Didn't IBM lose the case where they said you can only run IBM software on IBM 360s?

IANAL but it sure would be nice for someone that is to speak up on why many of these old cases don't apply.

Is it that it is legal, Apple just doesn't have to feature it in their store? Phone companies were forced to allow 3rd party phones on their network. So where/are mobile companies as far as I know. Car companies are require to honor car warranties even if you change out the car stereo AFAIK.

Is there some reason similar rules don't apply to Apple (and Nintendo, and Sony, and Microsoft)?

It should be.

You have to write a short letter saying why you once used <product> or refused to purchase <product> because of <reason>.

If this doesn't feel like anticompetitive behaviour, I don't know what does. They are using their rather large position in the smartphone/tablet market to enter another market (in this case storage) and snuff out the competition. And there are other examples.

Be careful what you wish for. If antitrust laws can be applied even when there is no monopoly, indeed, not even a majority market share, you are basically giving the government a green light to do a WHOLE lot of bad things.

Now it's kind of funny to see some of the same people make the argument in comments here that Apple has no significant marketshare or dominance of anything.

Why is this a distinction?

Apple has a monopoly on the "market" (portion) that pays for apps. That's not as clean a definition of market as you would want. The defining characteristics of this market are also (arguably) inconveniently dependent on the offending practices. IE iphone user pay because it is easy, because there is a single payment provider, because users don't have to worry about a cheaper option some roundabout way, etc. etc.

Then there is the problem that any platform, regardless of overall marketshare is something like a little local monopoly. Our definitions of monopoly don't really work here but platforms can still exhibit a lot of what anti-monopoly rules are trying to prevent.

Apple are being abusive, few would deny this. Few have. Why are you?

A market segment just is a market according to the dictionary definitions. And legally, a lot of EU competition law concerns exactly how one individuates such markets/market segments.

Can you draw out what you're claiming more?

The fact remains semantically and legally that you a monopoly of the segment or niche of a market is not possible. A company can be abusive (which is what you mean when you say monopoly - something which in and of itself isn't illegal), but unless they control the significant majority of the whole the it is legally not an issue. Morally is different debate.

Well, I don't know what you mean by 'cogent', as that's generally taken to be a property of arguments and not statements (there may be loser notions, but as I say you'd need to spell out what one you intended). However, the statement that 'Apple have a monopoly over Apple products' is a true statement, which is all that matters to establish the semantic point. It might be trivial, but it's trivially true.

If I might try a helpful suggestion, it seems to me your confusion is arising because you're thinking something like 'if x is a market segment, then x isn't a market'. But of course that doesn't follow, as one can individuate markets at different levels (more or less fine grained).

Then there's a legal point about whether one opens oneself to legal action for dominance when operating in certain ways over market segments - I think it's also true you can be. But I'm not that advanced in my legal training, so don't take a strong position on that.

Further, there are normative and moral issues about what should be the law, and what one should do in these cases - but discussing those would take a long time...

The issue here is one of sensationalism. As a community, we a far too quick to jump to the "$corp is evil!" conclusion without looking for a reason, however ridiculous it may seem. We, as a community, are too cynical for own good.

> "Apple makes 80% of the money in the cell phone market, Apple is the only one making any money"

Making the majority of the profits is not a monopoly in the Microsoft Windows sense, which I assume is what we're talking about here. iOS does not have that in the handset market (esp. if you include Symbian!), and the tablet market is very young.

Unfortunately, Google is probably not capable of exploiting these mini-resentments and I don't think anybody else is either.

I'd love to hear more about that.

This is my reasoning on why I think there is an opportunity there:

Lets say (patent issues not withstanding), you created an exact clone of the iPad and iOS and sold it at the same price but without the 30% 'apple tax' on purchases. It seems reasonable to assume that if that were the only differentiating feature you would get more developers (they get to keep more of the money) and so it would get more apps, and the platform would outsell Apple's iPad with its constraints.

Now granted that is a hell of a hypothetical, but if you can accept the claim that given two otherwise identical products, but one with more developer friendly policies, would allow the developer friendly one to be more successful, then we can talk about at what point the 'value' represented by that can overcome the fact that the product is not an iPad. Does that make sense?

The Android tablet ecosystem is currently horrible. Between the device diversity, the user experience diversity, and the release diversity, and the app experience diversity it is a wild and woolly place which has not been able to compete well with iPad. Contrast that to the Kindle Fire which started with Android, locked down a lot of stuff that Google doesn't, and that has gained more traction than any other Android based tablet.

