Tag: antitrust

Amy Klobuchar: Apple, Google app store rules are “pretty outrageous”

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Executives from Apple and Google will testify in front of Congress on Wednesday, and are likely to face tough questioning about the way they manage their respective app stores. Apple’s chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer and Google’s senior director of government affairs Wilson White will appear in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The hearing  comes as Congress readies legislation that could revamp antitrust law to better deal with 21st century monopolies, and better arm government agencies to enforce the law. The main topic of discussion will be the revenue sharing requirement imposed by the app stores on developers. Larger developers must pay 30% of their app or subscription revenue to Apple or Google during the first year of inclusion in their respective app stores. Many developers, whether they’ll say so publicly or not, think the 30% fee is onerous. Some have spoken out, including the music app developer Spotify, the dating app developer Match Group, and the Bluetooth tracker app developer Tile–and all will testify Wednesday. They’ll likely find some sympathetic ears on the other side of the room. You can’t argue that telling consumers they can get a better deal another way somehow jeopardizes security.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar “The 15% to 30% tax is such a whopping amount of money that the companies are charged for advertising on the app store,” Klobuchar told me on Tuesday evening. “The thing that I noticed myself was, like other consumers, I sometimes wonder why I can’t get that app on the app store–what’s wrong with that company? I never understood it until I looked at this [app store issue], and it’s because they don’t want to pay that amount of money.” Klobuchar says she hopes hopes her committee can learn some things about the app stores and the app economy by hearing both sides of the debate. But, she said, it’s also important that the public learn about the business practices of Apple and Google. She zeroes in on the fact that Apple makes it very hard for developers to avoid using its In-App Payment system, and paying the 15% to 30% fee. Read More …

Why some developers are avoiding app store headaches by going web-only

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Earlier this month, the indie developers Feross Aboukhadijeh and John Hiesey launched a new app called Wormhole , which lets users quickly share large, encrypted files with just a link. But unlike most new mobile apps, Wormhole doesn’t show up in Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. Instead, Aboukhadijeh and Hiesey released their app exclusively on the web. You can run Wormhole in any browser, and if you use the “Add to Home Screen” function in Safari for iOS or Chrome for Android, the site becomes indistinguishable from a native app. Aboukhadijeh says that Wormhole has a long list of reasons for skipping mobile app stores, including the ease of developing for the web and the lack of platform gatekeepers to worry about. But for him, targeting the web is also just a matter of principle Read More …

A Trump social network could get sued out of existence

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Donald Trump is “holding high-powered meetings” to start his own social network in the next two to three months, according to the ex-president’s adviser Jason Miller, who appeared on the Fox News show Media Buzz on Sunday. The former president was, of course, booted from Twitter and suspended from YouTube and Facebook (pending review), after spewing misinformation about the 2020 election and, arguably, inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6. Sunday night, many on the right were joyous about the idea of a Trump social networking site. “BarYohai,” a commenter on FoxNews.com, summed up the sentiment nicely : This is how the free market works. People “vote” with their wallets. Trump’s social media platform will be widely successful and, additionally, it will create an incentive for people to close their Twitter (and perhaps even Facebook) accounts. Amazon and other self-appointed “speech police” will also feel the economic pain as dissatisfied customers seek substitutes for, and then “cancel” the “cancel culture” businesses. But running a social network is hard, as Trump may soon find out if Miller is right. People post untrue, defamatory, threatening, and conspiratorial things on social networks, requiring a major investment in content moderation staff and systems. It might get even harder this year if Congress decides to scale back or repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social networks from civil suits arising from hosting (or removing) user content. Actually, repealing Section 230 was one of Trump’s go-to threats against the Big Tech companies that run social networks, especially Twitter. Days after Twitter began applying truth labels to his tweets, Trump released an executive order directing Congress to remove the 230 protections. #BREAKING : President Trump signs executive order strip liability protection from companies that censure content: “Companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield.” https://t.co/D5ooUw1fNz pic.twitter.com/FHs7kUvJH1 — The Hill (@thehill) May 28, 2020 Many of Trump’s executive orders had little effect, but that one spurred some of his GOP devotees in Congress, such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, to introduce bills restricting the Section 230 protections. Hawley’s 2019 Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act reserves Section 230 protections only for content removals the social network can prove were “politically neutral.” A House bill from Arizona Republican Paul Gosar proposed revoking Section 230’s legal exemptions for social networks that remove content they deem “objectionable.” Other bills condition the legal protections on more transparent content monitoring and faster removal of toxic content. Reforming Section 230 is one of the few issues in Congress that’s garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans, if for different reasons Read More …

Google’s former ad chief is challenging its search engine monopoly

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The government is getting its antitrust game on this year after leaving it mostly dormant for the better part of two decades, and its sights are set squarely on Big Tech. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota is leading Congress’s powerful Senate Judiciary antitrust committee. “We’ve got to look at everything when it comes to putting rules in for tech,” she says Read More …

Google’s anti-tracking move is good for privacy, and even better for Google

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Google’s move against individual web tracking might be good for consumer privacy—and could look good to antitrust investigators—but it will also consolidate Google’s power in interactive advertising, several advertising sources told Fast Company  on Wednesday. Google, which controls more than half of the global interactive advertising business, said Wednesday it will stop targeting ads based on browsing data collected about individuals as they move around the web. Such data is gathered when a marketer or ad-tech company drops a cookie —a line of code that can be used to record website visits—into a user’s browser. Google already said last year its Chrome browser would no longer support the practice, effective in 2022, but now the company says it won’t develop an alternative way to track individuals. Read More …