[fermenflo]

Ok? I feel like Apple is free to promote whatever they damn please on their own platform. Are we seriously criticizing a company for promoting their products ahead of 3rd party products on their own platform? and I mean, how much money do you think Apple is making from someone having their compass app downloaded? Seems like an inflammatory and in-genuine story.

[nixpulvis]

It's an antitrust issue. If I own the market and some of the fruit, I'll clearly put myself in a better position to attract customers, and thus make sales. The rest of the fruit vendors are 2nd class.

Not to mention Apple employees are banned from making apps outside of company time, since they are aware of the issue with insiders having power to make apps that out compete the rest.

[zaroth]

How can it possibly be an anti-trust issue for a minority player in a competitive market to choose which products to display in their own retail store?

This is markedly different then, for example, Google altering search results to promote their own products, because Google owns something like 90% of Search.

[gamblor956]

The app store is not a retail store. That's one of the major factors in the antitrust analysis.

In the retail/wholesale model, the retail store buys the third party products and their own store brand products, and sells them both. It might favor the store brand with more promotion or better shelf placement, but both products appear on the shelves, and the third-party has generally already been compensated for their goods (or is contractually owed compensation). In uncommon situations, such as with new products, compensation may be contingent on products sold through (to end customers), but that is not the norm.

In the appstore model, third-party app makers sell apps in Apple's store. Apple sells apps in Apple's store and promotes its own apps ahead of competing apps. It even promotes unrelated apps ahead of competing apps in a blatant attempt to push competitors off the first 2 pages of search results (i.e., off the shelf). Apple also frequently bans apps that compete with Apple's own apps or features, even if such competing apps existed for years before Apple's own apps.

Any one of the aforementioned acts by Apple could be treated as an antitrust issue. And that's not even a comprehensive list.

[Despegar]

>The app store is not a retail store. That's one of the major factors in the antitrust analysis.

Well no. What you cited was related to the Supreme Court's analysis of the App Store case, but that was only related to the issue of standing.

How it differs from brick and mortar stores buying inventory isn't relevant to the actual merits of the case, which hasn't been in court yet.

[henryfjordan]

An Android app and an iPhone app are not compatible goods. You cannot replace one with the other. Try installing an APK on the iphone and let me know how that goes.

The "market" is smaller than you think. A classic way to determine alternatives to a product is by asking "if I raise the price of all apps, how many people will buy something else?" Iphone owners are kinda stuck eating the increase, aren't they?

Apple controls 100% of the iPhone app market. An iPhone owner made a $1000 investment into their phone and cannot just switch to Android. Apple takes advantage of that fact for their own benefit.

[zaroth]

Every manufacturer controls their own supply chain, and can choose what to put in or take out of their own product.

And everyone makes a choice when they purchase a product— you could say invest in a product—if they want to buy into that.

Of course it costs money to buy something different. The salient point is that there is a obvious and competitive choice before you buy, that Apple does nothing to restrict you from making that choice before you buy, and that you can switch if you feel like it, which makes it not a monopoly.

Monopoly is not defined as the lack of compatibility between two competing products. Monopoly is also not defined as having a closed ecosystem.

I think it’s fair to argue if you think it should be illegal to have closed ecosystems. Personally I strongly disagree because there are clear trade-offs involved and the market should be able to decide if it wants a closed ecosystem product offering from Vendor A or an open ecosystem offering from Vendor B.

The problem with a closed ecosystem is when it is combined with a monopolistic market. In this discussion I believed the two points have become conflated, but while Apple certainly has a walled garden, there is compelling evidence the smartphone market is highly competitive.

[Wowfunhappy]

I don't agree with this notion that you can't engage in anticompetitive behavior without 80%+ marketshare.

Imagine a world where Apple continues to clamp down on 3rd party services that compete with their own offerings, like Spotify. Apple could completely ban Spotify from selling subscriptions outside the App Store, and raise their fee to 70%. Google, wanting to push their own Google Play Music service, eventually adopts similar rules on Android, or perhaps implements them in a theoretical successor like Fuchsia.

This would basically mean you cannot build a music streaming service without also building your own mobile platform. That in turn would effectively mean we can only ever have as many streaming services as we do mobile platforms.

Even though neither Google nor Apple have 80%+ marketshare, this behavior strikes me as deeply anti-competive. It's not a world I want to live in.

[zaroth]

The Venn diagram of things that you are capable of doing, and things that are legal to do, changes when you either are or are not a monopoly.

