For some time I have been insisting that there is a paradigm shift in the technology industry. It is not that I have invented anything, I am simply following the opinion of the experts. However, within the free software community, they seem not to have taken notice of this change and continue to fight battles that made sense to fight 20 years ago but are now unimportant.
Fortunately, regulators in Europe and the United States seem to have taken note of the new ways that big tech companies are using to take advantage of users and small competitors and are looking for ways to remedy them.
In our previous article We saw how Apple used its app store to get more revenue from app developers and how Google apparently used the insights gained through its licensing agreements to develop a product similar to a competitor's.
Now we will see other accusations against Google and those that exist against Amazon
Criticisms against Google and Amazon. These are the complaints
The main criticisms against Google come from the way in which the positioning in the search engine is determined and because of the blocking of access to its services.
The power of retaliation through search engine positioning was evident in the US Congressional hearing that we mentioned in the previous article.
David Barnett of PopSockets mobile accessories digital store summed it up in one sentence
We could disappear from DuckDuckGo and we wouldn't even notice it. If we lose Google, we lose our business.
From Basement They point to Google's way of getting you to buy advertising.
This manufacturer of productivity software gets more than 40% of traffic thanks to Google. In the last few years, he realized that some of his competitors had bought advertising using the Basement name as a keyword. Of course they got a much better ranking.
Basement had to buy advertising.
Google too received complaints for using the popularity of its services to get users to its browser.
Chris Peterson of the Mozilla Foundation reported two years ago that a YouTube redesign was making non-Chromium-based browsers slower.
YouTube page loading is 5x slower in Firefox because YouTube's redesign is based on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API that is only implemented in Chrome.
Shortly after, Microsoft announced its decision to release a new browser based on the same engine as Chrome.
In November 2019 on Reddit it was reported that Google was blocking access to its services to minority browsers such as Konqueror, Falkon, and Qutebrowser.
Users came across a message saying that their browser was not secure and suggested installing another.
Counterfeiting and unfair competition
Amazon it is also in the sights of the authorities Americans and Europeans.
The PopSockets cell phone accessory maker he complained that the company not only fails to act against lower-priced counterfeit products, it is pressuring suppliers of legitimate products to downgrade theirs. If you don't, threaten to get them from other sources.
From PopSockets they say that Jeff Bezos' store, in addition to lowering prices without consultation, also forces sellers to compensate it for lost profits.
The European Union's Competition Commission this week opened a formal antitrust investigation into Amazon to determine if the business is using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over small sellers on its e-commerce platform.
The researchers did not they will only analyze Amazon's agreements with sellers, they also want to know how the included seller is selected as "Best Buy"
When you search for a specific product on the Amazon marketplace, it doesn't just show you the characteristics of the product. In case the company sells that product, it shows you its own stock. Otherwise it shows you the best offer of others within the platform. In theory, that decision should be made based on parameters such as competitive pricing, number of positive reviews, and compliance history.
In response to a German antitrust investigation, Amazon agreed to make major changes to its agreement with the sellers.
With the new provisions the company must now give 30 days notice and a reason before removing sellers from its platform. Those merchants who do not agree with their decisions will be able to take Amazon before the courts of their countries of origin, instead of being forced to do so in Luxembourg.