mostlysignssomeportents:

Google sucks at IoT so, in the time-honored tradition of monopolists, it bought a successful company, Nest, bricked much of its existing gear, failed catastrophically to integrate it for YEARS, exposing users to hacks, shuffled it around and around the corporate structure…

Locked out competing devices, hid secret microphones in new, “microphone-free” devices, and now…

…they’ve bought a $450m stake in home security giant ADT, which will turn ADT customers into nonconsensual Nest customers.

https://blog.google/products/google-nest/partnership-adt-smarter-home-security/

Under the deal, ADT customers’ security cameras will be “upgraded” to Nest devices whose videos will be sent to Google for long-term storage and machine-learning analysis.

Home automation and home security have become the shittiest end of the Internet of Shit. On the one hand, you have Ring, who turn your home security system into part of a warrantless, off-the-books mass-surveillance grid for local cops:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers

On the other, you have devices sold through “partnerships” with cable monopolists that are unceremoniously bricked when the deals end:

https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761

Then there were the internal empire-builders at Google that kept Nest from being properly secured, leading to a rash of voyeurs who spied on and terrorized Nest owners by screaming obscenities at them and their kids:

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/10/18/the-voice-from-our-nest-camera-threatened-to-steal-our-baby/

None of this should be happening. For decades, America’s competition law operated on the presumption of “structural separation” - the idea that companies should not be allowed to form vertical monopolies:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3180174

These monopolies are inevitably not just inefficient, plagued by “the curse of bigness,” but they also crowd out GOOD companies with superior products, by using the vertical integration to keep them from getting into the market.