the Apple ecosystem."
Not been the case with Safari for a long time - there was a Windows version which was killed off at least a decade ago (it was actually not bad). iTunes for Windows is still available but they clearly have little interest in it and it's had no major changes for years.
Don't think either have ever been available for Android - there's a streaming Apple Music app but that's about it.
Google to Apple: "Here is $18,000,000,000. Now make Google the default search engine for iphone."
Apple to Google: "I guess you really are the best search engine after all!"
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' -- Upton Sinclair
From a purely business prospective it makes total sense for Apple to accept the several $bn from Alphabet to have Google as the default search. As if Apple wanted to develop their own search engine it would cost them money to develop and would probably take years before they would be seeing anything like $20bn a year profit from their own efforts.
"Thing is, Apple talks about its love of privacy safeguards and how much it thinks Google is a fiend with people's data, but take a look at how it operates in reality."
El Reg can slag off Apple as much as they like (and ohboy do they like) but Apple's investment in privacy and security of user data puts the majority of other companies to utter shame.
There's nothing altruistic about this; the motive is profit, pure and simple.
Reason #1: Apple mines their own user data to cross- and upsell other products from within the Apple ecosystem. Keeping this data secure and private means they are the only company that is able to do this. It is incredibly valuable for this purpose, and this value would be drastically reduced if other companies had access to it and as a result were able to better target their own products. Apple would effectively be enriching their competitors.
Reason #2: Apple uses data privacy and security as a major competitive differentiator - maybe their only real competitive differentiator. If user data were leaked, or Apple were found to be dealing in user data despite their stance, customers would desert them in droves. Not Chastity and D'Shawnay who want the cheapest device they can get on contract, don't care about privacy and don't spend any money anyway; Apple couldn't give two hoots about them. No - the customers who would desert them are the major companies and government institutions who pay Apple billion$ to get this peace of mind.
I use an iPhone while occasionally gazing jealously at the old featherweight Pixel 5 that sits on the shelf. However, the fact that iOS lets you block intrusive ads in Safari is enough to keep me there. The difference is stark if you open a page in Chrome via the Google Discover feed - mobile browsing is pretty much unusable anywhere without ad-blocking these days.
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Apple can't talk smack. They had a locked in agreement with AT&T for their iphone's for years. It is quite known that AT&T works with the Fed's and FBI to track calls and people with iphones. Lots of stories going back on this matter. AT&T, do you want to tell people why you have top secret server rooms that are locked up in cages, and why fiber is being split to run to those servers? Happen to be tracking people's internet activities as well?