What you're doing is assuming "the relevant market" is very narrow. In antitrust law, they say the case is won or lost on how broadly the relevant market is defined. Does Amazon compete against every brick and mortar store, or just other online merchants? The subsequent legal analysis looks very different depending on the answer to that question.
Most people who dislike Apple have already found themselves a nice Android phone on it for less money with several app stores.
This goes both ways. My corner bodega has a monopoly over its intersection.
In practice, we need legislation defining anti-competitive behavior for platforms and Thompsonian aggregators [1]. I haven't seen anyone propose a sensible, predictable framework.
Skimmed an interview Doctorow gave for Time [1]. I get the gripe. But I’m failing to find a unique, actionable definition.
Better concise source?
[1] https://time.com/6219423/chokepoint-capitalism-doctorow-gibl...
> You've probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry's unwillingness to pay creators what they're worth. Maybe you've also heard the rebuttal – that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators' pockets.
> That right there is the false binary – either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if – and hear me out here – Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the "talent"? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
The search results are filled with adverts for Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book, but Cory Doctorow hasn't tagged many of those adverts "chokepoint capitalism": his website lists examples, instead. https://pluralistic.net/tag/chokepoint-capitalism/
Summarising https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/, I'd define it something like:
> Chokepoint capitalism is where one party becomes both a monopoly and a monopsony: a gatekeeper, or "chokepoint". This gives it more leverage than any single other party, which it uses to extract and exploit with impunity. ⸻ While it may once have added value, once an entity becomes a chokepoint, it can cease to add value, and even start making people's lives actively worse ("enshittification"), without losing its position of power.
I agree with all the examples. I just struggle to see a framework. How has he defined the monopoly? That’s what we are looking for. A new definition for antitrust, ideally separate from the definition of monopoly and its market-definition magic variable.
Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.
And they know it's wrong. How do you suggest we compel good behavior?
Leverage isn't about "the market", either. It's about the individual people, and their situations. The iOS App Store doesn't give Apple much leverage over iPhone users, but iCloud does – and, to a lesser extent, iMessage¹ and FaceTime do. (The flipside of the iPhone's many planned obsolescence strategies is that you have to choose whether to remain within Apple's ecosystem every three-to-five years, and iPhones are expensive.)
The iOS App Store does give Apple significant power over the authors of apps. Even if the App Store doesn't provide a chokepoint by itself, the iPhone “ecosystem” as a whole does. It's a different thing to antitrust, though the more egregious offenders might also constitute monopolies for antitrust purposes.
---
¹: Perhaps relevant to the Y Combinator gang: https://www.cultofmac.com/743055/why-it-pays-for-startup-fou... https://www.androidauthority.com/google-green-bubble-intervi...
On Cory Doctorow's "competitive compatibility" / "adversarial interoperability" theme, a company called Sunbird Messaging claims to have made an iMessage clone for Android. It's proprietary, and might turn out to be vapourware, but I'm hopeful.
BTW, Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to copyright holders. How much more does he want Spotify to pay? Note: it's 70% of revenue, not profit.
> Documenting the group’s last show before the coronavirus hit, the pay-what-you-want release generated $4,200 from nearly 700 buyers in just two days. That’s more than 75 Dollar Bill have made through streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube over the last six years. “Streaming is a joke,” Chen tells me. “We might make $100 a year from streaming. On a recent statement of mine, the royalties for one track that had 580 plays on Spotify was zero dollars and 20 cents.”
This article goes into some detail about reasons: https://pirate.com/en/blog/can-bandcamp-compete-with-spotify...
> Unlike Bandcamp, Spotify’s royalty rate is difficult to ascertain, using a model which pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed – which benefits the Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts of the world far more than it does any struggling artist or independent creator.
> Per stream royalty rates on the platform have been gradually declining for years. One recent estimate suggested the figure averaged around $.00348 per stream, or $3,300 – $3,500 per million plays.
If anyone can explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me, I'd appreciate it. I've heard that claim a lot, but I don't really understand how the pricing model is bad. (It feels like the kind of pricing model that admits sleight-of-hand, but that's all.)
> explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me
It's not uncommon, especially in scenarios where distributors can strongarm artists into signing their agreements. In the world of gaming, progressive distribution models are very common, where Steam/Epic/Sony takes a smaller cut as you get sell more units.
The unfortunate fact is that boiling down digital music sales gets you two things - file distribution and payment processing. And the payment processing costs money.
Within the last few years, I've noticed a trend where questions are now interpreted as statements. I can't say I understand it. I don't think it's fair to say they were assuming anything. They were asking for help in understanding.
The second part of the question is assumed. To question that part, one would ask "how can the app store promote competition if it is a monopoly on iOS?"
I thought the question was not entirely in good faith, since it would be pretty obvious that there's no such thing as "monopoly on X" — otherwise it would make Sony a monopolist on Playstation, Microsoft a monopolist on XBox, etc.
Way to drill that category all the way down to IOS to ensure that you're able to use that "monopoly" keyword.
The deli that's in my complex has a monopoly on buying and obtaining wine if i don't want to drive anywhere or use a phone to order some via some delivery app.
To give you an idea of hypothetical regulation scenario: You want to move to an Android app. Sure you gotta need to change your phone as well. This is likely much more expensive then the app itself, thus it may make Android/iOS apps non-interchangeable. If FTC finds that this is expensive enough so most people won't make such move even if Apple decides to considerably increase the app store tax, then the App Store itself is a relevant market thus monopoly.
We don't know the legal conclusion since FTC hasn't done such study (this is a very complex process that takes several years with huge uncertainties, this is why politicians prefer direct regulation via legislation), but many experts believe that Apple is not in a very safe position.
There are 2 dominating app stores:
- Google/Android app store
- IOS app store
They have a duopoly in the mobile market, and they each have a monopoly on their platform. The deli comparison is asinine since there are millions of delis vs 2.
No, Apple is literally hard coded to be the only app store on iOS. You can not install apps not from the app store, and you cannot install other app stores. Installing your app every week by paying $99/year to be a developer is not a viable alternative.
On Android you could install another app store within the next 2 minutes if you so desired.
This is the perfect definition of a misleading argument.
But yes, I agree that Google's strategy is more open, and they allow others to use the Android source code to make their own (Amazon app store, Microsoft, etc).
Apple is more of a walled garden and a strict monopoly on their platform (and hardware).
This is in the works, right. It's not possible at this moment, is it.
How will Apple prevent people in the USA from buying iPhones in Europe and bringing them back to the US.
To lure US customers, app developers could offer lower prices to users who sideload, to offset the higher price paid for iPhones in the EU. App developers selling to EU iPhone owners will be able to avoid the 30% Apple tax and can pass on the savings to customers. Developers could offer more features to users who sideload. There are a variety of possible incentives developers could offer to lure users away from Apple App Store. That is assuming developers see the long term benefit of getting people to stop using the App Store and avoiding the Apple tax.
