We live in a free society, not a police state, regardless of what you may be wishing. That makes a lot of things like this possible.

He could appeal to the Supreme.....oooooohhhhhhhh....

You forgot the part where Google decided to stop cooperating with repressive regimes in outing dissidents. Still waiting for Microsoft and Yahoo to do the same.

How is Google a monopoly? Have you heard of Baidu, Bing, Yahoo? All get decent shares of the search market. Apple competes with Google quite effectively on many fronts. And you're going to have a really difficult time arguing that the market has significant barriers to entry, especially given the way in which Google broke into that market in the first place.

My "bias" comes from history. Google has continually been the most open, the quickest to admit fault, and the least likely to betray your data to some repressive regime that wants to imprison you.

You can talk of faults till the cows come home, those factors to me are crucially important. When Microsoft actively works with the CPC to hand your skype data over, and Google is blocked in China due to resisting their repressive BS, I sort of stop caring whether Google has closed such and such service or their Android Play services are a binary blob. Theyre a Good Actor, and thats what really matters.

Being a jerk isnt illegal (nor should it be), and ultimately the person advertising isnt DOING anything except trying to convince you to do something really unhealthy. How is that different than a friend trying to convince you to smoke? Should that too be illegal?

Seems to me the responsibility ultimately rests with the individual making the decision, and no attempt to shift the blame onto the "tempter" changes that reality.

The point is that Google's rules are the same in both markets, and the Asian market has demonstrated how unrestrictive Google is through their extensive use of AOSP to create non-google ecosystems.

It sounds like the argument is "its impossible to use Android without buying into the Google sphere", all the while ignoring the examples to the contrary. How is it Google's fault that no one in the EU has tried to be as innovative as Oppo or Xiaomi?

Im failing to see how one could argue that Google forces vendors to do anything when there are a large number of premiun handset makers in China making AOSP-based handsets with no linkage to google (which would be impossible, since Google is blocked in China).

Recognition of a religion is not a violation of church and state, so Im not clear what the point of your post is. Establishment of a religion is all that is prohibited.

They are SIGNIFICANTLY less restrictive than their counterparts. I just got a corporate issued iDevice, and coming from android it is infuriating just how much Apple forces you to play with their ecosystem. You can install google maps, but it wont give you lock screen integration, and it cant be made the default for instructions, and it cant prevent screen lock. You can install SwiftKey, but you cant disable the Apple keyboard, nor prevent its mandatory use for password fields. You can install chrome, but cannot force links to open in it.

It is quite obnoxious to see people holding Google up as the bad guy here. Can you imagine if Apple was dominant? Oh wait, they were for a while and it WAS obnoxious, because it WAS horrendously locked down. Google offers an alternative that people have hacked to pieces and done wonderful things with (like Samsung, XIaoMi, OnePlus, Oppo, etc's take on AOSP) and the EU feels the need to crap on them because they hate google for some reason.

Google isnt perfect but theyre the best internet company we've had in a LONG time. Everyone else is worse in just about every category.

None of their competitors even OFFER the option to have an "F-Droid" or to remove their respective equivalents of play services. Google is doing something literally no one else-- except those on AOSP-- offers. Its arguably not even possible to do the thing you're suggesting short of returning to the old days of "every phone its own OS with crappy J2ME apps".

Im not arguing whether SecureBoot is good or bad, but you're making several false technical statements and Im not a big fan of arguments premised on BS.

Bootsector malware is (or was) exceedingly common on Windows XP and 7, to the point where I was regularly using tools like aswMBR and GMER to remove it. Thats why there are so many tools to detect it-- it was quite common. Sinowal, TDSS, Whistler, and several other rootkits infect the boot sector.

In any case Microsoft is not forcing OEMs to do anything. This is about a set of requirements that were given to get a Windows certification; one of them for Windows 8 was that OEMs were REQUIRED to allow other OSes to be installed. That requirement has been removed, which could have any of a number of rationale-- it is possible its for "lockin" reasons, but there are other valid reasons too, such as the rise of locked-down single-OS tablets. Microsoft continuing to have their "other OS" requirement could arguably alienate those OEMs, so they removed that requirement from their certification.

You have an obvious issue with Microsoft as a whole, but thats not a valid techical argument against a specific one of their technologies. Secureboot IMO has a lot of baggage, but it has the very real benefit that it can defeat a number of very real and very common rootkits like TDL3/4 which have historically been nightmarish to deal with.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I've done it on my Nexus. At the very least you can disable them, even if your phone wont allow their removal.

Its funny that you're modded up when the very first sentence of your post is contradicted by the existence of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

As a matter of interpretation of the word "person" in the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. courts have extended certain constitutional protections to corporations.

Perhaps you should stop relying on Ben Franklin and Adam Smith for 21st century jurisprudence.

One of those emails specifically says Samsung had used Skyhook to replace google location.... which sort of kills the point you were making.

Of course you cant even dream of doing something like that on any other non-AOSP OS out there.