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Secure Boot, No ThanksSecure Boot, No ThanksPosted Jan 1, 2013 13:08 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)In reply to: Secure Boot, No Thanks by efraim Parent article: The H Year: 2012's Wins, Fails and Mehs
You seem to be thinking that, if an action is good, or OK if done by /any/ party, then it must also be allowed/OK for a monopolist. However, that's not the way it works.
Monopolists are barred from certain actions NOT because of anything specific to the actions, but because they ARE a monopolist. Monopolists have to have their grip prised from the market, and this requires barring them from taking actions that would be perfectly acceptable, even desirable, from other actors. This is needed to create room for other actors to expand in the market.
Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory behind anti-monopoly law and regulation.
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Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 1, 2013 13:16 UTC (Tue) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
Yes, I really do not understand why should customers of said monopolist (BTW, are you ready to claim the same status for Android once it dominates some 90% market of smartphones which is very likely) suffer just because.
If it is OK for Joe Random to give his customers an OS with an integrated web browser, so should it be OK for a world dominating monopoly. Why should I, as a customer, have to go and install such a basic component as a browser, and a media player separately? Just so that Opera Software can be happy?
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 2, 2013 4:06 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Yes, I really do not understand why should customers of said monopolist (BTW, are you ready to claim the same status for Android once it dominates some 90% market of smartphones which is very likely) suffer just because.
If Android does achieve this sort of market dominance, it will be a Monopoly, and If Google _abuses_ this monopoly to extend their reach into other areas, there will need to be actions taken against them.
However, it may very well be that the fact that Google allows the vendors to customize Android so drastically before shipping it may be enough to avoid this.
This is why Google has to be very careful about the requirements it puts on the vendors to call their product Android.
It may also be that the fact that Google allows companies like Amazon and B&N to take the android source, modify it and ship it without branding (as on the Kindle and Nook Tablets) may be enough to prevent the "Android" branded version which Google controls from hitting a high enough percentage to become a Monopoly
The key thing isn't to make Opera Software happy, it's to prevent a Monopoly in one field (OS) from leveraging this Monopoly to harm competition in other fields (Browser software, Office Software, etc)
A monopoly also indicates a strong barrier to entry for new competitors. This is why calling Google's dominance of Search a "Monopoly" is highly suspect. there's nothing preventing other search engines from starting up, and if they server the users better than Google, it will be very easy for users to switch and forget Google exists (assuming google doesn't improve their version to compete)
A Monopoly is not just the dominance of a field, and there's nothing wrong with being a Monopoly. It's just that if you _are_ a Monopoly, then you are not allowed to "abuse" your Monopoly status to take over other fields.
It's perfectly legitimate for you to use your income from your Monopoly to fund good products in other fields, you just can't do things like selling them at a loss once you are past the R&D stage and into production.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 3, 2013 20:28 UTC (Thu) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
>> A Monopoly is not just the dominance of a field, and there's nothing wrong with being a Monopoly. It's just that if you _are_ a Monopoly, then you are not allowed to "abuse" your Monopoly status to take over other fields.
>> It's perfectly legitimate for you to use your income from your Monopoly to fund good products in other fields, you just can't do things like selling them at a loss once you are past the R&D stage and into production.
I understand your position, however I do not agree with it because I feel like many of the terms here are too ill defined to be a matter of law (for instance, what's R&D phase? Is Android in R&D phase? Is GMail? When quality control and brand control become abuse?)
I am not commenting on LWN often and this thread is pretty far from core LWN software topic, so if you feel I am veering off-topic into politics too far please say so.
Action against abuse of monopoly Posted Jan 2, 2013 16:18 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link]
Except the US didn't actually stop MS from shipping IE. And look at the actual remedy imposed by the EU: customers are presented with a browser selection dialog at first boot which allows them to choose from a list of top browsers. If they select a non-IE option then they're sent to download that, but it doesn't remove all IE components from the system, merely selects a default.
Yes this is an extra imposition if you're happy to use MS's default browser, but it's hardly a particularly onerous one. In return the consumer benefits as one company fails to snuff out all competition in the browser market. Look at the performance benefits to us all when healthy competition returned to the browser market; MS had to start investing in browser development again -- something they entirely stopped doing during the period they had a practical browser monopoly.
Action against abuse of monopoly Posted Jan 3, 2013 20:17 UTC (Thu) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
I actually don't believe for a moment that the resurgence in IE development we've witnessed has anything to do with EU's efforts.