So app developers should bear the brunt of Apple's hardware price strategy? Seems unfair.
One of the complaints about Apple from app developers is the cost of doing business on the App Store (15% or 30% or whatever it is this week). So you're suggesting app developers charge less for side loaded apps: isn't that just accepting that the apple fees are fair?
I'm pretty sure I cannot sideload on iOS, unless you count using a free developer account to load self-compiled applications whose certificates are only valid for a few days.
There are several ways to install apps that do not go through the app store.
Your company can have an enterprise certificate that allows in-house apps to be run on company devices without needing to go through the app store approval process or the app store. You are not supposed to use that enterprise certificate to publish apps to the general public, although companies have been caught doing so in the past.
If you have a paid developer account, you can test your own apps on devices owned by your company and your customers.
Anyone can get a free Apple Developer account that allows you to test apps on your own device.
I don't recall sideloading ever being a thing iOS started out with. There was a trivial jailbreak and very easy third party app store install for jailbroken devices, but that was essentially a defect and not something iOS was designed for.
You can’t have it both ways.
You don't have to be "a developer" to install, for instance, the sort of retro-gaming emulator you use to play classic console games. You just need a free developer account Apple ID.
> Through an app called AltStore, you can install emulators onto your phone through a method called sideloading. If you're unfamiliar with the term, sideloading is installing software without using the App Store.
https://www.pocketgamer.com/next-level-gaming/how-to-install...
Secondly, Apple severely limits the capabilities of sideloaded applications - those emulators for example aren't allowed to make use of JIT, or Just-In-Time compilation, which is extremely important for decent emulation. This is also the main reason nobody has even tried to bring over a non-Safari browser using this method - you practically need it to have a browser that's decently usable.
It's practically useless outside of development purposes. AltStore is a pile of (very impressive) hacks to get around a system that's crippled by design.
Compare and contrast to Android, where the only difference between the Play Store and a regular application is that the Play Store doesn't get the regular installation window (something which is set to change in the next version of Android, so that alternate stores can also request this permission).
Either way - this doesn't matter. The Digital Services Act has already been passed in the EU, and Apple is going to have to offer third parties proper access to iOS without being allowed to gatekeep the App Store.
This is goalpost moving. The original claim was that it was impossible to sideload apps.
It doesn't nullify the app permissions system, but it's definitely sideloading.
To argue that the existence of Cydia means that “Apple started out with side-loading” is intellectually dishonest. I know it, and I know that you know it. If you have a real argument, you shouldn’t need to resort to this.
People like me who aren't programmers, or even power users anymore.
> I know it, and I know that you know it.
A long time ago I used to modify the Windows ME registry, and it genuinely created some features doing so. Then they removed this windows-altering ability from the particular feature I was modding and my mods were useless. Maybe the MS programmers saw this as a bug being fixed, but I saw it as a feature being removed. I basically haven't been a Windows power user since ME because of stuff like this.
-----
Nothing Apple is doing is materially different from what Microsoft was sued for in the 90s by anti-trust enforcers. In fact, it's a bit more, because it just isn't a default browser, it's control of every app. Apple's share of the US market is just slightly less than Microsoft's was at the time.
Better start working today because you’re gonna need to put in like 50 years.
It would take billions of dollars and 50+ years of development to have a chance. You would also need phone partners, which wouldn't go with a small OS maker. So you'd need to make the phones + the OS + the app store.
A deli can start anywhere with ~$10k and they'll have clients if they're good enough.
It's not feasible to compete with Android + IOS, even Microsoft and Amazon failed.
They therefore have a duopoly of the mobile app store market.
Every behemoth company you see today did not start out that way. Apple was a couple guys in a garage. At that time, IBM was almost 100 years old, had revenues in the tens of billions and was sending hardware and software into outer space with government contracts. Guess how that company started out?
It’s also revealing that you think $10K is a low barrier to entry to a risky business with razor thin margins. And it’s also quite hard work, in terms of physical labor and ongoing time commitment. Most of my life that kind of lump sum was unthinkable, and I have to imagine it still is for many. Yet even in the face of that, some people do find a way.
They should do so with smartphones as well, if they feel strongly about it. I think the scales match in terms of barrier to entry to expertise if you want to compare delis and smartphone manufacturing.
I think the problems with your comparison are at least twofold:
1) it’s much much easier, in a technical sense, to start a deli vs manufacture a smartphone. Just in Apple, there have been tens to hundreds of millenia of person-time poured into the company.
and 2) most people with the expertise necessary to do so are happy with the options available today and would rather spend their time solving other as-yet unsolved problems.
Microsoft actually lost an antitrust lawsuit for doing something extremely similar to what Apple is doing.
> Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system, which made it difficult for other web browsers to gain market share. Additionally, Microsoft was accused of engaging in exclusionary contracts with computer manufacturers to prevent them from pre-installing competing web browsers and of engaging in other anti-competitive practices.
Remind you of anything?
What Epic wants to do is have their game store on multiple OSes produced by other companies and then call the shots on those. I actually think they are closer to the spirit of what MS was doing, and given the chance they would leverage any advantageous market position they could achieve (or run to the courts) to shape OS customers’ UX in a fashion that is more similar to what MS did.
Apple wants a sandbox in the world; Epic and MS want the world to be their sandbox. If Apple’s sandbox becomes dominant it will be de facto because of people choosing to use a better competing product; Epic’s and MS’ actions are attempts to create a de jure dominant sandbox.
That we should punish success?
That is a great bullshit whataboutism argument.
Nobody speaks about punishing success here.
Apple and Google de facto Monopoly on the app store gives them a 30% tax on everything that wants to live on the mobile ecosystem.
This is the problem here. And this is what Epic was fighting against.
It's actually a patent minefield.
Nobody is entitled to have an abuseable level of market dominance simply because they worked hard.
Of course it's hard to prove consumer harm when there's so much vertical integration from day one. There's no before to compare it to.
Perhaps if Apple is forced to allow sideloading and other stores in Europe then the harms will be more obvious and comparable.
That's precisely the point. In order for Apple to have abused their monopoly, you would need to point to a change in their business model which occurred during the period in which they held nominal monopoly status.
Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
Phone operating systems are the malls, and for the vast bulk of us, unfortunately the only areas in the city zoned to have commercial app buildings.
None of this has the consumer at heart at all.
If you try to create a third mobile platform to compete, you will fail. We know this because of Microsoft and Amazon's failed attempts at making phone OSes. In Amazon's case, they actually used the same OS Google did, but Google refused to support it. And you can't legally port licenses over from Google Play to get Google's apps running on Fire OS. So the Fire Phone - a phone running Google's OS with Amazon's tweaks - could not use any Google apps. Anything on a Google service had to be used through the web browser. Windows Mobile was even worse: nobody wanted to support it natively. And again, you can't sell something that isn't an iPhone or Google-blessed Android that lets you buy App Store or Google Play apps and run them.
