Of all the big tech companies Apple is the most innocuous. There have no monopoly in any of their sectors and you can just ignore them if you wish, as I do, without any consequences.
There is at least one aspect where they may be a serious competitive problem: their enormous size enables them to buy up a huge share of the world's most advanced chip supply from TSMC. Their scale and the profit that goes with it makes that possible. They can very effectively limit competition globally through that mechanism.
You're a smaller company with a hot new phone? You need a large supply of 3nm chips from TSMC to compete? You can't get them because Apple is buying them all.
And their leverage on TSMC (with TSMC eating the cost of defective supply), which is very remarkable unto itself, may also be a serious problem.
It's not just testing on them. If any of your customers have bought an Apple mobile device, your only feasible way to distribute apps to them is through Apple.
It's like having Comcast and Time Warner and they each want to charge 30% of revenue to any service traversing their network. Not only is it unreasonable to say that they compete with each other because if you're not satisfied with Comcast you can just sign up with Time Warner -- because one of them is in California and the other is in New York and you'd have to move -- but it's not even you who would have to move. The customer of the App Store, the one who pays the fee, is the developer. It's your customers who would have to move -- every single one of them, or Apple still has a monopoly on each one who doesn't.
Notice how this differs from an ordinary retailer. Your customer can easily go across the street to Target or Walmart, or shop in both stores on the same day. They don't have to "move" -- buy a new device for hundreds of dollars and transition all of their other apps and services to an incompatible platform.
> this data includes payments which are not captured by Apple directly. In the words of the authors, “More than 90% of this figure originated from transactions that did not happen through the App Store, meaning that these amounts accrued solely to developers and other third parties, and that Apple collected no commission on them.”
Who's gonna break them up? The government itself, that enables companies to grow this big, and whose politicians are paid and dined by megacorporations?
> and whose politicians are paid and dined by megacorporations?
This is largely faked and comes from people intentionally misreading donations from company employees as if they were donations from companies. (Companies can do some things with PACs, but not much, and Apple doesn't have a PAC.)
What's actually happening is the FTC currently is run by someone who's trying to break up all the big tech companies, and they keep losing in court because their arguments are bad.
Employees don't have the same interests as their employer, which is why you can use the same methodology to show every big tech company actually loves Bernie Sanders.
They work very hard to make sure all their product lines form a cohesive experience. It’s very different than GE simply (once? Still? Someone fact check me) owning NBC. Or Blackrock just owning a ton of real estate. The latter just owns shit to own shit.
Each of those can be reasonably separated. But I do think that it is quite natural and will stop the digital dictator mindset, most importantly splitting of digital services from marketplace and both of those from hardware.
Notably they seem to view their product lines quite different, the website lists "Store Mac iPad iPhone Watch Vision AirPods TV & Home Entertainment Accessories".
You're essentially just asking them to destroy the company and each of those products. I'm really not sure how you're going to go about this when all of these operate within the walled garden. I mean it 100% won't happen, but further I don't see how this would benefit the consumer in any way.
How would it destroy any of them? They could all still be used together by anyone who prefers that. Anyone who wanted to could continue to install apps only from a specific App Store even if others were available. You could still run iOS on an iPhone even if iOS also ran on Samsung devices and Android also ran on iPhones.
The only change is that you could also choose something different.
FTA: “More than 90% of this figure originated from transactions that did not happen through the App Store, meaning that these amounts accrued solely to developers and other third parties, and that Apple collected no commission on them.”
As a non-American I would love if Americans started doing more impulsive footgun politics like breaking up their big tech companies. That will finally give European and non-Chinese Asian competitors a chance.
I don’t think so. Apple is not a monopoly in any of those spaces, and has plenty of competition on all fronts.
One of the big things that makes Apple products so compelling is the integration and shared engineering between them.
For instance, Apple made some of the best processor cores over the course of a decade for the iPhone. Now, variants of those cores are used in everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac.
Also, when you buy an iPhone app, it will often also work on the iPad and Apple Watch with tight integration and syncing.
To break the company up on product lines would significantly worsen the products. It would make the products less competitive worldwide and likely hurt the US economy. I think this would be a nonstarter for regulators.
If regulators want to go after anticompetitive practices, they would more likely force Apple to make changes to App Store policies, which are in many cases incredibly unfair.
> For instance, Apple made some of the best processor cores over the course of a decade for the iPhone. Now, variants of those cores are used in everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac.
Regulators could force Apple to sell their CPUs (if as hardware or as IP license) under fair conditions to willing buyers, or to open up macOS, iMessage, Facetime and Find My iDevice to competitors' products.
That way Apple could still enjoy the benefits of having tightly integrated hardware and software, but the rest of the world could enjoy high performance ARM systems as well, thus finally providing some actual competition to Intel and AMD.