To me, that shows a market for a non-iPad but with Apple like quality control and predictability. Depending on Amazon's success, Google might just wake up and fix their world (and of course they might not, it would not be the first time a large organization just didn't 'get' it)

But you also claim that nobody can exploit these resentments, and certainly Amazon is going to try and seem to have some modest success in that regard. Love to hear the counter point of view.

Apple has that covered. You cannot make your services cheaper on other platforms. You have to charge atleast what you charge iOS users for the same service. This is to prevent the success of alternative app stores that will take only 20% or 5% cut. The new ecosystem won't take off because the existing developers cannot afford to completely drop the App Store to jump to a new platform.

Surely in a world where the network effect rules and the stakes (the global marketplace) are so high, we shouldn't allow networks to entrench themselves too easily? Else we'd just have a behemoth in each sector, probably the same few companies even.

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that it protects Apple from having their users find out that 30% of what they're paying gets nowhere near the person they think is getting all the money.

I do not believe keeping the price equal to other helps the consumer, it's simply Apple keeping developers from charging the 30% straight to the consumer. I believe it would be interesting if they let this restriction slide. Perhaps the advantage of simple purchasing makes up for an increase in price. Convenience is also worth something, as supermarkets have found out.

What? It's specifically set up to protect Apple's cut of 30% and to prevent other app stores from charging less.

Lets say you price a service at $14/mo. Apple takes 30% so you price it at $20/mo. Apple takes $6/mo. Windows 8 ap store takes zero if you roll your own in app mechanism, but you can't charge Windows 8 users only $14/mo. You have to charge them $20/mo if you want to stay in the iOS App store.

How is Windows 8 users being forced to pay $20/mo instead of receiving a benefit from their platform competing, protect Apple customers?

Apple is trying to protect their own users from being ripped off by Apple? That's some _really_ twisted logic there.

That rule is in place to safeguard their 30% cut. I don't see how the user benefits from having to pay 30% extra instead of getting a 30% discount on the same supplier's website instead of paying Apple the tax.

That cost goes directly to Apple. It protects Apple, not their consumers. Their consumers see no benefit from 30% of their cost, whether larger or smaller than the alternatives.

Based on the examples I have witnessed, I simply do not have any hope in the existence of an open platform with Apple-esque quality and eco-system (the assumption being viable eco-system automatically implies major market share).

Sorry if I spoke in circles!

One of the areas that hasn't been explored a whole lot in the product space is 'moderated open' which is how I think of the Linux Kernel. You can change it all you want, get the source, etc, but if you want to get into the kernel that everyone else sees you have to go through Linus. He keeps the quality pretty high by doing that. It was similar to FreeBSD as 'open source' but 'moderated commits.'

Now in the tablet space I have yet to see someone to take that path. There do not seem to be too many successes for business people to draw on for inspiration. That being said, as an example the Kindle Fire has sold a lot of units. And it is a completely legit argument that Amazon 'makes it up in book sales' (which is their business model) much like the iPod can be subsidized by iTunes purchases.

And I am sympathetic to mladenkovacevic's comment about a wild and free ecosystem can be more useful/desirable than a locked down one. But I also recognize that there are lots of folks who are interested in the product, not deeply technical, and chafe under Apple's restrictions on developers.

If anyone could 'afford' to make a run at this, Google could. And perhaps they will with a 'Google Experience' tablet that has been rumored.

I understand your lack of hope given the things you have seen so far. Back in the before times of personal computers when they had lights and switches on the front, the introduction of the IBM PC for the 'suits' was a huge pain. And really successful brands at the time got pushed aside. Google pushed aside Alta Vista, Sun pushed aside DEC, Compaq/Dell pushed aside the IBM PC, and Android phones at least have put a huge crimp in Apple's style.

Interesting to see how this evolves.

What "Apple tax"? Haven't you noticed that competitors have struggled to offer the same prices for their tablets for example? The iPad/iPhone is one of the cheapest products on their market segment.

Just consider that when everybody expected the iPad to be like $999 or $799 on introduction, it came out at $499 -- and the mostly useless copies (now forgotten) that appeared of it, where in the range of $700.

Apple has their margin's with huge economies of scale and huge massive pre-orders of RAM, solid state storage and screen panels.

They would be cutting their own nose off to spite their face.

Personally, the idea of hardware-accelerated HTML5/JS apps makes my heart sing, so I'm really hoping it takes off with consumers. Maybe it'll be the best texting phone ever and every teenager in the world will swap. A dude can dream...