Our digital sovereignty is jeopardized by potential monopolies of big Internet companies such as Google and Apple.
(SZ: Johannes Kuhn: Letzte Ausfahrt Zukunft/Last Exit: the Future; in German: SZ #11, 2016-01-15; URL: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/mozilla-letzte-ausfahrt-zukunft-1.2818241, accessed on 2016-01-16, 11:01 UTC)
What is happening to us? We have access to the Mozilla open source web browser, which is independently developed, but we deliberately make ourselves dependent on Google and Apple!
- Firefox on Android phones has a marginal 1% market share. But we do not take three minutes to install Firefox from the app store.
- The browser Chrome has reduced the Firefox market share to 15% on desktop computers.
- Content blockers on Apple’s phones can only be provided for Safari. Apple is currently not opening the required functions for external browsers. Nevertheless we buy Apple’s smartphones.
A few years ago, Microsoft has been forced to unbundle the browser from the windows operating system. This gave independent providers (prominently Mozilla) the opportunity to enter the desktop market. Wouldn’t it be time to analyse Google’s and Apple’s monopoly tendencies in more detail? Our digital sovereignty is dependent upon the openness of the Internet and multiplicity of service providers!