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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Convicted monopolist prevented from re-offending

This Sunday (Apr 30) at 2PM, I’ll be at the San Francisco Public Library with my new book, Red Team Blues, hosted by Annalee Newitz.

In blocking Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, the UK Competition and Markets Authority has made history: they have stepped in to prevent a notorious, convicted monopolist from seizing control over a nascent, important market (cloud gaming), ignoring the transparent, self-serving lies Microsoft told about the merger:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529eda000c3b0525/Microsoft_Activision_Final_Report_.pdf

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/#microsquish

Cloud gaming isn’t really a thing right now, but it might be. That was Microsoft’s bet, anyway, as it plonked down $69b to acquire Activision-Blizzard — a company that shouldn’t exist, having been formed out of a string of grossly anticompetitive mergers that were waved through.

Activision-Blizzard is a poster-child for the failures of antitrust law over the past 40 years, a period in which monopolies were tolerated and even encouraged by the agencies that were supposed to prevent monopolies from forming and break up the ones that slipped past their defenses. Activision-Blizzard is a giant, moribund company whose “innovation” consists of endless sequels to its endless sequels, whose market power allows it to crush its workers while starving competitors of market oxygen, ensuring that gamers and game workers have nowhere else to go.

Microsoft is another one of those poster-children, of course. After being convicted of antitrust violations, the company dragged out the legal process until George W Bush stole the presidency and decided not to pursue them any further, letting them wriggle off the hook.

The antitrust rough ride tamed Microsoft…for a while. The company did not use the same dirty tricks to destroy, say, Google as it had used against Netscape. But in the years since, Microsoft has demonstrated that it regrets nothing about its illegal conduct and has no hesitations about repeating that conduct.

This is especially true of cloud computing, where Microsoft is using exclusivity deals and illegal “tying” (forcing customers to use a product they don’t want in order to use a product they desire) to lock customers into its cloud offering:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-says-microsofts-cloud-practices-anti-competitive-slams-deals-with-rivals-2023-03-30/

Locking customers into Microsoft’s cloud also means locking customers into Microsoft surveillance. Microsoft’s cloud products spy in ways that are extreme even by the industry’s very low standards. Office 365 isn’t just a version of Office that you never stop paying for — it’s a version of Office that never stops spying on you, and selling the data to your competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Microsoft’s Activision acquisition was entirely cloud-driven. The company clearly believes the pundits who say that the future of gaming is in the cloud: rather than playing on a device with the power to handle all the fancy graphics and physics, you’ll use a low-powered device that streams you video from a server in the cloud that’s doing all the heavy lifting.

If cloud gaming comes true (a big if, considering the dismal state of broadband, another sector that’s been enshittified and starved by monopolists), then Microsoft owning the Xbox platform, the Windows OS, and the Game Pass subscription service already poses a huge risk that the company could grow to dominate the sector. Throw in Activision-Blizzard and the future starts to look very grim indeed.

It’s a nakedly anticompetitive merger. As Mark Zuckerberg unwisely wrote in an internal memo, “it is better to buy than to compete.”

(These guys can not stop incriminating themselves. FTX got mocked for its group-chat called “Wirefraud,” but come on, every tech baron has a folder on their desktop called “mens rea” full of files with names like “premeditation-11.docx.”)

Naturally, the FTC sued to stop the merger (after 40 years, the FTC has undergone a revolution under chair Lina Khan and is actually protecting the American people from monopoly):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake97g/ftc-sues-to-block-microsoft-acquisition-of-call-of-duty-publisher-activision-blizzard

The FTC was always in for an uphill battle. “Cloud gaming,” the market it is seeking to defend from monopolization, doesn’t really exist yet, and enforcing US antitrust law against monopolies over existent things is hard enough, thanks to all those federal judges who attended luxury junkets where billionaire-friendly “economists” taught them that monopolies were “efficient”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

But the FTC isn’t the only cop on the beat. Antitrust is experiencing a global revival, from the EU to China, Canada to Australia, and South Korea to the UK, where the Competition and Markets Authority is kicking all kinds of arse (see also: “ass”). The CMA is arguably the most technically proficient competition regulator in the world, thanks to the Digital Markets Unit (DMU), a force of over 50 skilled engineers who produce intensely detailed, amazingly sharp reports on how tech monopolies work and what to do about them.

