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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Both Apple and Google can be guilty of anti-competitive and anti-freedom behavior.

I said as much. I mentioned twice that I wasn't trying to defend Apple.

The article is nominally about web standards, but the WHATWG—whose steering committee includes Google and Microsoft—hijacked web standards. The article is painting a picture where Apple is largely acting alone, but that's not even remotely true.

> Android is caving to the pressure to follow suit more and more every day.

Pressure? What pressure? Are you claiming that Apple is somehow pressuring Google into locking down Android?

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You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.

Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?

Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.

> You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.

No, I was trying to re-focus the discussion on all of the monopolists: Apple and Google on mobile, Apple and Microsoft on desktop. To talk only of Apple is to ignore the crucial roles of Google and Microsoft as monopolists.

> Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice.

Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.

As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.

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