Rumor is that Elon is delaying "Twitter Blue" (whatever the hell it is this week) due to his "war" with Apple. Real life LOL.
@lauren A dispute with Apple about their 30% take? You don’t see that every Fortnite.
@Santaclaus @lauren I loathe how grey things can be sometimes, like when your heroes and villains end up on the same side, or even, when one party can be both at the same time on different issues.
Tim Sweeney's an underappreciated hero of the people, Elon's, of course, a dip****. And of course, Apple is far above and beyond competitors on privacy issues, but needs to get slapped down badly on antitrust grounds.
@ocdtrekkie @Santaclaus Antitrust efforts against "Big Tech" are now largely unvarnished political grabs by both the Right and Left. They don't care that the result would be worse for most consumers, only that they think their own speech models should prevail. You almost never hear consumers complain about the size of these firms, only the activists who have their own vested interests. Most consumers just want the damn tech to work, not be made even more complicated by antitrust aficionados. As for Apple and privacy, their privacy moves seem to have been mainly aimed at boosting their own ad revenues. But antitrust is not the answer.
@lauren @Santaclaus We're not going to agree on that topic *at all*, FWIW. Consumers may not "care" because they do not understand, but the complete obliteration of Google, Apple, and Amazon antitrust models would have wide-sweeping benefits for consumers. The hammer cannot be dropped hard enough.
@ocdtrekkie @lauren @Santaclaus
> but the complete obliteration of Google, Apple, and Amazon antitrust models would have wide-sweeping benefits for consumers
I'm feeling like that's the sort of assertion French Revolutionaries made before the Jacobins took over.
I can't be sure whether things would be better if the big tech companies were broken up by force of law. In the short run, my in-laws' Chromebook, which has been the absolute ideal platform for her, would no longer be supported.
From where I sit, that's not a boon.
@mtomczak @lauren @Santaclaus Why would you argue that her Chromebook would no longer be supported?
I would argue good antitrust enforcement would make it illegal for Google to release new products which prohibited, say, installing Firefox, but I can't imagine any regulation would bar supporting current product offerings. (And I think we've moved past the world where one could sell an OS without *a* web browser coming with it.)
@ocdtrekkie @lauren @Santaclaus I don't think anyone can guarantee to me that an antitrust shake up that broke Google into smaller companies would preserve the Chromebook. It's an integrated product---it uses Google's authentication, Google's operating system, and Google's web store. I, for one, am uninterested in risking all of those pieces not ending up in the same fragment of a restructured Google so they can continue to work together seamlessly.
@mtomczak @lauren @Santaclaus Unfortunately, I doubt an actual corporate breakup is likely/possible, our government has way too much vested interest in corporations to be that heavy-handed. The best we could hope for is forced divestiture of acquisitions like DoubleClick if we were really lucky.
I think it'd be really nice if Google was forced to spin Android and Chrome out into independent orgs but it's not a realistic dream.
@mtomczak @ocdtrekkie @Santaclaus Politicians can generally be relied upon to screw up almost everything related to technology. In our toxic political environment now, that's virtually guaranteed. Just look at the headlines every day!