The CMA is very interested in cloud gaming. Late last year, they released a long, detailed report into the state of browser engines on mobile phones, seeking public comment on whether these should be regulated to encourage web-apps (which can be installed without going through an app store) and to pave the way for cloud gaming:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

The CMA is especially keen on collaboration with its overseas colleagues. Its annual conference welcome enforcers from all over the world, and its Digital Markets Unit is particularly important in these joint operations. You see, while Parliament appropriated funds to pay those 50+ engineers, it never passed the secondary legislation needed to grant the DMU any enforcement powers. But the DMU isn’t just sitting around waiting for Parliament to act — rather, it produces these incredible investigations and enforcement roadmaps, and releases them publicly.

This turns out to be very important in the EU, where the European Commission has very broad enforcement powers, but very little technical staff. The Commission and the DMU have become something of a joint venture, with the DMU setting up the cases and the EU knocking them down. It’s a very heartwarming post-Brexit story of cross-Channel collaboration!

And so Microsoft’s acquisition is dead (I mean, they say they’ll appeal, but that’ll take months, and the deal with Activision will have expired in the meantime, and Microsoft will have to pay Activision a $3 billion break-up fee):

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/big-tech-blocked-microsoft-stopped

This is good news for gaming, for games workers, and for gamers. Microsoft was and is a rotten company, even by the low standards of tech giants. Despite the sweaters and the charity (or, rather, “charity”) Bill Gates is a hardcore ideologue who wants to get rid of public education and all other public goods:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

Microsoft has a knack for nurturing and promoting absolutely terrible people, like former CEO Steve Ballmer, who has played a starring role in Propublica’s IRS Files, thanks to the bizarre tax-scams he’s pioneered:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

So yeah, this is good news: Microsoft should have been broken up 25 years ago, and we should not allow it to buy its way to ongoing dominance today. But it’s also good news because of the nature of the enforcement: the CMA defended an emerging market, to prevent monopolization.

That’s really important: monopolies are durable. Once a monopoly takes root, it becomes too big to fail and too big to jail. That’s how IBM outspend the entire Department of Justice Antitrust Division every year for twelve years during a period they call “Antitrust’s Vietnam”:

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

Preventing monopoly formation is infinitely preferable to breaking up monopolies after they form. That’s why the golden age of trustbusting (basically, the period starting with FDR and ending with Reagan) saw action against “incipient” monopolies, where big companies bought lots of little companies.

When we stopped worrying about incipiency, we set the stage for today’s Private Equity “rollups,” where every funeral home, or veterinarian, or dentists’ practice is bought out by a giant PE fund, who ruthlessly enshittify it, slashing wages, raising prices, stiffing suppliers and reducing quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Limiting antitrust enforcement to policing monopolies after they form has been an absolute failure. The CMA knows that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure — indeed, we all do.

From Apr 26–28, Barnes and Noble is offering a 25% discount on preorders for my upcoming novels (use discount code PREORDER25): The Lost Cause (Nov 2023) and The Bezzle (Red Team Blues #2) (Feb 2024).

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A promotional image from the Call of Duty franchise featuring a soldier in a skull-mask gaiter giving a thumbs up on a battlefield. It has been altered so that he is giving a thumbs-down gesture. Superimposed on the image is a modified Microsoft 'Clippy' popup; Clippy's speech-bubble has been filled with grawlix characters; the two dialog-box options both read 'No.']

Image: Microsoft, Activision (fair use)

#pluralistic #labor #digital markets unit #gaming #brexit #cma #competition and markets authority #antitrust #monopoly #incipiency #microsoft #activision #blizzard #activision-blizzard #cloud gaming #cloud #mergers

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kfithen · 2 months

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Geforce Now's day pass pricing vs its priority monthly subscription pricing. Yeah Nvidia, no thanks. These day passes should be around the ballpark of $1. Basically, you can either buy a day for $4 or 30 days for $10. Don't buy the day pass people. If you really like it, just choose the subscription!

