Infrastructure monopolies are the nastiest. This one is so insidious too.
I’m pretty sure part of this is to spice up Apple One. In my region family plan of Apple One costs slightly more than two Apple Music subscriptions. That means that even in a two person household you’re breaking even immediately if you need/want iCloud, TV+ or Arcade.
I’ve been caught, abort mission!
This is a step before we get „blacks for Hitler” with Kanye joining AfD.
Rossmann is for consumer protection laws because he benefits from them directly. This man also moved his repair shop multiple states away just to pay less taxes.
Is it your first time seeing a pussy?
It’s not really the decrease that’s the news here because that decrease is within a margin of error due to other factors. What’s the real news is that the graph has been flat for two consecutive years which is mind boggling!*
Recent example - Poland renamed Kaliningrad (a territory it owned briefly ages ago) to Królewiec for shits and giggles similar to what Trump did with Gulf of America thing. It shows up as Królewiec in Poland and nowhere else because why would it affect anyone else?
Older example - since Russia annexed Crimea Google Maps in those countries has reflected official borders but for the rest of the world it’s just a dotted line.
You’d probably find a lot of disputed names and borders between India/Pakistan/China where similar stuff happens.
What I’m trying to say that while Google didn’t necessarily follow their own guidelines, their actual priority was to be pragmatic, unobtrusive or invisible. This change is unexpected because it’s very much „in your face” for everyone everywhere.
MS prevented you from using other browsers by using vendor lock-in. It was a prime example example of now misunderstood concept of embrace, extend, extinguish. You could download Mozilla Phoenix but you couldn’t use it for everything because CSS rendering in IE was so detached from standards. On top of that you had ActiveX which meant you HAD to use Windows for some websites.
It’s demonstrably not true because Maps would be a mess if they followed this policy. Unless „vary between countries” means „vary between countries as long as one of them countries is US”.
So weird that they’re changing it for other countries like that since they follow local conventions in general. I hoped not to have to switch email providers but that’s the last Google bandaid to rip off. I wonder how long will it take for Apple to bow down.
It’s the kind of teasing like in The Last Remake of Beau Geste film where the main character kept receiving letters about his father’s imminent death through the entirety of the film. That’s why press shouldn’t engage in rumours :D
Adding gambling to video games without verifying user age is targeting children with gambling. There’s a lot of convenient combinations of circumstances that Valve is fully aware of and profiting from. I don’t care about plausible deniability because Valve employees were visibly smug and amused when questioned about it. There is no absolving Valve after this.
You blame others for Valve monopoly. Yeah, I said they missed the ship. We have a private monopoly in PC gaming storefronts now and that’s not good. It doesn’t matter if they won fair - they are a parasitic middle-man that makes everyone lose.
Ask yourself and be honest about it: if Valve had a true competitor would their cut be as high as it is now? This is the only thing you should be concerned about, not that they engage in Linux philanthropy or that they make cool games.
Pressure on their web browser monopoly was necessary because IE6 was stifling entire industry. From a legal point of view it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to abuse that position so there isn’t that much you can do about it, especially in the US. Going after operating system or office suite monopoly should have been done but matters less and less these days.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here. I think Steam is a clunky piece of software that’s popular mostly because everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed. Other viable competitors tried and failed at even gaining a foothold and are relegated to small niches because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years. Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard. You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
Why keep pretending that’s not the case, especially now? What else is required? For Kanye to run death camps?
Why use examples of ones that are no longer fascist. I mean, in Italy we have a post-fascist government after all. There are also some fascist states that have endured quite long like Russia or United States. And that’s for plain fascism. Monopolies and the rich extracting money from societies are as big of an issue because unaddressed they lead to fascism pretty much always.
Thank god nobody from this comment section was involved in antitrust cases against Microsoft.
Scavenger’s Reign is the bomb, will check the other one, thanks!