Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS

Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by taf2 on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @02:38PM (#13534412)

Yes but they controlled a majority of the market so it was a monopoly- unfortunately in this case apple does not have control

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by digi_owl on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @04:03PM (#13535203)

More that MS was using their marketshare in operating systems to get the upper hand on the competition in a related area (not sure if that area was web browsers or web servers though, as the whole intranet thing was going on back then).

Now if Apple made it real hard to play any content from ITMS outside of Apple products, that may be cause for concern. And they did get slapped on the wrist about ebook pricing.

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by tracker1 on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @03:57PM (#13535147)

There is more than one form of monopoly... horizontal (a single resource controlled by one entity) and vertical (a single entity renders significant control through an entire vertical.

Now, it can be argued that Apple has enough of a vertical stranglehold that anti-trust rules can apply. It doesn't have to be an absolute monopoly to violate anti-trust law.

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by digi_owl on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @04:06PM (#13535230)

Yeah, people get overly hung up on the monopoly term. Back when antitrust was formed, it was aimed at trust busting. Meaning that several big names of a market would come together and decide how the market would operate, rather than compete.

And i do believe Apple has gotten a slap or two on the wrist for abusing their hold on content distribution. Ebook pricing for instance.

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by bad_user on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @02:46PM (#13534497)

This argument is often repeated, but I think it's a matter of perspective.

Were all servers, mainframes and dumb terminals counted too? Back in the nineties I'm sure those counted for something compared with PCs.

Apple has a complete monopoly on the iPhone / iPad market and that market is bigger than Microsoft's market in the 90s. You cannot change the OS without changing the hardware. You cannot change the browser without changing the OS. PCs and Windows never had such restrictions.

So what's the difference? If you answer that the PC was an open standard whereas the iPhone is Apple's own toy, I personally don't think that's fair, given that Microsoft too has built the PC market ;-)

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by GuiA on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @02:56PM (#13534599)

> Apple has a complete monopoly on the iPhone / iPad market

?!? Of course they do, just like Nintendo has a monopoly on the 3DS market, and Porsche has a monopoly on the 911 market, but that's just tautological.

If you meant "Apple has a complete monopoly on the smartphone/tablet market" then a 3 second Google search will show you that this is completely false.

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Re:Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS by threeseed on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @03:24PM (#13534843)

Your argument is illogical when you think about it.

Microsoft dominated the Personal Computing market. Apple is dominating the iOS market which is a subset of the Mobile Device market. I can buy a mobile device and experience the social and personal benefits from dozens of players.

And bringing it back to the point at hand. The reason Microsoft got in trouble is not because they had a monopoly. But because they used that monopoly to unfairly attempt to create another monopoly when a new competitor came into the market. Safari always shipped with iOS. There was never any competition to begin with.

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