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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.

(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)

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> You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system.

You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).

It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.

Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.

Okay fair, you can avoid a monoculture with the legal system. Bit late for that now, unfortunately.

It wasn't really any better when Apple killed things off. For years afterwards I was running into devices that had embedded Java applets for configuration over the Web that no longer worked. Sometimes I'd run into an academic's personal web page that had examples that used Flash or Java and no longer ran for the same reason. There was a lot of useful legacy code that got broken overnight when Apple led and others followed in killing off these kinds of plugins.

For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.

Yes, you can. See the landmark United States vs Microsoft 2001 antitrust case.

I'm not sure that's a great example. Even though Microsoft lost, it had no real consequences - the company was not forced to split, MSIE remained a core component of Windows, and Netscape was still forced out of the market because they couldn't compete with free MSIE. By 2003 or so, MSIE was up to ~95% of the market.

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