This is the same situation for everything else, too. Amazon has a monopoly on books because Kindle and Audible books cannot be copied onto non-Amazon devices or reader apps. So nobody wants to buy books outside of Amazon's platform, because it'll split their collections. Nintendo spends extraordinary amounts of time and effort legally harassing anyone who publicly uses their games on non-Nintendo hardware. Same for Sony and Microsoft.
To bring this back to your deli thing, imagine if you weren't allowed to have your deli's wine and other wine in the same apartment. There's chips in the wine bottles that will poison the wine if you do that, and there's a federal law prohibiting you from removing the chip, and prohibiting even discussing how to remove the chip. So you can switch wine stores, but you have to throw out all your wine that you already have. That is the current situation of software distribution as a consumer in 2023.
but apple wasn't the one preventing these from succeeding. they failed on their own. On the other hand, it is reasonable to conclude that Netscape didn't fail on their own, but that Microsoft _prevented_ netscape from gaining marketshare by preloading a competing browser; such a preloading can only have occurred with a monopoly on operating systems.
Therefore, the monopoly abuse was to leverage its monopoly position in one market, to prevent competition a different market.
So despite the fact that I also hate the appstore and walled gardens, apple _did not_ use their apple device dominance to _prevent_ android versions of an app from existing/competing.
The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly.
I suspect that new laws needs to be introduced to break open walled gardens - i want to call these "interoperability" laws. It's in the interest of society for systems to be interoperable.
This will not only concern apple devices, but things like EV charging networks, computer networks, and data interchange apis, and digital ownership of data. Imagine if by purchasing a CD or DVD, you are only allowed to play that disk on an authorized device! Now imagine instead of a physical disk, you buy a digital "disk" - a game, or music - but you're locked into the vendor's platform!
Is Apple a monopoly by the same definition that Windows was a monopoly? The answer is definitely no. Android has a larger global market share and it's far more accessible than iPhones in terms of pricing. Apple's US market share is in the 55-60% range depending on the source. Windows market share in 1988 when the suit began was about 90% so it's much clearer.
> The complaint about walled gardens from people is that of lack of open access - not that of monopoly.
100% this. People are just using the monopoly label because they're looking for some excuse why this shouldn't be allowed. But the reality is that probably >99% of Apple users do not care about any of this.
“Interoperability” laws are dangerous because they require lawyers to legislate how code works, and they’re not engineers. It’s in the interest of society to be interoperable , but at what costs and tradeoffs? Do I have to register my new network protocol with the Bureau of Interop Standards? If I make too much money on my platform, must I eventually cede control of that platform to a government-led utility commission? These would be nightmares and the unintended consequences of forcing laws to over-regulate how our technology platforms work and would dramatically hurt innovation.
You mention EV networks but this is a great example of the benefits of not forcing interop too soon: by far the most reliable EV charging network is Tesla’s, which has forced competition to up their game and forced competitive car brands to invest in networks. On the other hand, The CCS fast DC charging standard is a bulky design by committee standard that extended the old J1772 standard from 20 years ago. It’s inferior to Tesla’s NACS in terms of communications speeds, ease of use (NACS is far less bulky) and performance in cold weather. But we’ll have to live with it. It was a premature standard but has only minor deficiencies, luckily. EV networks themselves don’t have forced interop on the billing level and we have a handful of apps with different payment methods, some with plug and charge, some not, it’s not very intuitive. But unless you force a utility experience prematurely this is life in an evolving market.
The judge makes a decision on their interpretation of the case and the law. This is a very important distinction in decisions.
There's really no interpretation needed.
That's not what I got from the case texts. Did you read them?
A lot of court rulings are basically come down to, "I don't like the logic but it follows" and you just have to live with them.
The district court analyzed anticompetitive effects
in terms of increases in the cost of mobile gaming
transactions—the court’s relevant market. But the court
could have found greater increases in costs if its analysis
concerned Epic’s markets, and this would change a properly
conducted balancing analysis. In essence, any balancing
done out of the context of a relevant market necessarily
involves putting a thumb on the balancing scale.I have a monopoly on parking spots at my house, but that's not a relevant market.
I'm for right to repair, I'm agains the 30% markup on the App Store, and I think Apple in general should make it easier for pro users to customize, but you the novel legal theories to consider someone with a smaller market share than a competitor in the relevant market (unless they are colluding with them in an oligopoly) is anarchy. You can't just say something is a market. It would never end the anti-trust litigation out there.
iPhone has a 57% market share in the United States, the jurisdiction of the case.
You say "for better or worse" and I agree, but people don't want to hear that. They want to hear [company I don't like] should be punished and [company I like] shouldn't.
A textbook monopoly price antitrust case involves people who are virtually the only player, or a combination of almost all or all of the players.
And the court found that they didn't do anything with whatever marketshare they had and this is obvious to people who were paying attention. What about consoles? They are even more locked down than phones, yet the Internet seems to have a lot less to say about that, even though it's been that way for decades.
You can think Apple is a bad company. You can think they are too big. But you can't just wish the antitrust laws to be completely unworkable to punish them. That's the not the rule of law. That's the rule of "I don't like them."
I didn't "cherrypick" one quarter. I'm talking about the most recent quarter.
Anyway, it wasn't a comment about the court case, it was a response to the claim "iOS doesn't have dominant market share".
57% is not the kind of market share usually associated with a monopoly or a combination in restraint of trade, so you're wrong either way as others have pointed out.
Would you say that PlayStation is a monopoly? Probably not - you know they are competing with Xbox and Nintendo. Apple makes the same argument and legally it has held up - they are competing with Android and Windows and Amazon. You don't have to like the competition from Android or Amazon, but legally, there's competition and that's all that matters. At least for right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
If you were, however, to penalize Apple; you would need to come up with a legal differentiation between a smartphone and a game console, as well as why the game console business model is moral and legal, but the locked-in smartphone market should be immoral and illegal. Considering there's no such thing as a "general purpose computing device" in the law; you would also need to come up with a pretty good explanation why Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft get to keep their exclusivity privileges but Apple loses theirs.
And that's a tricky nut to solve. Because you might say, "well, a smartphone can do way more than a game console." Well, that's only because the game console is so locked down - but a game console remains theoretically capable of anything a PC could do otherwise. If it wasn't for a lockout, you could install Windows on it and use it as a node in a supercomputer. Does that mean Apple would be legally fine if the smartphone was more locked down then? It's tricky.
Not really, they can just leave it up to the court's interpretation. "I know it when I see it" has been used in a court before. Just define it as a smartphone: No one is going to call a gaming console a smartphone, nor vice versa.
And applying a ruling to a specific industry isn't new either: see that Hollywood anti-trust case again. It was never applied to TV shows. Otherwise Netflix Exclusives wouldn't be a thing. Or any other "Only on Disney Channel/Cartoon Network/etc" show.
