Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

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> Of course for the companies it was mostly a plot to capture the web, which was uncomfortably open and uncontrolled. The mobile operators were used to charging 20 cents for sending a 140-character message and 1 euro for delivering a monophonic ringtone. They wanted to be the gatekeepers and content curators of the mobile web,

So how has this changed? Nowadays Google and and Meta are the gatekeepers. The business model has changed from billing the end customer to personal data prostitution. You sell us your private life and we give you "free" services to get even more personal data. Disregarding the ethical aspects: If you look at Google's profits and the money they can happily spend on paying fines to regulators, it's obvious that we have no functioning market economy.

In the old days one could still change between ~3 competing operators and one was typically competing on price. Nowadays you don't really have that option. Maybe every n years when you have to biy a new phone you can choose between Android and Apple, but it's a limited choice.

No, this is a completely different scenario. There’s a huge difference between the companies who provide the pipes having full control over everything (the way it was back then) and what we have today which is that some companies have become defacto standard platform providers. It’s the difference between having to pay a toll every time you leave your driveway vs. paying for things at whatever store you decided to drive to.

Google and Apple happen to have devices that most people use, but if you want to you can buy USB adapters to use on a laptop, or some laptops have built-in mobile data.

I think people making this type of comment like “there’s no difference now” just were not around back then and have really no context on just how completely locked down the wireless carriers had things back then.

> Google and Apple happen to have devices that most people use, but if you want to you can buy USB adapters to use on a laptop, or some laptops have built-in mobile data.

But if you want a smartphone like most people these days, you’re out of luck.

Things are almost infinitely better on the network side, and I don’t miss operators dictating when I get a firmware update or which app store I can use. But now Apple does that, and Google isn’t a really great alternative either for other reasons.

> how completely locked down the wireless carriers had things back then.

That was (and probably still is to some degree?) the case in the US. Here in this country SIM-locked phones have been forbidden for more than 20 years. Phone subscriptions have limited competition because the were only 4, later 3 operators. And the most aggressive price challenging service providers get acquired by the bigger ones.

But phones have fully free competition, you buy them from a domestic or international store, from your own operator, or from a competitor, just as you prefer.

the fact that other companies succeeded doesn’t have much to do with the many that failed with terrible assumptions

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