Offering rebates for using your product and not using someone else’s, for example, may be illegal if you are a monopoly but not illegal if you are not.

There are innumerable things a given company could do that harms its competition. Up to a point, that’s kinda the whole idea! It doesn’t become illegal unless it is done by leveraging a monopoly market position.

[Wowfunhappy]

I'm arguing the law (or our interpretation of it?) should be stricter than it currently is, in light of how much power modern technology gives platform holders, and the situation I outlined above.

[zaroth]

I think as long as Apple does not have a monopoly, history has shown us that competition will take care of this.

If Apple clamps down on 3rd party apps to the point where it is no longer serving its user-base, the user base has many good alternatives, and Apple would lose business.

I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that. Apple might love the idea that only Apple Music should exist on their iPhone (in fact they was kinda Steve’s original vision) but they can’t get away with it specifically because they would be clobbered by the competition if they tried.

Even as (if) Apple’s reputation shifts away from “walled garden that protects you from junk and malware and spyware” toward “overlord trying to control what you can buy” this causes some users to leave.

As long as there’s viable competitors, I’d rather let users vote with their wallets. This is actually the best way to give people the choice of which system you would prefer using. If the fully open system is preferred by most users then most users will choose that product. But because there are actually huge trade-offs and very hard unsolved problems with a fully open system, it’s important to provide consumers both options.

[fortran77]

I'd agree if you were searching for a Compass app.

But the take that I got from reading the article is if you say "Podcast" in the search box, you'll see pages and pages of Apple's own apps, unrelated to podcasts, before you start seeing podcast apps.

[rchaud]

It wouldn't be a big deal if Apple allowed you to install apps from outside the App Store, like they do with MacOS programs.

[JustSomeNobody]

Ah, the old, "It's my football so I should always get to be quarterback" argument. I guess that works for a while.

[coldtea]

It should work forever, as long you own the field, and people want to use said field because that gives them access to a huge marketplace of devices that you've built and sold.

So there's that...

[nixpulvis]

You lost me with your analogy. Let me extend the pigskin thought exprement a bit.

If I own the football team, and the field, and the city (hell, why not), then sure I can choose who plays QB, so I choose my son. Maybe at the start he's even not that bad of a QB, and our team wins some games. Everyone is happy.

After a little while though, people realize there's no sense trying out for QB on my team. My son, now left without anyone gunning for his job becomes complacent. We start losing games more and more.

With enough control over the market (like Apple has with the App Store), there become less and less QBs to choose from, and it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league.

[coldtea]

It's more like:

Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls.

Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them.

They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing system.

Apple is not obligated to advertise those third party stalls over their own.

If they don't like the arrangement they can always go somewhere else (there is an even bigger stadium in town that has available food stalls).

[nixpulvis]

Yes, and that's part of why you pay $10 for a domestic beer, and $5 for a hot dog.

So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.

[74ls00]

But what if you’re not selling food, but merchandise targeted at this particular team’s fans. You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium - you have no choice but to suck up the fact that on the vendor map of the stadium, where it says merchandise, is actually Apple’s food court. Nobody is going to find your t’shirt stand.

[coldtea]

>You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium

For starters, nobody forces you to sell merchandise for this particular team's fans...

But the analogy breaks down here, because merchandize such as t-shirts is not dependent on the stadium to be used. You could sell it outside the stadium.

Whereas iOS software leverages the fact that the iOS is being sold, maintained, having the necessary APIs, and so on, and that iOS devices are being made and sell decently and lure people willing to pay for apps.

So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...

[sixstringtheory]

> it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league

I don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion.

I figured that it'd mean nobody tries out for QB on your team, all the best QBs go to other teams, eventually your team starts to suck and lose fans and therefore revenue, and the market forces either force you to get a new QB or your business in the team suffers and maybe folds. Problem solved either way, eventually.

[nixpulvis]

I said "With enough control over the market ...", which is basically a way of saying I'm making these QB choices for not just my team, but some large enough set of the QBs in the NFL.

[toxik]

I think the analogy isn't very good. Let me try.

It's as if you're the one selling all the tickets to the only stadium in town, and you make it so that when your team plays, tickets are cheaper, more abundant, and more visible.

Another local team wants to play too, but their ticket prices are outrageous, there's no promotion of the event either, and they might actually be banned from the stadium unless they use ONLY your equipment.

[Ensorceled]

Your analogy also isn't very good, your town has lots of other stadiums: The Samsung Galaxarium, The Googlplexel, The LG Centre, The Huawei Dome. Sure the Apple one is pretty fancy and the rules are onerous but there are plenty of other places to do business.