They want to have their app/game store everywhere, not just PC and smartphone.
Also, hasn’t “I know it when I see it” been criticized as a poor test since it was stated based on how arbitrary it is?
It’s been used in a court, but not too much effect; the popular source of that is a discussion of “hardcore pornography” in a concurrence to a Supreme Court decision in an obscenity case which was notable for having a majority on the ruling in the case, but no consensus by any more than two justices on either a rationale for the ruling, or (among the dissenters) on the reasons for rejecting the ruling.
1. No one is stopping developers from selling their apps in Android markets.
2. Apple hasn't attempted to prevent android app markets from existing.
3. Apple can make the argument that they own the market on merit, therefore their monopoly on selling iOS apps is legal.
4. It has to be proven this is bad for consumers. Apple is claiming their control benefits consumers, which again justifies their monopoly.
And as mentioned elsewhere, Apple may be forced to allow side-loading, but still require their 30% on all transactions. And nothing stops Apple from enforcing security policies on things like private apis on side-loaded apps.
Unfortunately I think the likely result is going to be a partial victory no one is happy with. :(
The Play Store has almost identical rules and pricing compared to the App Store, how is that a competitor?
The fact that the Play Store is similar to the App Store doesn't mean it's not competitive
You are welcomed to find another explanation, I don't see any other one.
A. There's no legally recognized market for "privacy-friendly phones."
B. "Privacy-friendly phones" is an ill-defined category, with "privacy" meaning different things to different people. Does a phone that blocks trackers qualify? Or does it have to protect me from rogue governments? There's no legal standard for what makes a device "privacy-friendly." Because of that, you are complaining that Apple has a monopoly in a market you just made up, which would be laughed out of court. You might as well claim Apple has a monopoly on phones with Lightning ports.
C. There's always GrapheneOS, which is free for anyone who wants it. There's also CalyxOS. You might claim they don't serve your purpose, but the law doesn't care an ounce about your specific purpose. There's generally-recognized competition in the vague category.
D. Having a monopoly is not illegal in the US. It's abusing your monopoly that's illegal. You would have to show Apple intentionally and specifically suppressed the development of alternative privacy-friendly phones by actively abusing their market power, which nobody is alleging.
This is probably because when phones were first introduced in the previous century, people assumed that nobody would listen in on their conversations.
By the way, who decides what a legally recognized market is?
Primarily, the legal system, courts do. However, they always draw in expertise and considering that privacy experts don't agree on what a "privacy phone" should be, good luck defining that market when the market can't define itself. (Does it need secure boot or not? Hardened malloc? Tracker blocking? Sideloading or no sideloading? Allow background processes or not? Hardware Microphone disable switches or not? Some or all of the above?)
But then, even if there was a standard for a "privacy-preserving phone," is that market large enough to legally matter? Currently, judging by how many people are using GrapheneOS... No. Again, Apple has a monopoly on smartphones with Lightning Ports, but I don't think anybody cares about the "Smartphones with Lightning Ports" market.
In the 80s, I could literally pick up my phone and hear neighbors conversations sometimes.
Also during the analog cell phone era, anyone could buy a receiver from Radio Shack and bypass the frequency block and listen to cell phone conversations.
That’s entirely false. The majority of telephone lines were party lines through the mid 20th century.
The lack of privacy became a topic of pop culture of the time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Wire
This is a very important point because Epic doesn’t like that either. There was very reasonable speculation that if they won this lawsuit they would immediately turn around and use it to sue the console makers.
The court did not decide that the relevant market was iOS only, as Epic wanted.
> A threshold issue in any antitrust case is defining the “relevant market.” Here, Epic argued that the relevant market is Apple’s iOS system. Apple argued that the relevant market is the market for all digital video games, where it is one of many players. The court disagreed with both sides, and it instead defined the relevant market as “digital mobile gaming transactions.” Under this formulation, the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market. But this was not enough for the court to conclude Apple has monopoly power.
https://www.klgates.com/Court-Issues-Mixed-Ruling-in-Epic-v-...
This article is about Epic losing their appeal of the lower court's rulings.
Also be wary of comments in this thread that don't weigh this most important element of the entire process well.
All too often these discussions on anti-trust issues become meaningless on this site because everyone involved is using a personal definition for "the marketplace".
Step one of any attempt to claim Apple holds a monopoly will require you to define exactly what the market is, in quite specific terms, and have the court agree. That didn't happen for Epic here.
It’s often the first step in a whole lot of doublespeak. “This will set everybody free”, but at the same time, “this doesn’t present a security issue because nobody will use it”.
To be clear, I think that the government should storm Apple Park with buns glazing and force them to do a more reasonable degree of rent-seeking. I’m not going to pretend that this is for any reason other than “I think that 30% is a dick move”.
You don’t just get to pretend that Android doesn’t exist, or that the vast majority of ways that people communicate aren’t cross-platform, or that IOS has any material network effect whatsoever.
So you really end up with two camps, one camp who always stop short of saying “iOS is just better in my eyes, and I want to be able to do more with my phone.” And the other camp is…let’s be honest…Android users. And the mere fact that there’s so many people in this camp I think directly contradicts any assertion that there’s a monopoly in the first place.
But it said ... that Epic, regardless, had “failed to establish, as a factual matter, its proposed market definition and the existence of any substantially less restrictive alternative means for Apple to accomplish the procompetitive justifications supporting iOS’s walled-garden ecosystem.”
In other words, while these types of contracts can be within the scope of a Sherman Act claim, that wasn’t relevant to the court’s decision in this case.
Lol typo or intentional?
I built a modified name generator based on some existing open source code that’s been around for several years now based on GPT2 and sure I couldn’t ask to go give me something with a specific theme… but damn it was way more creative at generating new words that could be names and it was t hard to filter the output to be useful since I could get it locally in batches of thousands overnight.
What I was trying to highlight is the sort of “small task” not, very short essay and feel free to make up specific words using specific linguistics as some guidance.
I’ve seen it make up words in this way too, even without prompting it to allow it to make up a word. I was more trying to highlight that its not particularly good at prompts like “please give me a list of 50 names for a hypersonic aircraft company for my science fiction novel”, counterintuitively it requires significant additional prompt text to expand its creativity in response to prompts like this, and not repeat itself if you ask it for a list of another 50 names.
In some ways, from Apple's point of view, Android does not exist! Android is not doing the same thing Apple is, and most computer manufacturers are not doing what Apple is doing with the Mac either.
Apple likes to sell products to people who will value them in the same way Apple does. A big part of that is Apple makes awful nice stuff! And unlike many other manufacturers, Apple asks for some money on every last bit of that value and Apple gets that money because it is all real value.
I'm typing this on an M1 Air that I got for a song. It's a sweet machine! I said the same thing about the last Mac I owned and used regularly too. Got that one for a song as well. From Apple's point of view, I might as well not exist!
I only value some of the things Apple does and that means I'm unwilling to pay what Apple asks for that value.