#geforce now #cloud gaming #gaming #video games

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gamergoff · 9 months

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Nvidia was giving out one-day trials for their Ultimate Tier for GeForce Now if you do the Ultimate Challenge in their app. Did it so I can give that and my new monitor (Acer XZ272U Vbmiiphx) a test drive. Didn't waste any time going through some of the ray-traced and HDR games with it. Seeing that it might be a little while before I'll upgrade from my GTX 1650 Super, I might buy a month or two of the Ultimate tier later on just to toy around with some of the DLSS 3 games in the future.

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gamerswift13 · 9 months

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Need for Speed Unbound!

Or as I like to call it, High-speed Head-on Collision Simulator 2022

Kia ora, friends!

This is gonna just be a short one this week due to ongoing mental and physical health issues, but on that front I have some news: I think I’m slowly but surely getting better!

But anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about Need for Speed Unbound this week because I have been playing it a lot over the last few weeks (when I have had the energy) and I can’t think of a game in recent history that has made me rage quit and want to throw my controller so many times but still is able to pull me back in. I love a good arcade racer; my favourite series in this genre is obviously Forza Horizon (and to a lesser extent Forza Motorsport, which I am still excited for in October), but I have been known to dip into Need for Speed now and then. This latest entry, launched last year, recently came to Xbox Game Pass, so I decided to check it out.

My first dive into this game was via Xbox Cloud Gaming and y’all, that service is great for some games, but for a game as fast-paced as Need for Speed Unbound, I absolutely do not recommend it 😅. Playing it this way, I was constantly crashing into things that I didn’t see because the frames fell out, so it didn’t take long for me to decide to make some space on the tiny Xbox Series S internal storage and download the game to play locally. Once I got that out of the way, I started to have a blast… for a while. My TV, which was 1080p, died a couple of months ago, so since then I’ve been using a TV I borrowed from my sister, which is 720p, and let me tell you, again for a game like this, it’s… a less than optimal way to play. Once I started getting into faster and faster cars, I started crashing into things again. A lot. This isn’t a failure of the game itself, I don’t think, I’m just playing it in a really stupid way 😭.

Apart from all the technical stuff I just mentioned, Need for Speed Unbound is really fun. I think my favourite part, though, has been customising my character, as well as the paint/wraps on some of my cars.

I wish I had more pictures of the different outfits I’ve had my character wear, (I haven’t had the time to go back to the game before writing) but I still really like this look. And oh boy do I love that car. It’s one of the cars the game gives you in the beginning, a Nissan GT-R from I want to say 1997 (or thereabouts), and it’s fast, great at drifting, extremely hot, but the best thing of all: I made it look queer and non-conforming as fuck.

The game limits what you can write on your cars, I assume because it’s possible other players could see it, so it wouldn’t let me write ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘fascist’ - those first two are kind of bonkers considering the amount of queer representation this game contains, but I digress. So I substituted ‘fascist’ with the succinct ‘fash’, and instead of ‘basic bitch’ I wrote ‘basic beach’, which the latter is honestly kind of better anyway.

The racing is fun, though frustrating sometimes thanks to the game only giving you a maximum of retries per in-game 24-hour period, but what really stands out to me is that there is so much queer representation here - like way more than I’d have ever expected from a Need for Speed. There’s one NPC racer you meet and race against named Justicia who is from Mexico and is openly transfem. There are signs around the city that say things like ‘love is love’, or simply have the pride flag on them. And as you may have noticed on my car in the pictures above, you can just put the pride flag and trans flag all over your car if you want - and not just that, they have every single type of pride flag I could think of, which blew me away. Seriously, more games need to be this open about supporting queer communities. There’s also a bunch of representation for people all over the world - the music in Need for Speed Unbound includes tracks in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, French, and a few I couldn’t nail down just by listening, and it’s honestly super refreshing.

Anyway, that’s all from me this week. Sorry if it feels a bit like it was put together at the last minute because, well, it was, but I wanted to make sure I had something for you.

Thanks so much for reading, y’all, I appreciate it. As always, if you have any comments or questions, hit me up on the social links at the bottom of the page, or flick me an email! If you want to read more stuff from me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews! This week I reviewed Robot Jox (1989), which I believe may have inspired some of the aesthetics of things like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pacific Rim.

