Facebook reportedly prepping antitrust lawsuit against Apple on App Store rules
The best analysis of this is from Stratechery: <a href="https://stratechery.com/2020/privacy-labels-and-lookalike-audiences/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/2020/privacy-labels-and-lookalike-au...</a><p>--<p>"Amazon, meanwhile, is increasingly where shopping searches start, particularly for Prime customers, and the company’s ad business is exploding. Needless to say, Amazon doesn’t need to request special permission for IDFAs or to share emails with 3rd parties to finely target its ads: everything is self-contained, and to the extent the company advertises on platforms like Google, it can still keep information about customer interests and conversions to itself. That means that in the long run, independent merchants who wish to actually find their customers will have no choice but to be an Amazon third-party merchant instead of setting up an independent shop on a platform like Shopify.<p>This decision, to be clear, will not be because Amazon was acting anticompetitively; the biggest driver — which, by the way, will also benefit Facebook’s on-platform commerce efforts — will be Apple, which, in the pursuit of privacy, is systematically destroying the ability of platform-driven small businesses to compete with the Internet giants."<p>--<p>FB has a point here, but I'm still hoping Apple wins - I'd rather the tracking model not be viable.