We get along just fine too. I'm not paying what Apple wants and I almost never use the app store either. I have the software running on the machine that I want to run, and I can write the programs I want to write, use the peripherals I want to use enjoy media I want to enjoy. No worries.
Unlike many who disagree with Apple on value, I strongly support what Apple does and how they do it. It doesn't impact me one bit, or if it does and let's be real --it probably does, then I don't really notice. From there, it's a hop and a skip to who cares? I sure don't.
Most of the time when I see someone saying Apple is a problem, it boils down to a few great features, or how sexy the hardware is, or some other similar thing. Or I see someone point out how the BOM doesn't seem to add up to them and how that means over the top margins that "the market" does not support meaning something has got to be wrong, rent seeking, monopoly, SOMETHING!!!
The truth is so much more simple and I've already said it:
Apple values their products as fully as they can and Apple charges for all of that value and the fact is there are plenty of people out there who see that value and pay up.
They didn't get ripped off.
They didn't get abused.
They are not the victim in any way really.
If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android, since they have a large library of apps on iOS and significant other platform lock-in (messages, photos, subscriptions etc). So according to this test, the relevant product market would be "providing apps for iOS devices", which apple clearly has a monopoly on at the moment. I wonder if this argument came up.
Anyway, the Supreme Court in United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. ruled that doesn't apply.
That answers my question, thanks for supplying the case reference.
EDIT: Actually I don't understand how this case applies... The key passage seems to be:
"We conclude that cellophane's interchangeability with the other materials mentioned suffices to make it a part of this flexible packaging material market."
My point is that there is no interchangeability between ios apps and android apps. Customers tend to have either ios or android and aren't able to freely choose between the two. What am I missing?
Well, they lost, didn’t they? So their argument wasn’t that compelling, and it wasn’t that clear cut in their favour at the very least.
It's not just that; most Apple users actively dislike Android, or think that only Apple makes smartphones (really, I've met people who said this).
Apple could easily raise their prices for apps by 100% and not have a significant number of users jump to Android. Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.
Or maybe they just don’t like paying for an Android device that actively spies on literally every moment of their life so other companies can buy the marketing data.
Or maybe we just like the OS, build quality, or available iOS only applications? Maybe we like the battery life or the quality or the apple ecosystem. Maybe we like prompt, regular, and long term supported security updates.
Pretty silly generalization.
-makers- want other app stores, but I'm not sure consumers do.
I'd go so far as to argue that -consumers- like the single-app-store, and see that as a feature.
E.g. imagine Google rolling their own Play to install Chrome or Maps. Facebook for Whatsapp, Amazon for Kindle et Al, Netflix for its own… etc etc.
No the moment that happens it’s over
Eg: anecdote: mother-on-law was gifted a cheap smartwatch (Samsung I think). Installing its companion software required downloading and registering to a whole new store on her Android smartphone. Weirdly enough I think it was also a Samsung, already had 2 stores (the Samsung and Play ones), yet she (we) had to dump yet another one on that sorry mess.
But in this case, Android does exist.
[0] Misunderstanding leading to misattribution: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse
I get that people like their iPhones. My wife is one of them. I'm not. People are different. Choice is good. Some folks choose to cede control in favor of simplicity. Go off.
Same with Google
Their laptops on the the other hand have a sleep state that works and the battery lasts >8 hrs even when heavily used. Mine is giving the service warning but still lasts longer than any Windows or Linux machine I've ever used (and it doesn't empty itself when the shell is closed).
Mostly & sometimes. I'm unable wake up M1 MBP when docked in clamshell mode to a TB dock, once it blanked the screen, but didn't go to full sleep yet. Either put it into full sleep (=> turn off the monitor, it will notice and go to sleep) and then wake it up, or undock it and wake it up undocked. In both cases, it will lose all peripherals attached to dock (like ethernet) while doing the exercise. Pretty annoying actually, and it didn't happen with Intel Macs.
Well, of course Windows laptops that you have never had aren't going to work...
Got a coffee spill on my 2012 MBP and Apple didn't really want to fix it. I was quoted nearly a new machine. I bought parts myself, fixed it for $150 and some (intense) labor. Apple really doesn't want me doing that. Had it happen again a few years later. Parts were HARD to get, and so... yeah, that one is in a box now.
Lenovo doesn't seem to care. Parts are inexpensive, I've had to do a few more repairs, but they were not hard. I can still get parts for my Lenovo machines.
For a lot of reasons my daily driver remains Lenovo. I do use my Apple a lot more than I used to now however...
Homd[k
Lenovo takes a beating better than Apple does. Apple is very petty
Somehow, that post got mangled and I missed the edit window. Please delete it, and thanks in advance.
I've also repaired my MBA - it's an Apple so obviously something is designed to break after 18 months. In this case it's the USB-C adapter. Thankfully they're cheap and easy to replace. The experience is shocking though.
My work HP Chromebook also takes a long time to wake up in the morning, so they all feel very familiar to me, I'm no different.
I don't think that ordinary non-programmer people care about OS or even understand what it is. And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
> build quality
I don't understand what this means. It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
Developers can side load apps on IOS that are under development work have a limited distribution.
Also, most developers don’t like or use Linux as their desktop OS.
> It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
Some of them are that bad, yes.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices.
Back with the incredibly condescending view that Apple users clearly don’t know what they’re doing. In spite of so many comments explaining the reasons: hardware and software design, hardware build quality, accessibility features, handoff features, multi-device ecosystem integration, privacy and security, there is a long list of rational reasons.
They might not now what an OS is, but they surely do care about the UI, speed and general handling.
> And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
Yet most do not. I say this as an mostly exclusive Linux user.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
Yet this is true. Apple has a very good build quality and, for the most part, great support. It's true that high-quality Android phones do match that, but they are not priced that differently compared to modern iPhones.
Of course there's also some marketing involved, as well as Apple being a status symbol, but it's not like Apple is producing inferior products.
I've always seen the same thing:
user buys some low-mid end Android phone once or twice since the 2010s.
Phones are okay, not exceptional. Build and overall quality, speed, performance, camera, battery on such low-mid end phones 10 years ago was years away the best phones.
Then they see their friends/family iPhone, and they are like "wow, this is so much better" and they instantly see that striking distance.
This won people's minds at the core of the smartphone revolution which Apple vastly led as well and it's here to stick.
It never mattered to anyone when someone produced Android phones better on most aspects that costed 25% less, sales have always been much higher for Apple.
But now? Now in all honesty we can easily compare 300 or even sub 300$ phones to just the previous year's iPhone. The cheaper Pixel 6a is absolutely comparable to the iPhone 13, let alone with the 12 from 2021.
Also, I see more people leaving the Apple ecosystem right now for the inverse reason. Their aging and highly expensive iPhones 8/9/10s they are just so behind even the today's midrange that they are "why would I spend so much again for an iPhone"?
