Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 12298765 2650 days ago
> Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.

This is the core issue. Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).

I don't see how this is much different than IE. Maybe even worse in some ways. But regardless, it is very clearly manipulating the market artificially in Apple's favor.

2 comments

Apple is not dominant in the hardware market in the same way IE was. Nowhere near.
For those who have significant sums invested in the App Store, they are effectively dominant as there is no way to switch app licenses to a different app store.
Sure, but the rules are _reasonably_ unambiguous and unchanging. The 30% cut has been in place since day one. If Spotify didn't like it, they had the choice to focus their attentions exclusively on other platforms. That wasn't the case with Windows+IE, when effectively there were no other platforms of any size.
And worth noting that Spotify grows by millions of paying subscribers every quarter without the app store. They're currently choosing to focus exclusively on other channels rather than try to pay the 30% and… doing better than Apple Music…
> Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).

Allegedly anticompetitive.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook all engage in similar behavior by giving preferential treatment of their products/features/services.