Comment by danielmarkbruce
6 months ago
They are just trying to make their products better. Anti competitive behavior is generally perceived to be about doing things that put the company in question in a better position without improving the product.
Ask yourself the question - are customers better or worse off because of this?
That's not what anti-competitive means at all. Having APIs that Google Meet can use but competing products can't reduces competition, which makes customers worse off.
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Anti-competitive behaviour doesn't need to mean other companies can't compete. It just means it makes it harder to compete, which this does. Having access to this data improves Google Meet, and evidently gives enough advantage to justify adding it to the browser. Other products don't have access to these APIs, so can't improve their products in the same way. Google has used their browser monopoly to give their other products an unfair advantage. That is anti-competitive behaviour, and is illegal.
"All they're doing is making their product better."
"Making your product better by privileging your own domains in the browser is the anti-competitive part."
"Come on, it's not like it's making their product better."
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This really isn't complicated. Is this making Google Meet better? I would quote:
> danielmarkbruce: "They are just trying to make their products better."
Okay. So then Google Meet would be a worse product if they didn't have privileged API access over other apps. So... this does make it harder for those other apps to compete, unless you think that the quality of a product is somehow irrelevant for competition.
Sure, Google Meet still isn't winning, but who knows where they'd be in the market if they didn't privilege themselves.
You're saying that their product would be worse if they didn't do this, but also that it somehow doesn't matter because they're not the best product. Which has a similar energy to me cutting a loop out of a marathon and saying, "Come on guys, I only came in third. It's not cheating unless I come in first, everybody knows that. As long as I don't come in first I'm allowed to take shortcuts. Give me my third place medal that I definitely earned fairly, why is everybody mad about this?"
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You're saying it's not a big deal while also saying it improves the product. The debug panel is apparent, but we don't know what else the API's data is used for. Maybe Meet uses it to improve performance too.
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Other companies are also trying to make their product better. If other products are not able to compete this can become a problem for the users.
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You think that's the actual point? You cannot be serious.
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> are customers better or worse off because of this?
Worse. Google's Hangouts/Meet customers are better off, but everyone else is not. That's what anti-competitive behavior is: using your monopoly in order to advantage your own products at the expense of others.