I think the best selling point of modern Apple it's is top of the notch integration between multiple devices. You get one, you kind of snowball in benefits in getting more and staying in the ecosystem.
This is not accurate and is anecdotal at best: https://archive.is/r6PbO
Nobody goes to that place anymore, it’s always far too busy!
Hasn't Apple been found guilty of artificially slowing older models with updates few years ago?
I am a long time multi OS users, and I just don't find Apple phones priced in any way to merit that plus in price.
E.g. The cheaper Google Pixel 6a offers more or less what the iPhone 12 Pro or 13 base offers in terms of battery life, performance, screen, camera, so it all comes down to what? OS?
Why would I spend such crazy $ for a brand new iPhone 14, even the base one, when I can get a comparatively as good phone for less than half the price and change it again next year or two when I will get at similar prices a phone much better than the iPhone (not that it matters, I honestly believe all this tech and GHz on phones have no use in most people's lives and how I see them using their devices).
May I just say that despite the Apple hype it's an ecosystem full of problems and cons as well, especially for more tech-inclined people?
Depends on what you care about. For instance, I am paying the premium simply to make sure Google didn't have its fat fingers inside my phone.
b) Why is it okay if Apple does that?
c) Why don't you de-google an Android phone, plenty of OSs to choose from?
d) You know that Google owns thousands of patents, including several key Motorola Mobile patents so you're paying Google even when you buy an iPhone?
c) Why don't you de-google an Android phone, plenty of OSs to choose from?
My bank app and national e-id won't work, or so I heard. Plus, I do enough tinkering with my xmonad config, emacs init file, and all that. Simply no energy or interest left to spend on mobile, which to me is relatively unimportant.
https://support.apple.com/guide/news-publisher/earn-revenue-...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/report-apple-is-expl...
Amazon knows what I have bought from Amazon.
Google buys a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, so they can spy on your offline life the way they already spy on your online life.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21110537?baseli...
and using your example an iPhone 12 Pro is much faster:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/21107401?baseli...
Some people care about getting software support after the sale.
The $399 OG iPhone SE from back in 2016 just got another security update a few weeks ago. The OG Google Pixel was also released in 2016 and has been completely abandoned for several years now.
Is someone selling phones based on GHz?
You need hardware improvements so the camera and battery life keep getting better.
I'm not paying exorbitant subscription fees for relatively trivial apps, let alone falling for the manipulative and often-basically-gambling nonsense of F2P games.
Apple are somewhat to blame for these trends though. Unlike 'real software for a real OS', mobile apps tend to need constant ongoing maintenance just to keep them working with OS updates and new devices. You can't just release a finished game/app and expect it to continue to be usable for decades, like the over-20-years-old Paint Shop Pro 7 that I still use almost daily on Windows.
You can argue that Apple users are just Apple users because of the logo and the coolness and the hype and whatever, but I can tell you that users like me have a real reason for staying with Apple: quality!
Apple doesn't charge for most of its apps. How would this work?
Are you arguing that Apple could raise the prices of apps sold through their App Store? Isn't that the developers' choice? To me, that doesn't seem to change the market argument (IANAL, obviously).
(I know Apple provides banding and international support so perhaps you're suggesting Apple might shift the bands?)
One thing Apple has done masterfully is exploiting the status circuit in the human brain. Apple users often claim they pay more because the product is superior in some or many ways, or even argue that it is, in fact, cheaper when considering everything. However, in reality, they pay more because they can. They want to display their Apple products and they want others to see them.
Epic did raise this argument during the original trial however since they failed to establish a single-brand aftermarket they never got to the point where the SSNIP analysis would have been performed.
> If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android
It's actually not that clear and would need to be backed by actual evidence in court.
There are hundreds, no thousands, no tens of thousands of people creating apps for iOS.
This seems surprising low, and I suspect there is some kind of nuance being left out or an oversight in the methods of the study that found that number.
I don't understand that. How is a single company controlling more than half of the entire market not monopoly power?
It's much harder to unfairly distort an open marketplace with 51% share than say 90%, most of the time. Again, this is why the marketplace definition step of this process matters so much!
I'd hardly call it open. Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
Moreover, Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.) And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring.
>(I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
Because using an alternative, of which there are many, is as easy as typing in a different URL. They're all just inferior products and the market knows it.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Making a deal is not a conspiracy. It would be of concern if part of the deal was prohibiting switching to other search engines but nothing is stopping you from switching to Bing and having Google waste a few dollars of that deal.
Fitting the definition of a monopoly is probably a lot harder than to ask what is undesirable about monopolies. If google or apple hold a monopoly isn't very interesting. We can easily agree that the motivation to innovate is not there if there is no real competitor. We are kinda blessed by there being 2 platforms but that they are like prisons for developers is not beneficial.
We are also blessed with the www in how incredibly open it is. With the phones we got entities that dictates the rules of the game. In stead of domain names the www could have been what these mobile application stores are: a web directory with enormous fees.
Before the www I tried to create a teletext page. We had countless TV channels each with their own text pages. Even the smallest TV stations wanted me to pay for hardware and charge an enormous monthly fee. They made it into a completely useless offer. It didn't have to be a monopoly to get there.
In the US rent-seeking percentage fees on transactions are quite normal, in the EU many just pay for the transaction. How large it is is quite irrelevant?
We are also blessed with a relatively open Android OS. For a new OS it is hard to get any of the other popular prison builders onthere.
Government should regulate where companies try to own and control things that are non of their business or clearly not theirs to own.
For example chat history or email is important for the legal process. People need to prove conversations happened. I just send a whatsapp screenshot to my boss where my previous manager approved my day off. I could easily doctor such an image. We have the technology to grant someone access to part of a conversation in a legally binding way, technology just didn't mature enough, its to childish to do those things.
To have corporate platform owners decide which company lives or dies is simply undesirable. They [may] do it without dialog and without explanation. A company should not be forced to put it self in that position.
People purchase mobile computer. Companies desire to offer software for their mobile computer. The manufacturer then gets to decide if they approve?
I buy a toaster, you make bread, the manufacturer disapproves of the bread? Or they desire 30% of the money?
Manufacturers can't stipulate which cartridges you have to use in your printer. They may have a preference (using their own brand) but they can't force you to. Car makers can't make you use a certain brand of fuel. Dishwasher manufacturer may not force you to use a specific brand of tablet. Coffee machines may not lock you into their preferred brand of coffee.
It's not a position that arises from logic, it is just that making the hardware created the possibility. It is quite unusual to force customers to not just buy specific coffee but also buy it from a specific store.
If we are going to allow that other manufacturers should be allowed to do the same. We should allow MS to force users to use Edge for everything. If you want to use libreoffice you can install a linux?
For whatsapp, they actually use the Signal protocol for messaging, which has built in deniability, so you can't use the cryptography it uses to prove a conversation happened, since any participant is able to falsify messages after the fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_mail
In stead we have toys?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251702178
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing
This is where imho regulators should step in and closely examine the corporate prison system.
