Lying Liars Who Lie (Premium)

As you may have seen, South Korea today approved a new law that will require digital platform makers like Apple and Google to allow developers to use third-party payment systems, a change that will save developers a lot of money. When it was proposed, this law was referred to by its advocates as “the Google law” because Android has such a stranglehold in that country. But it’s fair to say that it will impact both companies---and, potentially others---hard, given how the massive revenues they each derive from the online stores.

I already wrote about the news and my worry that Apple and Google will try to bypass it, most obviously by support third-party payment systems only in South Korea, which would be a burden to developers and could lead to some developers just not offering apps there. Here, however, I’d like to focus on something different: What Apple and Google said about this new law. It’s rather incredible.

Let's start with Google.

“Google Play provides far more than payment processing, and our service fee helps keep Android free, giving developers the tools and global platform to access billions of consumers around the world,” a Google spokesperson said.

There’s more to this quote, and I’ll get to it. But that first bit---"Google Play’s service fee helps keep Android free,” essentially---deserves a bit of scrutiny.

Because it’s an outright lie.

In fact, it’s a compound lie. Google Play’s service fee does not help keep Android free because Android isn’t free. What’s free is something called the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which doesn’t come with Google Play and is thus useless to most hardware makers. You can’t license Android without paying a fee. And the primary thing you get for that fee is, wait for, Google Play. And the apps---Maps, Chrome, Search, and so on---that Google Play enables.

Look, companies routinely lie through obfuscation and by limiting what they say and don’t say. Microsoft, for example, is lying to customers when it states publicly that it will only support upgrading PCs with 8th-generation or newer processors (and their AMD equivalents) and TPM 2.0 to Windows 11; Microsoft has privately communicated to numerous publications that users on older hardware can, in fact, upgrade to Windows 11. (And Microsoft bungled that latter bit by later telling others that those unsupported users “might” not even get security updates; that’s obviously another story.)

But outright lying in business, at least at this scale, is unusual. I’ve been covering Microsoft and personal technology for over 25 years, and I can’t really point to many major examples of actual lying. These are publicly held companies, after all. There are still some standards.

This Google statement, however, is a lie, a double lie, and that they were able to deliver this lie without fear of reprisal and directly to a mainstream news organization like CNN says a lot. It says a lot ...