Stay safe and warm out there (or safe and cool, if you’re in the northern hemisphere!) y’all, and I’ll talk to you all again really soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

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gamechestgames · 1 year

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Just Finished: A Plague's Tale: Requiem

Beauty is the word that it comes to mind when I think of this game. It grew a lot from the first entry and so it grew all its characters. Everything was improved from the first game as it became more complex, tense, scarier, lovely, and challenging. Amicia is not a little fragile girl anymore. She's stronger a willing to kill if that means protecting her family. So forget about all the puzzle based game you played the first time, because now you'll need to take more action if you want to get through the rats, the soldiers and the evil minded people you'll get across. Explore the south of France and find its beauty in a very passionate story driven puzzle/action game. I would rate it 10/10 now

#a plague's tale requiem #a plague's tale #pc gamepass #cloud gaming #video game awards #the macula #asobo studio #amicia de rune #hugo de rune #love story #family comes first #rats #infestation #black plague #action games #puzzle games #girl power #swing it #game chest

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wedeemchannel · 1 year

Video

youtube

Looking for a mobile controller to replace your @Razer Kishi or the old Gamesir x2 with the #NintendoSwitch layout? Check out our review on the @mygamesir x2 Pro for #XboxGamePass (xcloud) above!

#youtube #gamesir #xbox game pass #gaming #mobile gaming #cloud gaming #gamers #gamers unite #gamerslife #gamingcommunity

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gamespublisher · 11 months

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The Thriving World of Indie Game Development: Fueling Creativity and Innovation

In recent years, Indie Game Development Studios have witnessed a remarkable surge in popularity and influence. Indie games, short for independent games, are created by small teams or even individual developers without the backing of major publishers.

These games often reflect unique and imaginative concepts, captivating players with their creativity and innovative gameplay mechanics.

The Rise of Indie Games

The rise of indie games can be attributed to several factors. One of the primary catalysts is the accessibility of game development tools and platforms. Over the past decade, the democratization of game development has enabled aspiring developers to create games using readily available software and resources. Tools such as Unity and Unreal Engine have provided a user-friendly environment for developers to bring their visions to life, regardless of their previous experience or formal education in game design.

Conclusion

Indie game development has revolutionized the gaming industry, bringing fresh perspectives, innovation, and diversity to the forefront. The accessibility of development tools, the rise of digital distribution platforms, and the unwavering passion of indie developers have fueled this revolution, allowing for the creation of unique and unforgettable gaming experiences. As we move forward, it is essential to continue supporting and celebrating the indie game development community, as they are the driving force behind some of the most exciting and groundbreaking games in recent memory. Visit Games Publisher today and know about Xbox Cloud Gaming as well.

#game development #indie game developers #cloud gaming #game publishers

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glownightgames · 11 months

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Cloud gaming has emerged as a game-changer in the gaming industry, revolutionizing how we play and experience games. This innovative technology allows gamers to stream games directly to their devices without the need for high-end hardware. With cloud gaming, players can access a vast library of games instantly, eliminating the constraints of physical copies or lengthy downloads. By leveraging the power of remote servers, cloud gaming delivers seamless and immersive gaming experiences, regardless of device specifications. It opens up new possibilities for gamers to play their favorite titles on smartphones, tablets, or low-end computers. Cloud gaming technology represents a paradigm shift, providing accessibility, convenience, and limitless potential for the future of gaming.

#Cloud Gaming #Mobile Game Development #gaming #gamedev

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itsamepatches · 1 year

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Video Game demos via Cloud for the Switch be like:

Cloud demo: (still installing)

Cloud demo: (finishes installing)

Person: (presses "Start" and then moves their character a single inch)

Cloud demo: Thanks for playing :)

#I wanted to try out the RE game that had a demo in the eShop - never again.#to hell with Cloud demos just put a regular demo for your game not this trash #video games #nintendo switch #nintendo eshop #cloud gaming

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clouddosage · 11 months

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You asked for it. We're doing it! Our giveaway for the month of June will be an Asus Rog Ally!

It's a fantastic device for both native and cloud gaming! You've got until midnight on June 30 to enter!

#cloud gaming #gaming #video games

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices

Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies — Google and Apple — with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales — 15–30%!

