FairSearch to EU: Google’s Android A ‘Trojan Horse’ to Dominate Mobile Markets - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Stonecycle;40244816]Smartphones, search engine, formerly RSS readers, advertising, soon ISPs, almost everything.[/QUOTE] They haven't done anything underhand to achieve that monopoly, everyone else just sucks in comparison.

[QUOTE=Stonecycle;40244816]Smartphones, search engine, formerly RSS readers, advertising, soon ISPs, almost everything.[/QUOTE] Google's markshare on smartphones is nothing compared to say Samsung. They've already gotten in trouble for biasing their search results due to the marketshare. they're closing reader. The only reason they're an ISP because the other American ISPs are crap.

This is incredibly ironic coming from a consortium including Microsoft which A: is well known for its previous antitrust and B: doesn't let you change the default search button provider from Bing in anything except IE

An example how Google isn't a monopoly everywhere is Google+. Look how well that's going for them.

[QUOTE=melonmonkey;40244797]I'm not sure how you guys are blowing this off so lightly. Google has very real potential of becoming a monopoly, doesn't pretty much every government in the world have measures in place to stop that?[/QUOTE] It may be the first time in the history of the modern world a company has [i]legitimately[/i] earned a monopoly by simply making products significantly better than anyone else can. Google also isn't keen to go "Herpderpmonopoly, I can make my phones shit now", because the moment they do iPhones will quite happily reclaim the market practically overnight.

[QUOTE=TestECull;40244906]It may be the first time in the history of the modern world a company has [i]legitimately[/i] earned a monopoly by simply making products significantly better than anyone else can. Google also isn't keen to go "Herpderpmonopoly, I can make my phones shit now", because the moment they do iPhones will quite happily reclaim the market practically overnight.[/QUOTE] Look at the Chromebook. They could spit out a crappy laptop that runs ChromeOS for $100 or something, but they're not. They're taking time to actually make it a *good* computer. Linus Torvalds has one of the latest iterations and is now using it as his main laptop (of course he installed another version of Linux on it, which Google allows you to do).

Why would Linus even bother getting a Chromebook just to put another OS on it? The storage is puny.

[quote]Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone, the complaint says.[/quote] This would be a fair argument for anti-competitive behaviour if it worked this way, but I don't remember any Google apps being "prominently placed" on my S3 out of the box. The play store was right beside the shitty samsung store on the main homescreen, but that's it.

[QUOTE=Squad;40244678]Then attack Apple as well.[/QUOTE] Apple doesn't have a relevant market control to be targeted.

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40245397]Why would Linus even bother getting a Chromebook just to put another OS on it? The storage is puny.[/QUOTE] If you read his G+ page, he has been complaining about the utterly shite screen resolutions on laptops for a while now. Remember this is Linux, you will be lucky if your OS takes up a gig and there aren't many massive bloaty programs for it either.

those dirty bastards, they're holding a monopoly on the two OS market by giving away, yes giving away their OS for free, truly they are evil, because nobody who is out to make money could do such a thing, and they hold a monopoly over the gmail app GASP, they force us to use their software to access their email client!!! truly they are evil or they could just be very committed to the free culture of the internet...

Google's monopoly is akin to that of Valve's monopoly with Steam. They may hold a dramatic stake in the market, but they still continue to provide excellent services and products and continue to improve their existing services and products, using that to maintain their monopoly instead of underhanded tactics.

[QUOTE=The golden;40245537]Only for the light distros. More full featured distros will easily unpack to 3gb+. PXlinuxOS "Full Monty" unpacks to like 7-8gb I believe.[/QUOTE] I seriously doubt Linus would be installing ubloatu, I stick Debian testing netinst onto my machines and only install just what I need.

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40245397]Why would Linus even bother getting a Chromebook just to put another OS on it? The storage is puny.[/QUOTE] Oh no, he just gets them sent to him since he's a tester, but was surprised with the quality of the screen.

[QUOTE=SGI Onyx;40245475]If you read his G+ page, he has been complaining about the utterly shite screen resolutions on laptops for a while now. Remember this is Linux, you will be lucky if your OS takes up a gig and there aren't many massive bloaty programs for it either.[/QUOTE]What about his massive stash of gnu porn?

[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;40245774]What about his massive stash of gnu porn?[/QUOTE] RMS is the one with the massive CP stash. [t]http://i.cubeupload.com/NVcR6d.png[/t]

[QUOTE=SGI Onyx;40245819]RMS is the one with the massive CP stash. [t]http://i.cubeupload.com/NVcR6d.png[/t][/QUOTE] wait why Ogg Vorbis i should email him and ask

[QUOTE=lavacano;40246286]wait why Ogg Vorbis i should email him and ask[/QUOTE] Its an open format isn't it?

