8 ms·

Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Apple, too

54 points by gkanai 8y ago

cimmanom 8y ago
This is an interview that goes into more depth about Warren’s proposal. Only a few questions are about Apple; the rest further elucidate her reasoning behind the proposal as a whole.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
peteretep 8y ago
I’ve read her proposal and actually it sounds pretty exciting to me. I wonder where AWS fits into all of this
- lykr0n 8y ago
  I assume AWS would be split away from Amazon.com. So Amazon would turn into AWS, Amazon.com + Amazon Logistics, Amazon Prime Music/TV, ???
  - votepaunchy 8y ago
    Only the original content would be forced to split from Prime. You could have a combined marketplace and video platform, but you can’t self host (above $25B revenue).
    - michaf 8y ago
      I wonder if Netflix would have to spin off their in-house productions once they reach $25B revenue. Or, if they don't, if the mobile platform providers could change their business models into similar subscription services to avoid the break-up.
Upvoter33 8y ago
Breaking up the tech giants is not a solution to the problems that confront us. Legislation about our rights to digital privacy and related issues are; I hope the powers that be work on that instead of this sound-byte friendly "let's break 'em up" approach. A 2-person company could compromise your privacy just as easily as a 2-trillion dollar company.
- awinder 8y ago
  You could even exactly pass GDPR as a first measure — there would be a head start on crafting legislation, and businesses are largely implemented against it, they just need to extend existing practice to US customers / users. Even that is going to be a hard sell in the political climate though. Twisting to take an even more abrasive and high-touch action is just not going to happen. Hopefully democrats will learn to calm themselves down and inject some degree of sanity over the next year because Americans deserve a rational alternative to the era of Donald trump. Not some Sophie’s Choice of two shock-and-awe Americas.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Legislation requires a 2/3rds control of government. The republicans have a stranglehold on the US senate due to every state getting two senators. There are simply more rural, conservative states than would tolerate that change. Warrens idea points out a better idea. Presidential candidates from non-republicans can do their most work with powers the presidency already has: drug criminalization, immigration, pardon powers, etc. I’m pretty sure a president can break up companies under the trust buster acts from the late 1800s, but I'm basing that on decades old public schooling.
    - awinder 8y ago
      The platform utility stuff would all require new legislation. Maybe the argument is that you threaten antitrust cases unless tech goes along but that too would apply to gdpr or some other low touch solution.
  - hindsightbias 8y ago
cascom 8y ago
Would consumers benefit from this? What businesses are lobbying for this?
- rifung 8y ago
  Possibly because you'd have more competition although higher prices as well. On the other hand, this would be much better for the economy which is, in my opinion, more important.
andreilys 8y ago
Looking forward to living in a world that's dominated by Chinese tech companies who can compete on a global scale without their governments trying to actively undermine them.
- votepaunchy 8y ago
  The global Chinese companies (revenue > $25B) would be excluded from the US market. Otherwise Silicon Valley would simply incorporate overseas.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    That’s not going to stop the massive technology advances they will amass from economies of scale (particularly in AI) ultimately dominating the market if the USG goes into Silicon Valley with an axe.
    - rifung 8y ago
      I'd argue that competition would drive more technological advances. There are commonly complaints on HN that FAANG are sucking up all the talent after all. Having worked at Amazon and Google I definitely feel most people are overqualified..
      - rayiner 8y ago
        Since when does competition drive more innovation? What’s more innovative, Google, which uses its monopoly on search to bankroll things like self-driving cars, or Lenovo, which is in an intensely competitive PC market? How innovative is the Android phone market, versus Android itself? As a thought experiment, imagine Apple adopted Android, thus opening itself up to more competition. Do you think they would be more innovative as a result? Or is Apple’s level of innovation (it’s CPUs are destroying its conpetitors’ By a factor of 2-3x performance per watt these days), the result of being able to leverage massive cash flows that its monopoly on iOS devices throws off?
sys_64738 8y ago
She has a point. Apple has a competitive advantage over others as it makes the rules it enforces. If critical change comes to the App store then Apple can make changes to their apps before the change is announced to everybody else. That's a conflict of interest which creates unfair business advantage.
- zaroth 8y ago
  All business naturally have some sorts of advantages. Otherwise they would not be in business. Not all business advantage is considered “unfair”. Apple is not unfairly competing with apps on its store, quite the contrary, Apple is highly invested in making the apps on its store the most pleasing, productive, performant, and profitable that they possibly can.
  - skewart 8y ago
    > Apple is not unfairly competing with apps on its store All the Apple apps that are pre-installed on an iPhone have a massive advantage over third-party options in the App Store. Most users just stick with the pre-installed Apple apps for email, web browsing, using the camera, looking through photos, and taking notes. There used to be third-party flashlight apps in the app store, but Apple used their platform power to crush those apps when they included flashlight functionality for free in iOS 7. Of course, one can argue that Apple has used its platform power for a worthwhile goal - creating a better user experience. People made a similar argument about Walmart back in the 90s and 00s when they were in the news for crushing small businesses - it's fine because Walmart is just trying to give customers lower prices.
wickedOne 8y ago
is this going to solve anything? sounds like cutting down a tree when it gets too big rather than preventing it growing like that... i'm quite sure companies like google, apple, facebook, etc. are creative enough to find a way to get around this restriction which will just ensure a false sense of security. i get the whole monopoly and fair competition issues, but haven't there been rules and regulations for those for quite a while? apart from that: how realistic is this scenario to get actual laws enforing it when those same companies are pretty much funding the government?