This is bad for users and workers. Many companies’ gross margins are less than 30%. In some categories, that means there’s no competition. Take audiobooks: publishers wholesale their audiobooks to retailers at a 20% discount, so a retailer that sells its audiobooks through an app, paying a 30% commission, will lose money through every sale.

This is why the only convenient mobile audiobook stores are Apple Books (a front-end for Amazon’s Audible) and Google Books: Apple doesn’t have to pay the Apple tax, and Google doesn’t have to pay the Google tax, and that means that Apple and Google can demand crippling discounts and preferential treatment from publishers and independent authors.

The app tax is a tax on the workers whose creative works are sold on mobile platforms, because creative workers have the least bargaining power in this monopolized supply-chain. Our publishers can squeeze us — and the editorial workers, narrators, and sound technicians who work on our books — to make up the difference.

Independent authors who sell directly on these platforms, meanwhile, have even less leverage and get even worse terms. Things aren’t much better at the other end of the supply-chain, either: while firms prefer to wring concessions out of their workers and suppliers, they’re not averse to raising prices on customers, providing that all the competitors do so as well.

Since every competitor is also selling through an app store and either paying a direct app tax or ceding margin to the mobile duopoly as a condition of selling in their in-house, pre-installed stores, they all have the same incentive to raise prices.

Economists call this the monopsony problem (or, since we’re talking about two companies, a duopsony or oligopsony problem). That’s an unwieldy and esoteric term, so Rebecca Giblin and I coined a much better one, and wrote a book about it: Chokepoint Capitalism:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Theoretically, there’s a way to avoid the app store chokepoint: web apps. These are part of the HTML5 standard, and if a browser fully implements that standard, then developers can make a self-encapsulated “app” that’s delivered in the browser, complete with an icon for your home screen, capable of doing anything an app store app can do.

A company that wants to sell stuff without paying the app tax could hypothetically deliver a web app that the user could download and install via their browser. This doesn’t just avoid the app tax, it also overrides the app stores’ editorial control, like Apple’s decision to block privacy tools in China to aid in state surveillance.

But you can’t have a web app without a web-app-compatible browser, and you can’t get a web-app-compatible browser in Apple’s App Store. The only browsers permitted in the App Store are those based on WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari. This means that every browser on Ios, from Firefox to Edge to Chrome, is just a reskinned version of Safari.

That’s a problem, because Webkit suuuuuuucks. Without the discipline imposed by either regulation or competition, Apple has systematically underinvested in Webkit, so that major bugs remain unaddressed for years and years. Some of these bugs are functional — Webkit just doesn’t act the way its documentation says it does — but others represent serious security vulnerabilities.

This is an important point: app store proponents say that denying users the right to choose where they get their apps and excluding competitors is necessary, the only practical way to prevent security risks to users. But while app stores can prevent the introduction of insecure or malicious code, they can also block the introduction of code that fixes defects in the manufacturer’s own security.

Mobile companies don’t want insecure code on their platforms, but they also don’t want to erode their profits. An Iphone with a working VPN app is more secure than one that lacks that app, but if that Iphone is owned by a Chinese person, it endangers Apple’s access to low-waged Chinese labor and 350 million affluent Chinese consumers.

Likewise, a third party might create a browser engine that corrects the security defects in Webkit, but if Apple allows users to install such a browser engine, they will lose the ability to extract billions through the app tax.

Companies never solely pursue their customers’ interests. Instead, they seek an equilibrium that allocates as much value as possible to their shareholders. This allocation is limited by both competition (the fear that a bad service will drive customers to a rival) and regulation (the fear that a bad service will attract crushing fines).

The less competition and regulation a company faces, the more value it can take from its users and give to its shareholders. Here, mobile platforms have it easy: they don’t have to worry about competition because of regulation. Laws like Section1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD) make it illegal to jailbreak a phone to install third-party apps. Jay Freeman calls this “felony contempt of business model” — that is, the government will punish your competitors for trying to compete with you. Nice work if you can get it.

As the old joke goes, “if you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” The rules that should promote better corporate conduct (through competition) instead encourage worse behavior, by putting companies in charge of who gets to compete with them, in the name of user safety.