Between Apple and Android you have the choice only every couple of years. The rest of the time there is zero competition.
It maybe that the antitrust law is not well-written for this case. But nobody can claim their is a functional app market at the moment. Market meaning choice for the customer where to buy.
Like to me, the market IS functional - people can choose their mobile platform and get the apps available for that platform. More than that and we are legislating software distribution as a publicly regulated utility. Which to me is an absurd idea.
This is incorrect in two ways:
a) any particular individual (e.g. you) can switch between alternatives at any time. Nothing forces you to wait years…
b) there are new first time mobile users all the time and they can choose between these two alternatives (or smaller, much less successful platforms), and in the case of Android, between different device manufacturers
Seems like lots of freedom to me. If you’re thinking is that even given that there are only two reasonable options to choose from from a software point of view (Android and iOS), I’d be curious to know your solution. Is it to force some company to create a third alternative? Is it for the government to subsidize Microsoft to make Windows phones?
Sure, if I have an iPhone or an Android phone, and I don't like the gaming landscape on either of those, I can get a Switch. But the Switch doesn't replace my phone. I can't toss the phone and now carry a Switch with me everywhere. (I also wouldn't want to carry a Switch everywhere; it's nowhere near as portable and doesn't fit in a pocket.)
So is it ok for a company to abuse their market position, if a consumer has the option to buy an additional device made by a competitor, and then have to lug around two devices, since the other device doesn't actually replace all the functionality of the original one? I would say no, it's not ok.
In mobile gaming, Apple and Google are the largest participants, but not the only participants. We have the Switch, the Steam Deck, and other smaller companies as well.
Why is that relevant? That was not the question before the court. However, to prove an illegal duopoly you have to show collusion. IANAL, but I think it is unlikely anyone could show enough collusion between Apple and Google to reach the threshold of an illegal duopoly.
That is not a monopoly, which implies that the market is controlled by only one company. Not two. “Monopoly” is not just something you say when you don’t like a company. Also, a monopoly in itself is not necessarily illegal or problematic. The real issue is a company abusing its market power, which does not require anything like a monopoly.
> You don't have to meet behind closed doors to fix prices, you just set your prices to be exactly equal to your competitor.
Then it is not collusion. It’s just a poorly functioning market, or something that cannot work as a free market (some natural monopolies are like that).
What do you suggest we do over this ? Forbid some people to search on Google ? Or give each user X queries / day then say "please use another search engine; here are some alternatives ...".
The laws are against monopolies abusing their power. As long as it's trivial to change provider we are in the clear; but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage. For example if Google says "You have to un-index you site from bing otherwise we will apply a ranking penalty on your search results".
But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
Break it up! That's what you do with monopolies. That's what they did with Standard Oil. That's what they did with AT&T. That's what they talked about doing and should have done with Microsoft.
> but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage
Google has leveraged its search dominance to gain dominance in a number of other areas too. For example, whenever I do a Google Search in Safari (without my content blocking extensions running), I see a big popup that says "Google recommends using Chrome". That's an abuse of power. (And naturally, Google is the default search engine of Google Chrome).
Google AMP is an abuse of power, forcing websites to redesign themselves specifically for Google, on penalty of lower search ranking.
I've already mentioned how the two duopolists colluding is an abuse of power.
Google has been accused by Mozilla of systematically sabotaging Firefox in various ways, for example on YouTube.
The list goes on and on.
Is it actually true?
Why is it legal for the monopolist to pay other companies to help it keep its monopoly? If Google couldn't pay Apple or Mozilla to make Google Search the default on their respective browsers, perhaps we'd see other, better defaults, and maybe people would continue using those defaults, eroding Google's market dominance.
> But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
The ease of switching isn't all that matters. I suspect if you polled a representative sample of people, they would tell you they believed that Google is the only option for web search. At best, some might admit they've heard of Bing, and then only because it's been the default for IE/Edge for years.
There are other free search engines. Also Google makes money as an advertiser, not as a search service. Search itself has always been free, even before Google existed.
The 90s was the advent of free World Wide Web search. It wasn’t the advent of online search engines.
Just because you can pay for information/search, doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to get it for free.
In the context of this thread, these all feel like straw man arguments.
A duopoly is not a monopoly. Unfortunately, anti-trust law seems to only be concerned with monopolies, and totally ignores duopolies and oligopolies.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Exactly.
>Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
This isn't quite a monopoly (Bing does exist, you know), plus it's free (or "free").
It doesn't help when the competition is so awful, though. See yesterday's article and discussion about DDG. Many times, monopolies (or near-monopolies, or duopolies) arise because the competition is so inept and incompetent.
A monopoly is where there is a single player that has enough power to manipulate the market. Despite Bing existing, Google can manipulate traffic by altering its search results and due to it having 93% of the search share, it can manipulate it's position to direct people to one site over another or kill a site by no longer including it in results.
My solution would be to fine them 25% of their total revenue every time we see market manipulation due to Google altering search results.
If we have no evidence of that, then I don't see a problem with the current situation.
As for Epic, they have plenty of alternative platforms to use. The fact that they don't target the Steam Deck because Tim Sweeney is petty makes me have very little sympathy for their argument.
No.
Anti-trust law is all about the nature of the competition not the number of participants.
If the market simply isn't functioning they can and have intervened.
What that does do is create an increased onus on the company holding that position not to abuse it. So that kicks the can down the road to disagreements about what constitutes abuse, but just being popular isn't a crime. You'd need to demonstrate actual harm to consumers.
In the case of search, the web search market and the mobile phone market are two different markets. You can't constrain Google from doing commercial deals with other companies in different markets, just because it's search product is hugely popular. Again you'd have to demonstrate harm to consumers.
Power corrupts. That's an iron law.
You seem to be under the misconception that it is illegal for Google to possess a monopoly over web search. This is not the case. It is only illegal if such a monopoly was obtained or maintained via anticompetitive means. If the monopoly was obtained via "growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident", then it is entirely legal.
Source: https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
I said, "And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring." But you chose to completely ignore that and accuse me of misconception.
I also mentioned several anticompetitive practices in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35695705
> Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
What have they done?
But nothing you've described is necessarily illegal so I think my point about your misconception stands. It might be anticompetitive (in your opinion) but that does not mean it is actually a violation of the law.
You didn't answer my question: "What have they done?"
That will depend on the outcome of the several current ongoing lawsuits and has not been established at this stage. I mean, just look at this case. A lot of people decided what Apple was doing was illegal after Epic filed suit and it turned out they were wrong.
> You didn't answer my question: "What have they done?"
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
and
https://www.naag.org/multistate-case/colorado-et-al-v-google...
I don't think there's much "right and wrong" in the court system. There's so much arbitrariness and even politicalization among judges. Just look at the Supreme Court.
The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.
