Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by treis 1401 days ago
>Killing an industry isn’t anti-competitive per se

Using your dominance in one market (computers/phones) to muscle into another (ads) is about as anti-competitive as you can get.

2 comments

It’s not, though. Consumers don’t buy ads. Apple wouldn’t have a monopoly, or be harming consumers.

Otherwise Facebook using its social media site to take over ads from Google would be anti competitive. Or Google taking over with AdSense by using its search engine. Or TV/cable stations taking over from newspapers or radio.

None of this is anti-competitive. They’re different markets that change as the underlying communication medium changes.

And it’s not like ads are somehow killed by Apple. It’s the surveillance based customized ads that have been made less common as customers can deny their use (or approve them!). Ads existed for a century without that level of surveillance.

Also if those ads are exclusively limited to the original market? People can easily choose to shop outside of that market and be exposed to exactly 0 of those ‘anti-competitive’ ads, only to the competing ads.