[gamblor956]

Your analogy doesn't work either.

An iOS app/ticket/whatever wouldn't work/get you into the other "stadiums." Ergo, the market for the iOS thing does not include those other "stadiums."

Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them. The antitrust issues are related to Apple's actions within the iOS app market. Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.

[mayankkaizen]

Didn't something similar happen with Microsoft and Internet Explorer?

[Causality1]

The EU fined Microsoft six hundred million dollars just for including Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player in Windows by default. Apple's behavior is much worse than that.

[coldtea]

How many times this old wives tale will have to be repeated till people understand what went on then, and how it's nothing like it's now?

Microsoft then had a monopoly on desktop OSes at the time, at 95+ (close to 97%, in fact).

Apple has a paltry sub-50% share of mobile OSes.

The "But they have 100% share on their own products" is not an argument, as far as the law is concerned, as monopolies are not judged this way. That's the same reason why you can't legally force McDonalds to also sell Burger King burgers, or GAP to sell Banana Republic clothes...

And even MS monopoly position wasn't the issue (having a monopoly naturally is not illegal). The issue was it used its monopoly position to threaten and bribe OEMs to not work with competitors.

[gamblor956]

Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices. An iApp only runs on iOS, so it's irrelevant that Apple is a minority of the mobile market because that's not the market being analyzed for the antitrust issues.

[root_axis]

This logic makes no sense. Using your reasoning Nintendo is a monopoly because only Nintendo devices will run Nintendo games.

[gamblor956]

Nintendo is a monopoly with respect to Nintendo games (but not Nintendo devices, since you can buy those all over).

Monopolies aren't inherently illegal. See e.g., patents and copyrights, which are legally granted or protected monopolies.

What is illegal is anti-competitive practices. This doesn't require a dominant or even majority market position--authorities in the US and EU have gone after companies with relatively small market shares that engaged in anti competitive actions (though they haven't done so in many years).

[coldtea]

>Nintendo is a monopoly with respect to Nintendo games

That's not what monopoly means legally.

>Monopolies aren't inherently illegal

That's true, but a vendor controlling their own store is not a monopoly.

Monopoly is when the vendor has 100% of the overall market...

[m_ke]

iOS revenue is 2x larger than android. There might be more cheap android phones out there but Apple has the majority of high income individuals.

[coldtea]

Which is not relevant. Monopoly is defined on a market, not on income segments (and even if it mattered, still on the high income individuals iOS is hardly above say 70%).

Someone could sell cars for $5K and have 99% of the car market in a small city of 1000 people, while another one sells a single car for 100M and has 20 times the other's revenue. It's still the cheap car guy that has the monopoly.

[m_ke]

Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses. Apple pulls in 2/3 of the revenue in the mobile app ecosystem and gets to act as a gatekeeper between most consumer startups and their potential customers.

[coldtea]

>Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses.

It's not relevant for monopoly law and whether it's a monopoly, which is what's discussed here...

[damnyou]

Of course it's relevant. A definition of monopoly that only relies on raw unit numbers is obviously incomplete.

Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.

[coldtea]

>Of course it's relevant. A definition of monopoly that only relies on raw unit numbers is obviously incomplete.

We don't get to pick our "complete" definition we prefer because "we deserve free money/mobile platform access". There's an actual, legal, one...

>Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.

Only in the same sense that McDonalds has power not to sell Burger King burgers, and a shop owner has owner to sell whatever the duck they want.

Not power related to monopoly over the mobile market or the app market in general.

[vgetr]

So...?

[ceejayoz]

Apple does not have a monopoly in the mobile phone market like Microsoft had in the operating system market.

Microsoft also had a court order to comply with that they forgot about in Windows 7. https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/microsoft-european-commi...

[gamblor956]

Microsoft never had a monopoly in the OS market. Plenty of businesses large and small used competing OSs like Apple, Unix, Linux, Beos, OS/2, DOS, etc.

Microsoft had a dominant market position, and anti-competitively leveraged that market position in operating systems to muscle its way into the internet browser market.

[greedo]

Windows had 97% marketshare. MacOS, BeOS, OS/2, DOS, the various *nixes and Linux were NOTHING in that market.

[jakear]

IMO, that fine is (for lack of a better term) bullshit. Does Android present a browser selection to EU customers?

[Cthulhu_]

No, but there are at least three running or finished antitrust cases going against Google from the EU, for Google Shopping, AdSense and Android; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google for a summary.