At the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.
I think a year for the remedies is optimistic - could drag on for a while. Also worth mentioning that it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
> it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
But it kind of is an exclusivity agreement. Have you ever tried to change the default search on an iPhone? There is only a very small list of curated searches you are allowed to pick from, and you cant add your own.
You’re right, my bad on the terminology. A year is definitely optimistic, I just hope that’s the first draft pending appeals. the longer it stretches on, the greater chance there is of directives being changed, lobbyists influencing politicians, etc.
seems like these days most of the payment is 36% of ads in Google searches, but maybe there is also some money sent specifically for it to be the default.
They get paid a share of ad revenue their users generate if they make Google the default in all of their web search entry points. These are not separate. The deal is 1) "make Google the default" and then 2) "there's a revenue share". No 1 then no 2.
My idea is that they could auction off the right to be the default search engine separately in each state. So google could still win most of the auctions but if some other smaller provider wanted a chance they could concentrate their whole bet into a smaller market like Rhode Island or whatever.
Basically, ISPs in Korea charge services extra fees based on the amount of traffic they generate.
The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.
Of course while Netflix can raise prices to cover those fees, Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.
I can see both sides of the argument here, but it is strange to me that the cost does not fall on consumers instead of the producers—the U.S. has had bandwidth caps for users for a several years.
There aren’t two sides to the argument… The ISP’s customer is paying to access that data, adding another fee to the originator of the data is double dipping, plain and simple.
I think it’s telling that generally the only network providers who can charge these fees are the ones with outsized market power - for example the largest ISPs in my country, such as Telstra and Optus don’t do any settlement free peering and charge everyone for transit to get bytes into their network. But the smaller ISP I’m on peers with Netflix and AWS and Microsoft and literally anyone who connects in to internet exchanges around the country, and funnily enough, even without charging content providers extra fees for data I’ve already paid for, my connection has better general performance, I pay a competitive fee compared to the other ISPs, and their network isn’t swamped by all the data…
> The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.
Netflix/Twitch don't put any "strain on the internet infrastructure" since they don't just gratuitously blast terabytes of UDP traffic to Korean IP addresses or something. The _users_ who paid of _internet access_ are using their connection to... access the Internet! And most popular internet services are obviously consuming significant amount of traffic. The ISPs can introduce bandwidth usage limits or try to actively throttle the connections to particular services, but they just prefer to double dip and milk the businesses instead. Strange that I have to explain such things on HN of all places...
I find it odd that twitch would rather shut down their service than simply stop offering a free tier. They already have an ad-free service called Twitch Turbo, surely enforcing usage in Korea wouldn't be prohibitively difficult.
This makes me think that they are trying to spark outrage.
I think that would decimate their user numbers, which is a bad deal for the streamers too since they make money on sponsorships/ads and based on audience size. Hard to grow an audience when folks have to pay for the service. No idea how much of an average size streamer's income is based on donations on stream compared to brand deals. I wouldn't expect the average user to both pay for a sub to twitch, and also donate to the streamers.
I won't pretend to know what Twitch knows, but watching for free is definitely integral to how Twitch acquires users.
That's not obvious. If the pay-to-watch version of Twitch isn't viable, it will have no streamers and no users, but it will cost more than the we-no-longer-exist version.
A fixed price tier cannot cover the full cost of that user's variable stream usage.
Twitch is unable to charge per hr streamed - nobody would accept that pricing, esp. if it was originally free.
Removing twitch from korea is the best move, since koreans are the ones losing out - which hopefully as a democracy, they elect someone to change this sort of lobbying from the ISP industry.
It might work short-term, but without a free tier, can they get enough new customers to replace subscriber loss over time? Otherwise they'll just slowly bleed subscribers until it's no longer profitable to run transit to and CDNs in Korea.
Twitch's market share in Korea is very small. Domestic streaming services like Afreeca are the dominant player. If I had to guess, Twitch doesn't have enough users in Korea for a paywalled system to turn things profitable.
Twitch is an advertising platform first, and a streaming platform second, similar to Google search is a search portal second. They can reduce advert payout rates, which is similar to Netflix raising prices.
