The anti-trust community is all over Google, these days, says an article in the August 2009 issue of Wired Magazine. Fred Vogelstein tells readers that the search giant is the new Microsoft – remember that huge antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for packaging their browser with Windows? Now they’re interested in the advertising and business ideas of Google, as Google has a huge market share in the advertising and search market, which gives them an enormous amount of data about users. After all, why do they give their excellent software away for free? This is because the more users that their applications have, the more data they have about them, about their interests, their personal identity, and much much more. Effectively, many companies have access to such huge amounts of personal info – take Facebook for example, which acquired FriendFeed yesterday. They can (and do, for all I know) use all the data that users submit about their interests, identity, preferences, and more, to target advertisements, to circumvent identities (in malicious situations), to sell the data to marketing agencies, and more. Or look at Twitter. Look at how much detail Twitter has, even though mostly all of it is accessible by anyone (except of course for preferences, Direct Messages, and protected updates). I rather like Twitter, but what if they (or someone else, possibly someone who scrapes personal info off of their site) use it to create a whole “profile” of a person’s characteristics, personality, hobbies, interests, and whatnot? I know that Twitter won’t do this, but some other company in such a situation might. Like Apple.
Apple is the one the antitrust community should be gunning for. Look at how they are monopolizing.A classic example is the iPhone, exclusive to AT&T. Why is this, you might ask? This way, they can pull even more money out of the pocket’s of their users. Also, what is the whole point of all the restrictions inside the iPhone OS? Why can’t Apple be open, like Google with Android, open-sourced and partially developed by the community from the start? The Macintosh, Apple’s key product, is also an example of this. Mac OS X is only compatible with Apple hardware, not anything else, so that everything has to be through Apple, hardware and software, meaning more money for Apple, as well as an unnecessary monopoly, while Windows is completely open to all suitable hardware, because Microsoft isn’t a hardware manufacturer and knows not to lock people in, though they did that with IE some time ago (and possibly even again now). Apple even makes it hard for you to change the battery in a laptop!!! They want you to stop from using devices from others that compete with them!
And yet we agree to such a tradeoff. We still give all our information to Apple, ranging from our music purchases in iTunes (musical preferences and interests), files in MobileMe, email, pictures, computer preferences, and so much more. But they are crossing the line – why don’t they understand that doing so is dangerous? However, no one seems to care that Apple is being so monopolizing to users, even though in some of its main conquests it has a small market share. Look, this will end bad for you, Apple, so make the situation better for users NOW and save yourselves of the future consequences of not doing so. Otherwise, what is the commercial world coming to?