- jrs95 8y ago
  I don't think it matters, and I don't think it's a proposal that will actually be acted upon. It's just an attempt to get attention for an election she has virtually no chance of winning and posture as being the most progressive candidate.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  > i'm quite sure companies like google, apple, facebook, etc. are creative enough to find a way to get around this restriction That was my initial reaction as well, but after looking into it a little bit I'm not so sure. The wording of the Sherman Act is pretty broad, and the history of how it's been applied by the courts seems to be pretty complex (as might be expected with a broadly-worded law from 1890), so I'm inclined to doubt any explanation of the situation that would fit on a bumper sticker. There are, I assume, important legal reasons behind how United States v. Microsoft unfolded, with a protracted hard-fought court battle followed by a settlement that imposed some pretty major restrictions on Microsoft. If Microsoft could have easily gotten around the effects of a breakup, I'd expect almost everything about that fight to be different.
  - wickedOne 8y ago
    > If Microsoft could have easily gotten around the effects of a breakup, I'd expect almost everything about that fight to be different. you are right and i pretty much forgotten about that. microsoft fought a similar battle in europe with the same legal outcome and basically resulting in a "browser pick" splash when you installed the OS and that was about it. that's a story where there was actually taken some action. but, for example, for years it's been frowned upon that companies like apple "bank" their money in, for example, ireland and get away with not paying taxes in the countries they actually have offices. that's a story where there has been no action for a (known) issue like the one described in the aticle. so how likely will it be that tech giants will create a legal entity abroad, hosting their platform, whilst they will continue to be the biggest player on that platform? i'm not saying ms. warren doesn't have a point, just that it seams that this is just another "symptom control" item which sounds politically correct, but won't get any traction in the "real world"
IdontRememberIt 8y ago
I honestly do not understand who she is trying to please: tech is not banking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_investment_and_retail_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_investment_and_r... ). There is no systemic risk or too-big-to-fail risk for the government. Also, she would make the US companies considerably weaker against the chaebols (Samsung) and Chinese competitors having the same but more agressive strategy. http://www.businessofapps.com/guide/app-stores-list/ http://www.businessofapps.com/guide/app-stores-list/
- charlesism 8y ago
  tech is not banking It's 2019. That argument would hold more weight if FAANG weren't aleady in the payments market ( eg: apple.com/applepay , pay.google.com ). If they aren't banks now, they will be soon.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    I believe “banking” in this context isn’t “retail banking” (moving money around) but “investment banking”. It’s good to have some reasonable regulation of the former, but it’s the latter that allegedly poses a threat to the economy at large. FAANG is unlikely to sell CDOs around “likes and shares” ;)
    - justizin 8y ago
      > FAANG is unlikely to sell CDOs around “likes and shares” ;) Let's revisit this in 10 years ;)
  - IdontRememberIt 8y ago
    What I mean by "tech is not banking": Investment banking was playing with the money of their retail bank division. In some crazy years, you could have an unsupervised trader leveraging at 95% with money from the retail division. In that case, it was normal that politicians had to break the retail and investment.
  - mliker 8y ago
WaltPurvis 8y ago
Elizabeth Warren apparently knows very little about Apple; she's making a random and meaningless recommendation based in ignorance. Her rationale for breaking up Apple is "you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store." But Apple mostly doesn't "play in the store." Aside from Final Cut and Logic Pro, they sell virtually no products in the app store. All the apps that Apple sells combined together amount to a tiny fraction of one percent of Apple's revenues. It's probably not even one-tenth of one percent. Apple doesn't care at all about this revenue. I'm not sure why Elizabeth Warren cares about it. They could spin their apps off into a separate company, like they did with Claris years ago, but I doubt they'd even bother; they'd either just kill the products or, more likely, give them away for free. (Unless Warren thinks Apple shouldn't be able to provide free software to users, in which case she should really stop while she's not too far behind.)
- bitcurious 8y ago
  >All the apps that Apple sells... I imagine from the point of view of Elizabeth Warren the problem is all of the apps that Apple doesn't sell - a maps app the integrates as tightly as Apple Maps. A browser that doesn't use Safari as its backend. A messaging app that can read SMS and replace Messages.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    >A messaging app that can read SMS and replace Messages... And now we've hit on the essential flaw in Warren's "break them up!" soundbite based policy. Her ideas do NOTHING to address the real problem, a lack of data privacy. If you tell apple they have to let people make apps that can access things like sms, boom, all of the users lose control of that data. The App developer takes it, and now it can go anywhere. It'd actually be worse than what we have now. Here's the really sad part about all of this: A law to make the sharing of data between companies explicitly illegal is actually EASIER to implement than the whole "break 'em up!" strategy. So you have to ask yourself, "Why won't they just make it illegal to share data?" And when you start brainstorming potential answers to that question, it can be a bit unsettling. It makes me think we need such a law even more.
mc32 8y ago
Using a metric such as revenue is too simplistic. There are some concerns about power over competitors, consumers, etc., but arbitrarily setting the measure af revenue of X per year (plus inflationary adjustment of whatever) is not the way to go about it, but maybe this is a ruse to get a constituency excited and doesn’t really mean it. I do believe some of thd giants have too much leverage but I don’t see anything magical about $25BB/year.
jrs95 8y ago
This is a bit off topic, but at this point I'm curious why Warren is even running. By splitting the progressive vote with Bernie she's reducing the odds that a progressive candidate wins the nomination. So at best it seems like a selfish attempt to get a VP or cabinet spot at the expense of the ideas she claims to support, or she's doing this intentionally to support the Democratic establishment.
