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Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
(www.bostonherald.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It‘s a duopoly and I doubt the US will tackle this problem. At least the EU has started doing something about it.
Some nuance to that. The software platform is a duopoly, the hardware is not.
Not that it matters too much, because anticompetitive practices don't need a 100% or even a 50% market share.
and even then, Android is mostly open source.
I've personally updated the kernel to my Amazon Fire tablet (and believe me, the 3.18 branch doesn't contain as many security backports as they'd have you believe)
Antitrust is not about whether people have the arbitrary ability to go around it, it's about whether people actually go around it, and if not, is that because one player entrenched themselves in the market that they are able to distort it.
I mean, you're both right.
Yes, the use of OSS by Google doesn't exempt them from antitrust laws.
But also yes, it does give them a defense that Apple just doesn't have. Not solely because of the OS portions, but also because it tends to guarantee some nominal competition. See above my point about Samsung's alternatives.