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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the tech crowd would say if government was to order Apple to release windows- and android-compatible OSes, or if it was to rewrite Google's Youtube API terms of use at its convenience.

You guys seem to have a pretty heavy dislike to your cable providers, which is OK, but I wonder how you would react to similar requests towards tech companies.

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Cable providers are monopolies. In most markets, customers have literally zero choice as to what provider to use. This means that they need to accept a fair amount of government regulation, because there are no market pressures to act as corrective forces without government regulation. Meanwhile, the tech companies you listed are not monopolies (and when Microsoft did engage in monopolistic behavior, they were found to be violating antitrust and were subject to some regulation, e.g. no more bundling IE with Windows and making it difficult to get other browsers, etc).

>Cable providers are monopolies.

Cable video isn't anymore. There is typically one hardware cable company, two national satellite companies, two online streaming cable provides (SlingTv and PS-Vue), and many times a IPTV providers using telecom lines (Verizon or AT&T).

I have a hell of a lot more choice in video tv than I do for say web search engines. Should google and bing be forced to provide searches over an API?

Let's not lie to ourselves. Google has as close as it gets to having a monopoly. Monopolies are everywhere in our industry. For the last 5 years, the key questions to get funding were policed versions of: "can you build a monopoly" and "if we give you money, what will be your dumping strategy". And that behaviour is exemplified by e.g. the transportation market conquest by Uber.

Imo, Microsoft's antitrust is not something that would happen again, because politicians now care about international power rather than domestic balance, aswell as the fact tech companies now invest significantly in lobbying.

65% of market share is a monopoly?

Networks are not endpoint devices, and most networks, especially networks provided by ISPs, are open to an unlimited variety of devices. This regulation is more like a documentation and open connection requirement than like a technical requirement. It's also not a novel kind of requirement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

I'd love it if the FCC mandated that the streaming video services provide a common standard that allowed me to, for example, watch Netflix, Amazon, and Apple iTunes, all in one application.

As a consumer, that would be a win.

As a developer, it would create a vibrant marketplace for media applications that simply can't exist today.

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