Dawsrallah 8y ago
I don't like the breakup idea, but I like the idea of threatening the big tech companies, even crudely, so as to extort more R&D from firms that may eventually revert to the low-investment, high divident BigCo norm when founders die/retire. Government contracting is corrupt and government agencies are not always good at productization and other stages of research BigCos combine the state's giant revenues and scale with the private sector's personnel discipline and agility. Breakup and civil settlement threats may effectively cajol firms into buying the goodwill of the state through breakthroughs that please voters and increase US power in the international system
vinceguidry 8y ago
Breaking up giant commercial monoliths is essential creative destruction for the economy. They're not going to do it themselves. It's not a question of whether they're going to break up, it's only a question of when. I hope it happens sooner rather than later because I want to live in the Brave New World where dozens of services have to compete for the markets left behind.
- timbit42 8y ago
  It makes sense to break up Google and Amazon. Facebook, not so much but they need to be regulated. Google needs to be regulated as well. I don't see the justification for breaking up Apple.
deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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0815test 8y ago
Frankly I don't see what the point of breaking up Apple would be. Where's the monopoly potential/barrier to entry in the markets Apple is serving? They have quite viable competitors in pretty much all of them. I think a bit of well-designed regulation would go a lot further here, especially around right-to-repair (and "right to keep older hardware going after it loses support") and general platform openness for things like the App store.
- timbit42 8y ago
  Agreed. Also Facebook just needs to be regulated. Amazon and Google should be broken up however. Also, Google needs to be regulated as they punish websites that compete with their own products.
dwiel 8y ago
If we are talking about breaking tech monopolies, how about comcast? You can break up google and apple and Amazon, but I still only have one real choice for the internet connection I use to access them. I believe this is true for about 80% of americans.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think cable providers should be forced to open up their lines for other resellers that then can compete with different plans. It works pretty well for cell phones where you have multiple MVNOs offering plans on the big networks. In short the ownership of infrastructure should be separate from selling to end users.
maxxxxx 8y ago
I think in principle it’s a good thing to avoid having companies that are very big. These giants are not very innovative compared to their size so having multiple smaller competitors is probably healthy. Breaking up large companies may be a form of “creative destruction “. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this big I am convinced that very large companies are not good for a market economy.
fmli 8y ago
Wow. Fucking stupid. Not that it really matters, since there's no real singular vision behind Apple anymore, and never will be again, but... vertical integration is the fundamental strength of the company itself. Put another way, Apple has likely outlived its capacity to innovate, now that Jobs is gone, and there's no real hero to rally under, or respect on a fundamental level and a persona/personality. So the organization is coasting on repackaged derivative works (sort of like when dead rappers catalogs magically expand, posthumously, because reciting vapid poems with confidence requires little more than an ego and a wind bag to ham it up, and you can dump outtakes into primitive synthesized drum loops and call it a song), and nostalgia for the moment. To dissect this being, and force the organs to stand alone will basically kill the golden goose. What a fucking moron.
sasasassy 8y ago
Yes please. All monopolies are damaging to consumers, capitalism and democracy. Please do away with as many as possible. The only notable exceptions are business areas where the physical constraints force a single company to operate, like sanitation and sewage.
mikhailt 8y ago
While everyone else covered the main topic, there is one aspect of her proposal I disagree with; preventing the platform owners from selling/offering said apps on the said platform. (I could be misunderstanding Warren on this, please correct me if I'm wrong on this). Software/hardware integration is a good thing, not a bad thing. Safari and Edge remains the most efficient browsers on their platforms because the platform owners know the deeper levels, they're the most experienced and they're in place to optimize both the software and hardware. Now, one could say that the said platform owners must open up the APIs fully (which I have no problem with as long as it doesn't violate any security / privacy issues), so other browsers could be just as efficient but how would the platform owners know how to improve if they don't try it first? Everything else, I kinda agree with. I would love to see all platforms require a separation/firewall between the platform owners and App Store but mainly because it allows customers the ability to use other tools that is not normally available with sideloading other App Stores and also other OSes (maybe?)
tracer4201 8y ago
Her political stances are going the extreme route. These ideas on breaking tech companies has literally no well thought merit, at least from Warren. How exactly is Apple a monopoly? Because they have an App Store? They don’t really sell products in there other than maybe Final Cut Pro. So is the issue that no company should be able to set the terms of what it allows in its App Store? What’s the legal basis here? How is this detrimental to society or even just the US? This sounds more like Warren might be getting bankrolled by Apples competitors (best case) or she’s completely clueless about how business or economics works, completely ignorant of who Apple competes with (it’s an international market, recall Samsung), etc. It was the same nonsense the other day about breaking up Amazon. I asked then and I’ll ask again - by what metric are they a monopoly? Is warren going to break up WalMart and every other business that established a store brand? No of course not. This is nonsense, pandering to the fringes of the left, much like Trump panders to the racists, intolerance folks on the right. I don’t think her campaign is going to go anywhere, and if anything, she’s ruining her credibility. I want Trump gone in 2020, but I don’t want to replace one dangerous loon with another.

