Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
I mean, he’s not incorrect, but there’s that saying about rocks and glass houses.
Oh no! One terrible corporation is saying the other terrible corporation is terrible!
Let me play a very sad tune on this really tiny violin I found.
You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.
But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of “terribleness” they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.
So, this “both sides are bad” take is a bit ridiculous.
Pot calls kettle black.
Their crooked bullies.
Our strategic entrepreneurs.
You don’t have to support Epic’s ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to “they let us avoid malicious apps” but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don’t necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:
In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.
Sure, Epic won’t give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.
[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/
No shit Sherlock. Every company is. How they make stupid cash monies.
“Don’t be evil.”
I believe they removed this from their company policy a couple of years ago.
Yes they did. I wonder why…
It is still in their code of conduct.
Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause From Its Code of Conduct - Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393
But it’s still there.
Unlike on iOS, nobody forces them to use Google Play to distribute their app. Just don’t use it. On iOS that’s not an option, but here what’s the problem?
The problem is that they crushed the competition with a fairly good free product for years. Setting all alternatives back, then they started prioritizing revenue, slowly, over time. Now Google free to use products are part of our routine, part of our lives, and the alternatives are either paid, poorly developed or have a low user base. Do you have an alternative to YouTube that has the same amount of content? It was the same issue when we left Teddit, but at a much lower scale and that was still painful (and it still is)
And that has to do with being able to sideload how, exactly?
How did they crush f-droid? What did they do to set alternative app stores on Android back? We aren’t talking about YouTube here, your entire comment is just making shit up about Android stores because you are bad about other parts of Google.
