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I was responding to a comment that claimed “he isn’t on the project since last year”. Based on his activity on social media, he is clearly still in the project.
I was responding to a comment that claimed “he isn’t on the project since last year”. Based on his activity on social media, he is clearly still in the project.
Direct link to PDF of RCS Universal Profile specification
This PDF link can be found on a search engine. You can also fill out the form with fake information and a throwaway email to get the link, though you don’t have to.
The RCS Universal Profile is a publicly available standard, but there is no FOSS client stack that implements the standard. Google restricts RCS support on Android to the proprietary Google Messages instead of making it part of the Android Open Source Project. Apple Messages and iOS are also proprietary.
The EU should use the Digital Markets Act to force Google and Apple to allow competing RCS clients on Android and iOS.
That’s just the first thing that came to mind. Any product with consumable refills (razor blades, electric toothbrush heads, air/water filter replacements, etc.) would also work as an example.
Let’s say you want to buy a printer from a retailer. The retailer also sells replacement ink cartridges, and so does the printer manufacturer. The manufacturer prefers that you buy the ink cartridges directly from them, because their margins are higher when they don’t have to pay the retailer a cut.
To encourage customers to buy the cartridges directly from them, the manufacturer provides a link or QR code to their online ink cartridge store on the product box, printer manual, and another paper insert inside the box. The manufacturer might offer more competitive pricing than the retailer or some other enticement, like a coupon.
However, the retailer implements an anti-steering rule, preventing the printer manufacturer from providing a link or QR code to their online ink cartridge store on the product packaging, printer manual, or anything inside the box, as a requirement for the printer to appear on the retailer’s shelves. (As a result of corporate consolidation, there is only one other retailer in the entire country.) This is the equivalent of what Apple is doing to apps in their App Store: preventing developers from disclosing that users can purchase subscriptions or other app-related digital goods on the developer’s website.
iCloud is proprietary by definition because Apple has not publicly released its source code under a free license.
Only Google is claiming that the damages are less than $1 million. You’re taking Google’s self-interested claim as fact while overlooking Google’s financial motivation to pay less than what they owe, which a jury could find to be in the hundreds of millions. For obvious reasons, court judgments aren’t decided by the defendants.
Based on the statements Google previously made, Google most likely sent a check for a fraction of the damages that a jury could find them liable for.
It’s unclear just how big the check was. The court filing redacted key figures to protect Google’s trade secrets. But Google claimed that testimony from US experts “shrank” the damages estimate “considerably” from initial estimates between $100 million and $300 million, suggesting that the current damages estimate is “substantially less” than what the US has paid so far in expert fees to reach those estimates.
According to Reuters, Google has not disclosed “the size of its payment” but has said that “after months of discovery, the Justice Department could only point to estimated damages of less than $1 million.”
A fine of less than $1 million is absolutely not what anyone except Google is asking for.
So blatantly anticompetitive. Waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with the EU’s consumer protections.
Yes, Plasma 6 was the turning point for me, since it introduced pixel-perfect fractional scaling on Wayland for just about every application.