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Comment by modulus1 | Hacker News Reader

MS and Apple have the same thing, they're just less successful. Just a browser and an OS was previously seen as antitrust (and it looks like MS is being anti-competitive in this space still). Just a browser and a search engine can allow anti-competitive behavior. Or just a search engine and an ads platform...

The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.

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MS and Apple aren't companies who sell ads. MS and Apple are companies who sell tech products. Everyone analogizing the current situation with Google to Microsoft in 1999 is missing the core of the facts here. The Apple/Epic Games antitrust suits are much more similar to MS in 1999, but Google's antitrust issues are very different.

Google's product isn't its software, it's the attention of its users. Having this large and this dominant of a software/data platform attached to a company that sells attention is anti-competitive in the attention market.

MS does sell ads, they have an advertising platform.

So does Apple funnily enough so it’s a very strange post.

Read MS's 10k and come back and seriously tell me they are an ad company. They don't have much ad infrastructure (that's outsourced), and they make very little of their money from ads. Microsoft is a software company, and some of that software is paid for with ads. Google is an advertising company.

Incidentally, this sort of proves the point that Google's ownership of platforms where ads are displayed puts them at an advantage compared to competitors, who have to go to people like MS for space.

A few years ago, one of the bigger points from the apple earnings was that its first party ads platform 10x'ed (or wtv, can't remember the number) its revenue after apple implemented "do not track" app changes.

The US never did anything about Microsoft owning a browser. There was never a browser choice screen in the US and Microsoft was never forced to sell Windows without a browser.

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