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.
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.