One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I also thought, to be honest, that Epic's lawyers in the case were not great and seemed not fully prepared or technically knowledgeable. And some of the toughest questions for Apple were asked by YGR rather than by Epic.
> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
"Entering into long-term agreements with Apple that require Google to be the default – and de facto exclusive – general search engine on Apple’s popular Safari browser and other Apple search tools."
That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.
> One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I agree that the relevant market probably should have included all app transactions and not just gaming transactions but frankly it would not have changed the outcome of the case.
> That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means. It remains to be seen whether such browser payments will be considered anticompetitive in the eyes of the courts.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the judge invented a market that nobody considered to be a market before the trial. The judge didn't refer to any other market analysis or economic literature but simply pulled "digital mobile gaming transactions" out of her ass.
> The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means.
Power always corrupts, and Google is certainly no exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35695705
A benign economic monopoly is about as likely as a benign political dictator.
Not true. I'll just quote from the ruling:
"Epic proposed two single-brand markets: the aftermarkets for iOS app distribution and iOS in-app payment solutions, derived from a foremarket for smartphone operating systems. Apple, by contrast, proposed the market for all video game transactions, whether those transactions occur on a smartphone, a gaming console, or elsewhere. The district court ultimately found a market between those the parties proposed: mobile-game transactions—i.e., game transactions on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets."
I don't have skin in this conversation but I just want to call out your fallacy here.
It is kind of cheating a little to give reddit apps as an example here because as long as you can get on reddit somehow, you are a part of the network. You don't have to use the same app as the other guy...
>the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service
What is exclusive about 52%?
Antitrust law in the US doesn't actually really care about monopoly. It cares about monopoly power.
So it has neither a monopoly market share, (~27% globally and ~50% locally), nor does it discriminate in favor of wholly owned sham companies in the fashion of Standard Oil's practices.
Guys, we can't go into courts of law and make poop up. Judges will toss you out.
My own opinion is that the laws themselves have to change. A company like Apple will very likely never meet the legal definition of a monopoly. The digital age has outstripped these definitions, and laws need to change to reflect that fact.
Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?
Quite arguably, you can’t, but monopoly power (particularly, its expression as pricing power) can be observable (and itself proves an actual monopoly) when monopoly would not be clear by other means.
The ability to price without sales going to a competitor demonstrates the absence of actual competition, regardless of the superficial apparent competition in a described market.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power."
"Standard's market share was 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_...
Sounds like we have 12% more to go before we reach precedent.
AppStore is merely a package manager for iDevices. It is not it's own market any more than YUM is for RHEL or FreeBSD Ports is for FreeBSD. The market is software. Apple does not control half the entire software market.
What you are saying seems closer to “abuse of dominant position”, which is the cornerstone in EU antitrust law, but not so clear in US law where the bar to prove abuse is higher. This does not require a monopoly, just a market share large enough to steer the market. It’s hard to allege this when a company has a minority market share, though.
Yes there is, so I remembered fine on that count. Here is the article I read.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
Where I was off a little was in mixing market power and monopoly power. As the article explains and corrects my statement to a degree, courts have found it difficult to assign monopoly power when market share is below 50%. However, it does seem possible that a monopoly power can still exist without historical levels of market share. I believe the historical cases do not necessarily apply to technology companies, because these companies throw their power around and enforce it via software and not materialized objects like railroads or commodities. I think being overly preferential to market share is a mistake, particularly for global companies where the market share will vary drastically. In addition, these technology markets are massive. Abuses and competition stiflingly can be very disruptive. They are also very easy to hide behind the complexities of software.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Now... do buyers of third-world shitphones buy a bunch of expensive (or any) applications? Hell no. But they still count as Android "market share."
US antitrust law doesn't apply to the third world.
For some reason you chose to be pedantic with me but not with the OP.
Go away.
They let developers choose more price points. They offer only a 15% cut of subscriptions in a number of circumstances instead of always taking 30%. IAPs and subscriptions have given developers more choices of how to monetize their apps.
At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers. Even the yearly developer fee is still $99 despite the HUGE increase in App Store revenue.
It’s understandable people want Apple’s cut to shrink, but that doesn’t appear to be legally required. They didn’t make things worse so it seems they’re in the clear.
(They still lost on the alternate payment method thing)
Except the entire time they required a 30% cut and you weren't allowed to point to other payment methods.
I had never thought about it but I wonder if this is why they’ve never tried to raise rates.
It would certainly be a PR nightmare. But would it also immediately open them up to the “iOS monopoly abuse” case so many think this case was/wanted it to be?
I agree also the point you are making. If Apple somehow commanded 90+% of the smartphone market then they would likely face much regulation.
Is this true in the U.S.?
Maybe they don't mean competition between app stores, but between apps within the store itself? Look at how many apps are clones of other apps. If they didn't promote competition, they would shut down all of the clones. /s
This sounds like "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength".
They’re talking about apps. Before the App Store (and the android store etc) finding, buying and installing apps was an incredibly painful experience that few developers or users bothered with. The app stores have promoted a massive leap in the number of apps available (perhaps too many) giving small app developers the ability to publicise and publish apps competing with bigger developers.
There are a lot of areas for scrutiny. This ruling feels like the can is being kicked further down the road, and with the European regulation coming in hot I expect there to be more debate here. Separating Apple's business practices from their personal policies will probably be where this discussion ends.
What marketing says and what a company does don't need to align anymore sadly.
No need to go that far, the couple Google / Apple is a duopoly without any competition, regardless of their marketshare. So you can say that there's no competition on mobile marketplaces at all.
(I'm ignoring irrelevant marketplaces such as Samsung store or Amazon app store which are a rounding error at best)
> The comments seem to imply I am giving my opinion on this case. I am not. I am commenting on the PR-speak given here.
> I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about
Overall Apple is right, the App Store promotes competition and has driven a lot of innovation and expanded the opportunities of developers around the world. At the end of the day iOS could not allow third party apps AT ALL. iPhones could just be self contained devices with only the software on them which Apple has developed themselves. It would be like a smart fridge or toaster. You cannot load a different app into your smart fridge and nobody thinks this is anti-competitive. So given that not allowing any third party apps was the status quo in the early days of iPhones, the fact that Apple opened up and created a market place where developers can promote and advertise their own apps to be purchased and loaded onto people's iPhones is a HUGE STEP towards promoting competition, innovation and opportunity.
Yes, it is the absolute bare minimum, but you also have to remember that the standards for anti-trust enforcement in the united states are extremely low.
I now get bombarded with conflicting updates for apps from multiple stores. They all try to get in each others way and it's much harder to figure out what to install and from where.
I greatly prefer the Apple app store, where i can be reasonably sure that i'm not downloading a bunch of malware every time i look for an app.
The absolute king of this mess is the windows store. There is basically 50 malwares for every possible keyword in that absolute garbage patch of a store.
How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS? (I suppose they could be talking between different apps, but that isn't what this case was about)