... #Apple has become so emboldened by a decade of free monopoly reign that they don’t even feign a superficial adherence to their own rules. They carve out exceptions left and right to mega corporations they’d rather not anger, then invent entirely new rules that aren’t codified anywhere when it suits them...
“Blue states like California and New York have high housing costs in part because these states tend to house “superstar” industry #clusters like #SiliconValley, #Hollywood, and #WallStreet.”
#SouthKorea has proposed anti-#monopoly legislation targeting major online platforms to address concerns of market dominance, protect small businesses and ensure fair competition, with "dominant platform operators" facing restrictions on unfair practices.
Reminder: despite how everyone loves to frame it as a revolt about increased #taxes, the December 16 1773 #BostonTeaParty was primarily a protest against the #monopoly power of one of the biggest corporations in history (East India Company), including fear of becoming the megacorp's next conquest.
GMail is broken and crippled for email filtering. And getting worse over the years.
But it is so dominant that people are forced to change the way how they and automated systems send email, because that's the only way to improve user experience.
@TLB73 Sadly, they are also the only company offering fibre broadband to the house we’re moving to.
Thanks to the galaxybrains in the Irish government, they were allowed to lay down their own fibre, exclusive to their use, that they now have monopoly control over.
So our options are 1Gbit fibre with Virgin or “up to 6Mb” with Eir. So not much of a choice, really.
Firstly, it turns out Apple was tried by a judge, while Google was tried by a Jury.
Secondly, Android is an open platform allowing alternative app stores, however Google cut deals to favor billing for big apps and moves to funnel users in its favor. Apple just blocks everyone, big or small, at a technical level, which is legal.
Ironic that Apple, which doesn’t allow alternative app stores, is not deemed a monopoly, but Google, which does, is.
“But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.”
“Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight”
Amira Hass wrote on possible explanations for Israeli indifference in the face of destruction and cruelty in Gaza:
[Sorry for the poor translation from Hebrew]
⸺
The Gaza strip is being erased and gone. Of her families. Of her people. Of her children, their smiles and laughter. What allows most residents of the Jewish state to support this systematic and mass erasing? to see in it an appropriate answer to the massacre carried out by the Hamushi Hamas and their companions, to the military humiliation suffered by Israel and to the indescribable suffering of the kidnapped, the injured, the survivors, their families and the families of the hundreds of dead?
The IDF is erasing the Gaza cities, streets, countryside, fields and surprising mistakes, the alleys of the refugee camps there. Her beach promenade. He is erasing her cultural institutions and the universities, her archaeological sites. Hamas's military infrastructure is also being destroyed, thousands of its militants are killed. But the organization itself and its officials will recover and prosper, in every community and place where the degradation of Gaza will continue to occur.
What allows most Jews in Israel not to be shocked by the fact that in about two months we have killed about 7,000 children (temporary data) with the enhanced bombs that the United States provided us? What allows the majority of Jews not to suffocate in the horror of a compression of 1.8 or 1.9 million people in an area of 120 km, which is also constantly exploded? and not to cry out for the reports of the hunger and thirst of 2.2 million Palestinian citizens and the diseases that spread due to the density and lack of water and hospitals? What enables the erasure and mass slaughter of children, with our active and passive participation?
Here are some answers:
• Decades of education on the knees of absolute #belief in the exclusive ability of a military power to ensure the existence and prosperity of the country, while denying rights from the Palestinian people.
• Deleting all "context" — which incitement has made it a synonym for supporting Hamas and justifying its horrors.
• The #monopoly we took, the Jews, on the concept of suffering caused by the cruelty of the other.
• The choice not to know and not to watch the unbearable images that show Palestinian children trembling and gray-faced from dust, torn from the Russian walls. And you don't know who is more lucky: them or those who died.
• Every mass slaughter or tiffin-tiffin that we commit on Palestinians in years, every looting, humiliation, abuse, goes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The effect is the self conviction that their situation is better than that of Somalis or Syrians, so let them not complain.
• Remembering every massacre Palestinians have committed on us. You have forgotten every massacre we have committed.
• The decades-old practice of living in peace and well five minutes away from our backyard, where israel (that is us) destroys for Palestinians and builds for Jews, flows water to Jews and exploits Palestinians. And all the rest is written in the reports "The Focus for the Protection of the Individual", "Betzelem" and "Adalea".
• Decades-old ignorance of warnings of "moderate" Palestinians, about who robbed the lands and freedom and violence of the settlers with the help of the state — and inspired by its violence — reduce the horizons of their children and generate desperation and belief only in the power of weapons and revenge.
• The essential perception of the world: Palestinians are terrorists because they are like that. Born with the genes of hating us. A direct sequel to Hamelnitsky and Titus.
• The self-conviction that we are a democracy even though for more than 56 years we have controlled millions of people without civil rights, in their land and economy.
• The deep racial disrespect of Palestinians, that we developed in order to cognitively and psychologically justify their trampling under our feet.
• Denial of Palestinian history and the roots of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.
• Elimination of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity — offered to us by the Palestinians — to get rid of our characteristics as an occupying and settling entity and to give them a state of 22% of the territory west of Jordan. I wrote in July 2021: "In the light of the talk about apartheid is fading and eclipsing the dynamic, active and dangerous dimension that is Jewish-ass colonialism." This is an ideology in which the Palestinians are 'giving up', it is the actions that have shaped this ideology, which are inspired and nourished by it. In short: it is possible and desirable that only the Palestinians are bounded. Their existence here is conditional, by grace and not merit, depends on our will and our kindness, it's a question of time. The 'indulgence' ideology is a poison that spreads especially when the colonial process is in full swing. Settler colonialism is in a constant movement of land acquisition, eradicating historical boundaries, redesigning, and expulsion of the original inhabitants".
I then referred to the Palestinian "luxuries" in the West Bank and warned against the intentions for Gresham. I thought that the treatment of the people of Gaza as "giving up" resulted in the separation from their boredom and their families beyond the Erez checkpoint. But here, now the "indulgence" is manifested in their deportation ("willingly", in the shadow of the bombs) and in the physical erasure of the inhabitants and plans for the renewal of Jewish settlement in the Strip. Woe to them and woe to us.
⸺ https://www.haaretz.co.il/blogs/shabahit/2023-12-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/0000018c-738a-d798-adac-f7af51de0000@israel@terrorism