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by dane-pgp 1777 days ago
There is a universe where consumers have a right to purchase products without the market interference of exclusivity agreements, and that universe contains the EU:

> (151) In an exclusive distribution agreement the supplier agrees to sell his products only to one distributor for resale in a particular territory.

The rules are complicated and depend on the supplier's and buyer's market share, but you can read the details on page 46 of their "Guidelines on Vertical Restraints".[0]

I'm not suggesting that a company should be required to take a positive action to fulfil Apple's requirements, but if a company is producing a file which can be installed via an app store, they should not try using copyright or contract law to prevent other app stores from also selling/distributing their app.

(Admittedly there would have to be some amount of paperwork for allowing the various app stores to pay money into the app developer's account, but that could be done on Apple's side so that the developer continues to get a payment each month, with some stats on a dashboard somewhere showing which app stores the app was sold through).

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/legislation/guide...
1 comments
michaelmrose 1777 days ago
Exclusivity is something the market maker buys from the vendor. Making such a transaction illegal does not in any fashion require the vendor to actually sell their goods on multiple markets it just requires them not to exchange money for exclusivity.

In particular I don't think it says anything at all about a situation where the vendor and market are not engaged in a relationship but rather are literally the same company. Nothing forbids a donut shop from actually baking AND selling the donuts.

I don't think a 3rd party Epic store is an example of tying either. It's not something you are being asked to purchase in order to realize the other purchase it is rather a means to actually receive the product you have purchased. You might as well say that <insert app> is tied to the purchase of an executable or disk.

Not only that but if Apple allowed sideloading they would arguably be able to trivially able to avoid even a misguided accusation of tying by providing a manually installable package file with the app store merely providing a free means to receive updates.

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