It looks like eventually any company will start squeezing customers for what they are worth.
But only once the company is powerful enough. We don't call Google a monopoly, because there is Apple, but taken together they certainly behave as one. Both create expectations, create expected momentum in a certain direction, people build (companies, lives) on those assumptions and boom, you can't get out and now the company changes the deal.
Is it just our assumptions that get us in trouble? Or do we need to do more?
I'm not sure how to regulate this, other than to stimulate open source, as the "for the people by the people" solution. But also that will just lead to poor expensive solutions (the market created some nice FOSS though). So the law it should be... And we're back to the problem of lobbying...
Perhaps there should be contracts: Google advertises Android as open: They should sign a contract: For how long will Android be open? Define "Open". The contract can be enforced. Or perhaps we, the people, sue now, for false advertising, although that will just make them flex their legal and lobbying muscles... And they didn't sign any contracts.
> We don't call Google a monopoly, because there is Apple We call that a duopoly, which is similarly bad as a monopoly.
It’s slightly different because apple is a hardware manufacturer primarily that happens to have its own OS, whereas there are many other phone manufacturers, and not all of them even use google’s version of android/linux on them, nor have to in the future. And sure google makes hardware too but they’re small relatively speaking.
I guess what I’m saying is it’s less of a duopoly traditionally speaking because as companies they build primarily different things.