54 points by gkanai 8y ago

This is an interview that goes into more depth about Warren’s proposal. Only a few questions are about Apple; the rest further elucidate her reasoning behind the proposal as a whole.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

peteretep 8y ago

I’ve read her proposal and actually it sounds pretty exciting to me. I wonder where AWS fits into all of this

lykr0n 8y ago
I assume AWS would be split away from Amazon.com. So Amazon would turn into AWS, Amazon.com + Amazon Logistics, Amazon Prime Music/TV, ???
- votepaunchy 8y ago
  Only the original content would be forced to split from Prime. You could have a combined marketplace and video platform, but you can’t self host (above $25B revenue).
  - michaf 8y ago
    I wonder if Netflix would have to spin off their in-house productions once they reach $25B revenue. Or, if they don't, if the mobile platform providers could change their business models into similar subscription services to avoid the break-up.

Upvoter33 8y ago

Breaking up the tech giants is not a solution to the problems that confront us. Legislation about our rights to digital privacy and related issues are; I hope the powers that be work on that instead of this sound-byte friendly "let's break 'em up" approach. A 2-person company could compromise your privacy just as easily as a 2-trillion dollar company.

awinder 8y ago
You could even exactly pass GDPR as a first measure — there would be a head start on crafting legislation, and businesses are largely implemented against it, they just need to extend existing practice to US customers / users. Even that is going to be a hard sell in the political climate though. Twisting to take an even more abrasive and high-touch action is just not going to happen. Hopefully democrats will learn to calm themselves down and inject some degree of sanity over the next year because Americans deserve a rational alternative to the era of Donald trump. Not some Sophie’s Choice of two shock-and-awe Americas.
- ianai 8y ago
  Legislation requires a 2/3rds control of government. The republicans have a stranglehold on the US senate due to every state getting two senators. There are simply more rural, conservative states than would tolerate that change. Warrens idea points out a better idea. Presidential candidates from non-republicans can do their most work with powers the presidency already has: drug criminalization, immigration, pardon powers, etc. I’m pretty sure a president can break up companies under the trust buster acts from the late 1800s, but I'm basing that on decades old public schooling.
  - awinder 8y ago
    The platform utility stuff would all require new legislation. Maybe the argument is that you threaten antitrust cases unless tech goes along but that too would apply to gdpr or some other low touch solution.
- hindsightbias 8y ago

cascom 8y ago

Would consumers benefit from this? What businesses are lobbying for this?