Why should Apple be forced to sell their IP? The Mac has less than 15% market share? Should Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Amazon also be forced to sell their IP?
Intel has 80%+ of the computer market. Should they be forced to license their IP? Should Google be forced to license their search algorithms?
> Intel has 80%+ of the computer market. Should they be forced to license their IP?
You can walk into any computer store you want and pick up a top of the line Intel or AMD CPU, and buy parts from all kinds of vendors to assemble a computer from them. With Apple, you're locked in into paying whatever they demand. The only problem is that anything x86 is an utter pain in performance-per-watt because Intel doesn't care, AMD doesn't have the resources and the patent situation means that there can't reasonably be competitors for these two. Having actually performant Apple components available on the open market would be the kick for Intel to finally do something. Competition would be working again. (BTW, I'm an Apple user myself, but the way that Apple gouges you on storage and memory is beyond ridiculous)
> Should Google be forced to license their search algorithms?
At least to open them up. Google is incredibly powerful thanks to its market share, and its decisions (or not-decisions) have serious economic impacts upon individual people and small businesses unable to afford the millions of dollars that you need to get a personal Google account representative.
Given all the common/shared pieces underpinning their hardware and software, that would likely be disastrous for almost everything split out. Cloud services could probably find a way to stay afloat, but the Mac would be at risk as would wearables. iPhone would quickly lose its hardware edge over Android with it no longer making financial sense to invest so much in custom chips. It’s hard to see an outcome of a split that doesn’t end up entrenching Windows and Android as monopolies.
Then just tax them to hell (aka tariff Apple imports if they move out of the country significantly) if that's the game these companies want to play. They need the US customer base and investment base more than the US needs Apple.
Market share doesn't determine anti-trust action, it's merely one factor that tends to play a role in the ability of a company to harm consumers.
I don't know why this myth about % market share and anti-trust refuses to die.
Harm to consumers is the primary consideration. Apple has that ability through locking up component supply in an aggressively exclusionary manner that restricts competition, which then harms consumers. If Apple perpetually uses their very elevated profit margins to lock up that supply, you can bet they're plainly raising the average cost of a smartphone by limiting how many other lower cost competing devices there are eg at TSMC 3nm.
District court decisions don't set precedent and the case is still under appeal.
But I also notice that you're not providing a counterargument in any logical sense and only an appeal to authority. We're not in a courtroom, we've having a public policy discussion about what the law should be.
If you have prospective customers with iOS devices you want to distribute your app to, name a feasible distribution method that isn't Apple.
> But by that logic Shopify has a monopoly on distributing Shopify apps, and McDonalds has a monopoly on Quarter Pounders.
Anyone can make and sell a Quarter Pounder to anyone. They may need to call it something else if McDonalds has a trademark on the name, but that doesn't cause it to be a different market when the product is a substitute and the customers are the same people.
Maybe Shopify does have a monopoly on distributing Shopify apps? That presumably depends on whether you can install the apps in some other way. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on distributing Windows apps, for example, and the fact that there is a difference between that and what is going on with Apple is demonstrative.
> But I also notice that you're not providing a counterargument in any logical sense
because judges are kinda the authority on the interpretation of the law. That’s how the legal system works.
> Anyone can make and sell a Quarter Pounder to anyone. They may need to call it something else if McDonalds has a trademark on the name,
Only McDonald’s can distribute a McDonald’s quarter pounder. Anyone can make a distribute a smart phone too. There are dozens of white market smart phone makers that a company can get a run of smart phones made and put their own version of AOSP or Linux on it.
> If you have prospective customers with iOS devices you want to distribute your app to, name a feasible distribution method that isn't Apple.
> because judges are kinda the authority on the interpretation of the law. That’s how the legal system works.
Unless you have a Supreme Court opinion, their authority is limited to one courtroom or one Circuit. And this still doesn't tell you what the law should be, which is ultimately up to the public.
> Only McDonald’s can distribute a McDonald’s quarter pounder.
You're talking about the trademark, not the product. Anybody can distribute a hamburger. It can even be indistinguishable from a McDonald's Quarter Pounder as long as you don't call it that.
The issue is not that Apple has a trademark on Apple App Store so no one else can make a store with that name. It's that there are millions of people whose only mobile device is an iPhone who can't reasonably use any other app store no matter what you name it.
> Anyone can make a distribute a smart phone too.
The question is whether anyone can make a store that distributes apps to everyone with a smart phone. If they can only distribute apps to some subset of the people with a smart phone, that strongly implies that these are separate markets.
> The web….
I want to install the Firefox browser engine, my favorite VPN, BitTorrent and the Epic Games Store on an iOS device. Can I use the web for this?
Notice that you couldn't list Google Play either. Why is that if the market is supposed to be something like "smartphone app distribution"?