News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store class-action lawsuit. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by Jtsummers on Monday June 18, 2018 @03:20PM (#17340925)
Microsoft had something like a 97% marketshare. Apple is nowhere near that. They spent $1 billion to market a free product in order to eliminate or undermine a competitor (Netscape). They threatened hardware vendors with increased licensing fees if they sold non-Windows PCs (this helped kill BeOS and held back some efforts on selling Linux to consumers as well). MS did all of this and got away with it because of their marketshare. Without it, they wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as they did in these behaviors.

Apple isn't in the same position, at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by berthe on Monday June 18, 2018 @03:55PM (#17341170)
>> If the Apple app store isn't a monopoly I don't know what is.

> Microsoft had something like a 97% marketshare. Apple is nowhere near that.

Whether a company is a monopoly or not seems to depend a lot how the market in question is defined, for instance:

Apple has a 100% marketshare in the distribution of iOS apps. Monopoly-era AT&T had far less than a 100% marketshare in electricity-powered devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by Jtsummers on Monday June 18, 2018 @04:02PM (#17341232)
That is a fair statement, but as far as the FTC is concerned that's probably not enough. The fact is that there are alternatives (for both consumers and developers) to the iOS app store. They don't get products from or on iOS, but they can still buy and sell comparable products.

By the reasoning of your statement, all that's needed to establish a 100% monopoly is a sufficiently narrow definition of market. Walmart has a 100% monopoly on products (legally/officially) sold in Walmart stores. Do they have a monopoly as far as the FTC and courts are concerned?

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

EDIT: Fixed typo

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by mark212 on Monday June 18, 2018 @04:47PM (#17341572)
defining the relevant market is very frequently, if not nearly always, the most important question in an antitrust / unfair competition lawsuit. As your example points out.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by berthe on Monday June 18, 2018 @04:30PM (#17341460)
> The fact is that there are alternatives (for both consumers and developers) to the iOS app store. They don't get products from or on iOS, but they can still buy and sell comparable products.

But that's usually always true: 90s era Windows users had alternatives in the Macintosh and Sun workstations, and Monopoly-era AT&T users had alternatives in CB radios, etc.

That explainer you linked even uses language that excludes some competitor products: "Microsoft was found to have a monopoly over operating systems software for IBM-compatible personal computers" [emphasis mine].

That is a fair statement, but as far as the FTC is concerned that's probably not enough....

> By the reasoning of your stament [sic], all that's needed to establish a 100% monopoly is a sufficiently narrow definition of market.

I don't think the reasoning in my statement is sufficient to identify a monopoly, and it wasn't indented to be such. What I was trying to communicate is that you can't disprove a monopoly based on comparing marketshare numbers, and the actual determination is probably rather complicated and requires a lot of expert judgement.

I think Apple's business practices warrant careful and continuous antitrust scrutiny. If they're a monopoly, the form that takes will probably be significantly different than the one taken by 90s-era Microsoft.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by Jtsummers on Monday June 18, 2018 @04:39PM (#17341521)
There were alternatives to Windows on IBM-compatible PCs, but MS actively worked to block them in the marketplace. MS also actively worked to block competitors who would break platform-centric software via things like (as Netscape was after) creating a platform-agnostic software delivery platform.

It's also important to note that the FTC doesn't actually care about monopolies in all cases. They care about monopolies that arise from abuse and anti-competitive behavior or that are used to abuse consumers and competitors.

Show that Apple is in a monopoly position (as a player in the mobile hardware/software business space) and that they got there by way of anti-competitive behavior. Or that they've abused this position to artificially control pricing and other things. That's what needs to happen to establish an anti-trust case against them.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Supreme Court will hear Apple's appeal of App Store ... by nawgszy on Monday June 18, 2018 @04:16PM (#17341331)
>Apple has a 100% marketshare in the distribution of iOS apps

Right, and Steam has a 100% marketshare in the distribution of apps available on Steam.

Now, obviously there's wrinkles here and I'm not trying to be disingenuous and claim that these are identical scenarios. But you see how this quickly gets subtle, yes?

[ Parent | on HN ]