Good. Considering they’re already getting millions in comp, I’d rather have people working on AGI that aren’t in it solely for the money. And it’s not like Cohere or Sam’s next company won’t be trying to poach researchers anyway, but at least one company (OpenAI) isn’t going for profit for sure now.
SUSE was private just a few years ago, owned by the same firm that IPOed them and is now taking them private again. If there were any truth to your statement, it would’ve happened a while ago.
That explains it, I was very confused by what I assumed was self-censoring, since the comment didn’t actually clarify anything. I wish there was an accepted way to disambiguate asterisks from server side filters.
The weird part to me at least is that they don’t ask for affirmative consent prior to transferring all your data, billing details, etc., to Squarespace. This isn’t some 1:1 acquisition, the Google Domains UI won’t even exist anymore. Even stranger considering the Google workspace subscriptions are moving as well, no idea how Squarespace is handling that. At least transfers aren’t frozen so you can get away from Squarespace’s terrible product prior to the deal closing.
(I know Google has the legal right to do this, but that’s not the issue here.)
I read somewhere that Squarespace is already a reseller of Workspace, so the new accounts they acquire will likely slot into whatever current mechanism exists for managing and supporting these customers.
Apparently the Google Domains UI is sticking around too, although who knows how long that'll last.
Wait, like THE Google Workspace subscriptions are moving? Do you have a source? I might have missed that in the announcement - sounds like a total disaster waiting to happen..
Maybe this is a radical position, but if users have given you data based on the agreement that you'll follow a particular privacy policy, then material changes to that policy should require the user's consent.
If a user doesn't consent, then sure, you can go ahead and do whatever policy changes or mergers or acquisitions you want, but you don't get to include that user's data in the deal.
I suppose ideally your money can’t be stolen? E.g., if someone hacks you or something similar, the government can invalidate that currency. Plus reduced money laundering, since it’s tracked, which theoretically reduces crime and makes it easier to track.
Personally I only see physical currency being deprecated over the next several decades, considering most people don’t really care about privacy anymore (including me, to be fair).
It's 2032. Covid Alpha variant is running rampant. In an attempt to prevent Americans breaking mandatory isolation electric cars have been disabled unless authorised by your neighbourhood state leader and all non-online transactions have been blocked.
I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing. When I say I don’t care about privacy, I mean that I don’t use VPNs, I don’t use ProtonMail, I don’t disable cookies or JS, I don’t use cash—all because I value convenience. Is this short-sighted? Maybe, but I am in a position where I (generally speaking) trust the government. That’s not true of everyone of course.
And, key here, you trust the government now. If a government you trust erodes privacy over time & then a government you don't like gets into power you're screwed.
I’m curious as to how your company focuses on user retention in the longer term. Obviously, Spotify or Game Pass have the perks of having superstars and AAA studios already onboarded, so customers sign on and stick around for new releases by larger creators. But with indie games, there’s usually not that same loyalty to a creator (I can think of only a few famous ones off the top of my head). Games are also not as replayable as music, especially smaller ones—they’re more like video streaming in that regard. Is your eventual goal just to onboard enough new games every year that users continue subscribing, or is there another angle to it?
Similarly, how do you plan to retain devs, especially once they become established and choose to sell directly instead? I think your most “similar” competitor, Apple Arcade, gave out contracts to larger studios to build games, which isn’t really sustainable in the longer term as far as I can tell, especially when they can simply sell their games instead. Is this more of an alternative revenue stream for studios? One of the main draws of a subscription for customers is exclusivity, which would kind of contradict that.
In general though, I really like this concept; it can solve a lot of issues with getting indie game dev going in a sustainable manner, which is a market neither Game Pass nor Apple Arcade really address. Best of luck!
User retention is quite tricky, especially for gaming. We think that it won't be too hard adding new content, since there are so many titles releasing each year, but getting highly anticipated titles might be tough.
We think part of the solution will be adding features to MagnaPlay which go beyond just the games. A good example is Spotify, they have a great content library like many other services, but they also have your curated playlists, artist-specific radios, Spotify wrapped, etc. I think getting good user retention will ultimately depend upon the kind of community we can build, not just the content (although it also is a key part).