I think it's unfair to the hard work of Mozilla and later Google Chrome development teams to claim that their achievement is actually a result of some cheap political posturing by EU. What actually made Microsoft develop IE again is the fact that Mozilla has succeeded in delivering a more stable and feature-rich (and easy to use!) web browser for several years. In fact I am afraid that this trend might be reversed now that Mozilla started chasing Chrome in version treadmill. (I have only anecdotal evidence but it seems that plugin compatibility and stability suffered as a result)
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 3, 2013 9:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] Because it was OK for Microsoft to give their customers and end-users an OS with an integrated web browser, right up to the point where Microsoft attempted to tell their customers that they couldn't install another browser as the system default browser if they intended to sell the machine to an end-user. Android doesn't currently have this problem - if HTC choose to make the system default browser Firefox Mobile, Google aren't going to stop them using Android. If you go back to the mid-90s, when all this went down, other browser developers were in the business of paying OEMs to preinstall their product as the system default browser; Microsoft used its leverage as provider of the OS to insist that OEMs that did this had to pay much more for the OS (more than the other browser vendors were prepared to pay, so an OEM that shipped Windows and IE only paid less than an OEM that shipped Windows and IE and Netscape, even with Netscape paying the OEM to ship Netscape). Had Microsoft simply bundled IE as a freebie with Windows, and not tried to use that as leverage to block OEMs deals with Netscape, they'd not have got into trouble. It was the attempt to use their ownership of a monopoly operating system to influence the browser market that caused them pain, and a lot of observers noted at the time that IE4 was a better product than the equivalent Netscape browsers. Indeed, it's plausible that if Microsoft had behaved better, they'd probably have still crushed the competition in the web browser market as thoroughly as they did, and would not have faced the anti-trust issues that their monopoly abuse caused.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:46 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
So the OP's claim that "Netscape couldn't write a decent browser" is wrong - if the underlying OS has been deliberately booby-trapped it's rather difficult to cope! And there's a long trail of MS repeatedly doing that ... "DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run", and the story coming out now about WordPerfect, etc etc.
To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". MS can pretty much name their own price, so they have monopoly power. Google may be very dominant in search, but they can't set their own price. There are other search engines out there, and if Google raise their prices both sorts of customers (the advertisers and the searchers) can easily go elsewhere. Market dynamics currently push them to Google as the best value for money, but if Google changes that dynamic it's easy for them to flee. Thing with Microsoft is it is (and MS deliberately makes it so) very difficult for customers to flee. The harder MS makes it for customers to leave, the more MS can charge before customers consider leaving.
Cheers,
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 19:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> Don't forget, it was PROVEN in court that Microsoft put a load of code into Windows ?98 whose sole purpose was to cause Netscape to crash.
That's a serious accusation. Can you prove it?
As far as I remember, it was proven that MS has put special hooks to make their applications work faster.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:57 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
In a different case, it was proven that Microsoft put in hooks to make windows not work when running on DR-DOS
These weren't 'hooks to make it work better on pure microsoft systems' they were tests to detect DR-DOS and fail.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 18:19 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, they were (insanely specific) tests to detect {MS|IBM}-DOS and fail if not found. It just so happens that there was only one DOS-compatible competitor to the {MS|IBM}-DOS hegemony... how convenient.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 20:45 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production".
I think it should be clear that this is a quite radical re-interpretation of what monopoly means and is not the definition that is commonly understood or that is used in the law.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:17 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] To the OP - the best definition of "monopoly power" is "the ability to set a price above the marginal cost of production". This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 7, 2013 22:24 UTC (Mon) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
>This does unuseful things like saying that the Morgan Motor Company has a monopoly, which it doesn't in any meaningful sense.
Can you elaborate? I've never heard of the Morgan Motor Company, and I thought the definition quite usefully cut through the irrelevant connotations that "monopoly" has.
Secure Boot, No Thanks Posted Jan 8, 2013 0:10 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]
IIRC, the Morgan motor company is a very small outfit that makes fancy cars. They can charge way more than »the marginal cost of production« because the people who buy Morgan cars, even though they would be perfectly able to get something like a Yugo at a cheaper price that would also let them drive from A to B, for whatever reason still prefer a Morgan car, and are happy to pay more than they otherwise would have to if their only interest was to obtain a car (any car).
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