[QUOTE=SGI Onyx;40246358]Its an open format isn't it?[/QUOTE] yeah but so is FLAC last I was aware

[QUOTE=lavacano;40246473]yeah but so is FLAC last I was aware[/QUOTE] Probably because Ogg is closer to MP3. Since he was asking about FLAC vs MP3

[QUOTE=SGI Onyx;40245475]If you read his G+ page, he has been complaining about the utterly shite screen resolutions on laptops for a while now. Remember this is Linux, [B]you will be lucky if your OS takes up a gig [/B]and there aren't many massive bloaty programs for it either.[/QUOTE] god it'd be so nice if we could all just replace Windows with Linux

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40246890]god it'd be so nice if we could all just replace Windows with Linux[/QUOTE] I'm running an install that's almost a year old, it runs as snappy as the first day I installed it, and my root partition with ALL my applications I use to get things done is 13GB. This excludes games which are in my /home thanks to Steam, or GOG or whatever. Apparently the *base* install for Windows 8 is 11GB, which makes me a little confused. The bigger problem I've seen with Windows lately, is that you have shit scattered around your hard drive. If I want to change distros, I just format my root or backup my /home. I get paranoid when formatting Windows to make sure I don't miss things. At this point of time, I'm of the opinion that Linux will replace Windows, and that it's inevitable, the question is how long it'll take. The main problem isn't the quality of Linux, but the lock in to Windows most people are faced with.

[QUOTE=lavacano;40246473]yeah but so is FLAC last I was aware[/QUOTE] More things play Vorbis than FLAC. And Vorbis isn't half bad compression wise. [editline]11th April 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=Jookia;40247232]I'm running an install that's almost a year old, it runs as snappy as the first day I installed it, and my root partition with ALL my applications I use to get things done is 13GB. This excludes games which are in my /home thanks to Steam, or GOG or whatever. Apparently the *base* install for Windows 8 is 11GB, which makes me a little confused. The bigger problem I've seen with Windows lately, is that you have shit scattered around your hard drive. If I want to change distros, I just format my root or backup my /home. I get paranoid when formatting Windows to make sure I don't miss things. At this point of time, I'm of the opinion that Linux will replace Windows, and that it's inevitable, the question is how long it'll take. The main problem isn't the quality of Linux, but the lock in to Windows most people are faced with.[/QUOTE] I do like the ability to switch distros in a heartbeat. Just replacing one partition with a new one containing whatever distro you want, and having it understand what your others are straight away is really cool. Windows could probably learn a thing or two more from Linux in terms of that kind of feature.

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40244418]It's sad that consumers only choices are iOS, Windows, and Android. I wish there was a better linux based open source OS than Android to choose from :pwn:[/QUOTE] I saw one of the samsung windows 8 phones at a display in a store today. It had SEVERE burn in on the screen, like it was hilariously bad

[QUOTE=viperfan7;40247859]I saw one of the samsung windows 8 phones at a display in a store today. It had SEVERE burn in on the screen, like it was hilariously bad[/QUOTE] Probably OLED and was running with the screen on 24/7 Would happen with any phone really.

[QUOTE=Jookia;40247232]The bigger problem I've seen with Windows lately, is that you have shit scattered around your hard drive. If I want to change distros, I just format my root or backup my /home. I get paranoid when formatting Windows to make sure I don't miss things.[/QUOTE] What I've noticed is it will only scatter shit around in C:\. So all the shit I actually care about lives somewhere on E:\, and when Windows inevitably fucks up I can just format C:\ and worst case scenario is I forget to back up my sticky notes or something silly I can easily recover.

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40246890]god it'd be so nice if we could all just replace Windows with Linux[/QUOTE]As soon as most games run natively on Linux, i'm switching over permanently. Other than being more accustomed to it's use and the aforementioned compatibility issues, there's nothing on Windows that would keep me on it as opposed to Linux. Hell, some of my hardware runs perfectly on Linux already as opposed to Windows (namely sound cards).

[QUOTE=The Baconator;40244418]It's sad that consumers only choices are iOS, Windows, and Android. I wish there was a better linux based open source OS than Android to choose from :pwn:[/QUOTE] It kind of reflects the state of embedded ARM (etc.) support in Linux and the issues surrounding embedded development in particular. You can't just take the kernel source and compile it for a specific device, you'll be missing firmware/drivers (half of them are closed source for no good reason, like the Raspberry PI drivers, etc.). And the kernel then can't find hardware since the hardware layout is built into the kernel the OEM provides, so you have to take their listing or try to reverse engineer it. Then once you have your kernel up and running, what do you do on it? X sucks on mobiles, the main replacement (Wayland) is still too new, you can write your own like Google (SurfaceFlinger) or Ubuntu (Mir) are doing, or even skip it entirely like Mozilla are doing with Firefox OS (Which is based on Android so doesn't have to deal with those types of incompatibilities). And then, once you have your OS up and running and have a display working, what do you run on it? there's no easy way to make a desktop app run on a mobile type device (This is where Microsoft/Mozilla are having luck, their interfaces are built around scalable markup, XAML or HTML) Or wait for Tizen which will have Wayland and Qt out of the box.

A Google monopoly would be very different from something like a Standard Oil monopoly. Standard Oil was a company with pretty much one purpose. It undercut others and did some dirty shit to gain a monopoly. Google is a massively varied company with interests from personal computing to advertising to self-driving cars. Google will never "be a monopoly," because that means that they'd have a monopoly on pretty much everything they produce. They might have monopolies on certain areas, but currently it isn't close. 70% Android saturation isn't a monopoly - iOS will hold out. There are other advertisement engines. If Google suddenly bought out iOS and any competing software, yes, they'd be monopolizing the smartphone industry and legal action would be taken. As of now, though, that won't happen because of the simple fact that they [I]aren't [/I]undercutting competition.

This complaint is totally legit. Everything said is 100% true. If no one is there to compete with Google on a major scale, then Google basically becomes all-powerful and able to do whatever it wants. Imagine a world where your phone knows what you want to search before you even think about it. ... Introducing new Google MIND Reader.