UK Investigation Says Apple, Google Hampering Mobile Browser Competition 14
Britain's competition watchdog has concluded that Apple and Google are stifling competition in the UK mobile browser market, following an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The inquiry found Apple's iOS policies particularly restrictive, requiring all browsers to use its WebKit engine while giving Safari preferential access to features.
Apple's practice of pre-installing Safari as the default browser also reduces awareness of alternatives, despite allowing users to change defaults. Google faces similar criticism for pre-installing Chrome on most Android devices, though investigators noted both companies have recently taken steps to facilitate browser switching. The probe identified Apple's revenue-sharing arrangement with Google -- which pays a significant share of search revenue to be the default iPhone search engine -- as "significantly reducing their financial incentives to compete."
Apple's practice of pre-installing Safari as the default browser also reduces awareness of alternatives, despite allowing users to change defaults. Google faces similar criticism for pre-installing Chrome on most Android devices, though investigators noted both companies have recently taken steps to facilitate browser switching. The probe identified Apple's revenue-sharing arrangement with Google -- which pays a significant share of search revenue to be the default iPhone search engine -- as "significantly reducing their financial incentives to compete."
Personally, I prefer choice. (Score:4, Interesting)
Once we have decided that Apple does not own the software market it creates through its hardware (which is to say, Apple is required to allow third party software be sold on its market store for use on its hardware), then it follows that they shouldn't be allowed to pull dirty tricks to push those options back off.
I understand that Apple makes some privacy guarantees that the third party software will break. So, Apple should just be upfront about the fact that only its software comes with those guarantees. It could provide a way to do a curated search of the store to find only software that lives up to Apple's privacy guarantees, while giving users a super easy and obvious way to skip that search and find other apps, if they don't care about the privacy guarantees.
That's what makes sense to me, anyway, as a way of balancing the interests of privacy, freedom, competition, and profit. Though I am open to hearing other perspectives.
What browser competition? (Score:1)
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Exactly the same as Microsoft. (Score:3)
Exactly the same as Microsoft does on the Windows Desktop. and yet there are no sanctions called for in that case.
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Since when does Microsoft prevent Firefox from running on Windows?
Because that's what Apple does. They require that all apps be distributed through their store, and refuse to distribute anything that doesn't use WebKit.
Microsoft might bundle a browser, and they might even provide APIs to make it easier to include a browser view in your app, but to my knowledge, they won't ban your app from the entire platform for using Firefox's engine, nor ban Firefox itself from the entire platform unless they rewrite it
Re: Exactly the same as Microsoft. (Score:2)
That is bullshit. Microsoft does not restrict and has never restricted what browsers you can install or what engine they use, on any platform. There are restricted versions of windows which can only install from their store, but you can unrestrict them and install from wherever you want. Not even any of their phone platforms ever prevented side loading.
You have no idea what we or you are talking about
Disagree - its ECMA and WC3 (Score:3)
It's the standards boards at ECMA (javascript) and W3C (html, web) for not proposing a new modern set of web standards.
Fixing the mess of HTML/CSS/HTTP/JavaScript/REST WebAPI without requiring a 10,000 file JavaScript framework to paper over the problem is needed.
- Multithreading built into the browser's code execution engine
- Reusable web controls without the mess of copy and paste code built into the ecosystem (not requiring a 10,000 file angular/react framework)
- Encapsulation of layout, styling and code built into the ecosystem
- Binding of code to visual elements built-into the ecosystem. Not matching on magic strings, manually having to hook event handlers to DOM elements
- Using something other than XML for the layout language
- Using a more modern communication protocol than HTTP with a small subset of well defined requests and responses. HTTP not found means, what, the URL not found, the WebAPI call did not find a customer in the database, ?
- Using a communication protocol not requiring authentication and/or authorization for each and every request. gRPC?
- Using a binary compatible communication protocol not requiring expensive binary -> text -> transmit -> text -> binary for each rquest
- Using a protocol which does not rely on multiple levels of data storage for routing, data, parameters, etc. - HTTP headers, request verb, url, url parameters, body data/mime type, body (text, json, xml, custom)
- Providing for built-in without special data handling, multi-part messages to handle large data transfers like file upload/download
EU/UK Rules: (Score:2)
You must protect user data at all costs, but you may not encrypt it (UK) and you may not use proprietary controllable systems to accomplish user data privacy. And if you do use proprietary system and they becomes popular, we will fine you. If you don't protect user data, we will fine you.
Sure sounds like these companies are going to get fined no matter what, so, just calculate into OpEx and move on.
Of all the problems in the UK (Score:2)
And this is what the government chooses to do with their time? Picking fights with Trump? Seems a bit childish to me
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Nobody mentioned Donald.
Of course it has to do with Donald...
Timothy Donald Cook, CEO of Apple https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Having solved every other problem... (Score:2)
Who gives a Rust f*ck? (see what I did there?) Nobody cares what browser they use. This is just a pretext to sue so they can milk the two companies for money.
Compete, with what? (Score:3)
What exactly is Apple's incentive to compete? Advertising? Their USP is privacy (which the UK government loudly complains about), not ad-ware. They have 1% of consumers, meaning while they have a captured market, the cash-flow won't trigger sizeable 'investment' in things like a Apple search-engine. Lastly, info-tech is a winner-take-all market: Advertisers will choose the biggest player, which will never be Apple search.
Apple created their own search-engine and they stopped for an obvious reason: they didn't have the scale (customers, advertisers, marketing) to make a profit. The UK can demand that Apple stop being rewarded for not owning a search-engine. But the consequence won't be Apple building a search-engine. Everyone will continue to use Google (or Bing/DuckDuckGo) and Apple already knows how the 'competition' ends.