Google reportedly keeps tabs on usage of rival apps to develop competitors

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/24/21336946/google-android-lockbox-data-rival-apps-antitrust-scrutiny

by lladnar • 6 years ago

30 13 6 years ago

theverge.com

Shared4043• 6 years ago

tldr: Large corporation abuses power to maintain position.

Unfortunately, nothing will change until consumers start noticing/caring about these sort of things.

Government regulation will just cause it to become more hidden.

Or I'm horribly misunderstanding the situation. It wouldn't be the first time.

auganov3• 6 years ago

Who says it's bad for consumers? Big corporations are monitoring what's popular to develop their own offerings in these markets. For consumers it means more choice and potentially better products.

It's bad for startups which obviously don't want competition from stronger players.

thomk2• 6 years ago

Having less options because one giant company ate up all the small companies is always bad for consumers. Competition is good for consumers. Monopolies are good for corporations.

RedBeetDeadpool• 6 years ago

Is it really? Big Corp destroys competition, gains monopoly, stops innovating, and then they hike up prices. Look at what autodesk has done for the 3D-software industry. AutoCAD is a bloated piece of crap and hasn’t changed much in years yet everyone drawing details uses it because of file system monopoly And industry standard. Same can be said for revit. 3ds max and maya are all in one modeling/texturing/animation software that just repeat the offering of what the other does just with a different interface, both of which are clunky and outdated. Oh and they also have the benefit of being industry standard so if you work in a team, likely you have it just so you can modify files. I could go on but this is classic Autodesk, and they aren’t the only company that does this. We the consumers are ultimately the ones to pay for the disproportional power dynamics, while big megacorp keeps the dough.

arp242• 6 years ago

Government regulation will just cause it to become more hidden.

That's such a weird take; should we stop banning murder, rape, and theft now, as it will just become "more hidden"?

Shared4043• 6 years ago

This is a fair point.

What I intended to mean was not that we should not regulate against it, but that regulation will be ineffective.

bavell• 6 years ago

Whenever I see headlines like this I think, "... Duh? Of course they do, along with many other underhanded tactics". Perhaps I'm just cynical and know a little too much of what happens behind the curtains in large tech companies...

haecceity• 6 years ago

In some companies (that also has a platform of some kind, where they have information that would give them an advantage over everyone else in the market), it's not allowed to act on this information unless its released to the public. It's anti-competitive in some way.

The group that collects the information is not allowed to share the information with the product group.

Does anyone know legal basis for this policy?

Google reportedly keeps tabs on usage of rival apps to develop competitors

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