Meanwhile, users are increasingly trapped inside walled gardens, because their media, apps, and data are locked up in mobile silos and switching to a rival means enduring the switching costs of leaving it all behind. Mobile companies claim to have built fortresses to keep bad guys out, but those high walls make fortresses into prisons that keep customers locked in.

But anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The manifest unfairness and insecurity of the regulation-backed walled garden model has attracted the interest of new trustbusters, competition regulators from China to the EU to the USA to the UK.

The UK plays a key role here. The country’s Competitions and Markets Authority boasts the largest workforce of technical experts of any competition regulator in the world: the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit has 50+ full-time engineers, which allows it to produce the most detailed, most insightful market investigations of any nation’s competition regulators.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/digital-markets-unit

(Don’t get too excited, though: in keeping with the UK’s abysmal standard of government competence, Parliament has yet to pass the long-overdue secondary legislation that would give the DMU its own enforcement powers. Ugh.)

Last June, the CMA proposed a market investigation into cloud gaming and mobile browsers (gaming is the largest source of app store revenue and cloud gaming is a way to avoid the app tax, so it’s a closely related issue):

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/mobile-browsers-and-cloud-gaming

There were many significant submissions over this proposal, including comments that EFF legal intern Shashank Sirivolu and I drafted:

https://www.eff.org/document/comments-electronic-frontier-foundation-cmas-inquiry-mobile-browsers-and-cloud-gaming

Many commenters (including EFF) proposed that the CMA should intervene to improve the state browser engines competition on Ios and Android (Android allows multiple browser engines, but doesn’t give them the same hardware access that Chrome and its Blink engine enjoy).

This argument seems to have landed for the CMA. Today, they announced that they would go ahead with a full-fledged market study into mobile browsers and cloud gaming:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63984ce2d3bf7f3f7e762453/Issues_statement_.pdf

The most obvious outcome of this study would be an order forcing the mobile vendors to open up to full-featured, alternative browser engines. This is compromise solution, between forcing open app stores onto the platforms — which would mean forcing Apple to allow sideloading and policing Google’s use of contracts to limit third-party stores — and doing nothing.

A browser engine mandate is less satisfying than open app stores, but it is also more achievable, and easier to monitor and enforce. With Android, Google proved that you don’t have to use hardware locks to prevent third-party app stores — you can use a hard-to-detect web of contracts and incentives to create an app store monopoly that’s nearly as airtight as Apple’s.

But policing whether a platform permits rival, full-featured browser engines — ones that enable web apps and cloud gaming without paying the app tax — is much easier. Also easier: developing objective standards for evaluating whether a browser engine is secure and robust. Open Web Advocacy’s criteria are a great starting point:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1118238/Open_Web_Advocacy_-_Consultation_response_-_Publication_version.pdf#h.q9nder968wzm

The CMA announcement is welcome, but has some gaps. It under-emphasises the importance of hardware access (for web apps to compete with native apps, they need full hardware access), and could leave new browser engines at the mercy of the existing review teams that review all the other apps in the app store (who reject rival browser engines out of hand).

Meanwhile, while I was writing this article, Mark Gurman published a jaw-dropping scoop in Bloomberg: Apple will open its Ios platform to rival app stores by 2024, in order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA):

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe I’m still absorbing this news, but I think this complements the CMA browser engine work, rather than rendering it redundant. Alternative app stores don’t necessarily mean alternative browser engines. Apple says it will have security standards for alternative app stores, and these standards could well include a ban on browser engines. At a minimum, it’s clear that different levels of scrutiny need to be applied to apps, app stores, and browser engines, as each one poses different threats and opportunities.

[Image ID: London's Canary Wharf, a high-rise business district that is home to the UK Competition and Markets Authority. The colours of the buildings have been inverted, and the sky has been filled with a Matrix 'waterfall' graphic. In the foreground is an ogrish giant, standing at a console, yanking on a lever in the shape of a golden dollar-sign. The console is emblazoned with the logos for Chrome and Safari. The ogre is disdainfully holding aloft a mobile phone. On the phone's screen is a Gilded Age editorial cartoon of a business-man with a dollar-sign for a head. The phone itself is limned with a greenish supernova of radiating light.]

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