Lo and behold, Amazon and Google have announced that they will eliminate these penalties, but in Amazon’s case, the shakedown will continue until 2025. Google and Apple, who are partners in the phone business, also announced some of the first changes. . It is expected that the number of our own products will decrease and the number of other companies’ products will increase.
At the heart of regulatory concerns about the power of large platforms is their contradictory role as both market landlords and owners of the market’s most important stalls. Google was born with the noble intention of reducing the amount of time users spend on sites as much as possible. If you’re there, the founders reasoned, it’s just going somewhere else.
But then, as Google developed its maps, email, shopping, and video services, it became more difficult to find alternatives, reducing the incentive to build better mousetraps. Google is gradually starting to resemble walled garden services like Compuserve and Prestel that existed before the Internet.
Similar concerns about preferential treatment are often raised about supermarkets. However, regulators have concluded that the supermarket business is highly competitive. But for big tech, switching platforms is much more difficult than popping into Sainsbury’s instead of Tesco at the weekend.
Platforms are expanding their reach into every corner of our lives. I fully expect to pay Microsoft for the rest of my working life and Apple for as long as I want convenient access to my photos. It all adds up. Few people switch phone platforms as there is no hassle. We are trapped in a golden cage.
The same thing is becoming clear in companies. Utility computing is currently dominated by Microsoft and Amazon, and is intertwined with their other services, and perhaps soon with AI as well. That begs the question. Are these companies doing the best they can in each product category? Are they a fair market?
Last week, the European Commission fined Apple 1.8 billion euros for restrictions it imposed on rival Spotify. Small cloud providers argue that Microsoft charges punitive fees for Office, making fair competition impossible.