rifung 8y ago
Possibly because you'd have more competition although higher prices as well. On the other hand, this would be much better for the economy which is, in my opinion, more important.

andreilys 8y ago

Looking forward to living in a world that's dominated by Chinese tech companies who can compete on a global scale without their governments trying to actively undermine them.

votepaunchy 8y ago
The global Chinese companies (revenue > $25B) would be excluded from the US market. Otherwise Silicon Valley would simply incorporate overseas.
- zaroth 8y ago
  That’s not going to stop the massive technology advances they will amass from economies of scale (particularly in AI) ultimately dominating the market if the USG goes into Silicon Valley with an axe.
  - rifung 8y ago
    I'd argue that competition would drive more technological advances. There are commonly complaints on HN that FAANG are sucking up all the talent after all. Having worked at Amazon and Google I definitely feel most people are overqualified..
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Since when does competition drive more innovation? What’s more innovative, Google, which uses its monopoly on search to bankroll things like self-driving cars, or Lenovo, which is in an intensely competitive PC market? How innovative is the Android phone market, versus Android itself? As a thought experiment, imagine Apple adopted Android, thus opening itself up to more competition. Do you think they would be more innovative as a result? Or is Apple’s level of innovation (it’s CPUs are destroying its conpetitors’ By a factor of 2-3x performance per watt these days), the result of being able to leverage massive cash flows that its monopoly on iOS devices throws off?

sys_64738 8y ago

She has a point. Apple has a competitive advantage over others as it makes the rules it enforces. If critical change comes to the App store then Apple can make changes to their apps before the change is announced to everybody else. That's a conflict of interest which creates unfair business advantage.

zaroth 8y ago
All business naturally have some sorts of advantages. Otherwise they would not be in business. Not all business advantage is considered “unfair”. Apple is not unfairly competing with apps on its store, quite the contrary, Apple is highly invested in making the apps on its store the most pleasing, productive, performant, and profitable that they possibly can.
- skewart 8y ago
  > Apple is not unfairly competing with apps on its store All the Apple apps that are pre-installed on an iPhone have a massive advantage over third-party options in the App Store. Most users just stick with the pre-installed Apple apps for email, web browsing, using the camera, looking through photos, and taking notes. There used to be third-party flashlight apps in the app store, but Apple used their platform power to crush those apps when they included flashlight functionality for free in iOS 7. Of course, one can argue that Apple has used its platform power for a worthwhile goal - creating a better user experience. People made a similar argument about Walmart back in the 90s and 00s when they were in the news for crushing small businesses - it's fine because Walmart is just trying to give customers lower prices.

wickedOne 8y ago

is this going to solve anything? sounds like cutting down a tree when it gets too big rather than preventing it growing like that... i'm quite sure companies like google, apple, facebook, etc. are creative enough to find a way to get around this restriction which will just ensure a false sense of security. i get the whole monopoly and fair competition issues, but haven't there been rules and regulations for those for quite a while? apart from that: how realistic is this scenario to get actual laws enforing it when those same companies are pretty much funding the government?

jrs95 8y ago
I don't think it matters, and I don't think it's a proposal that will actually be acted upon. It's just an attempt to get attention for an election she has virtually no chance of winning and posture as being the most progressive candidate.
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> i'm quite sure companies like google, apple, facebook, etc. are creative enough to find a way to get around this restriction That was my initial reaction as well, but after looking into it a little bit I'm not so sure. The wording of the Sherman Act is pretty broad, and the history of how it's been applied by the courts seems to be pretty complex (as might be expected with a broadly-worded law from 1890), so I'm inclined to doubt any explanation of the situation that would fit on a bumper sticker. There are, I assume, important legal reasons behind how United States v. Microsoft unfolded, with a protracted hard-fought court battle followed by a settlement that imposed some pretty major restrictions on Microsoft. If Microsoft could have easily gotten around the effects of a breakup, I'd expect almost everything about that fight to be different.
- wickedOne 8y ago
  > If Microsoft could have easily gotten around the effects of a breakup, I'd expect almost everything about that fight to be different. you are right and i pretty much forgotten about that. microsoft fought a similar battle in europe with the same legal outcome and basically resulting in a "browser pick" splash when you installed the OS and that was about it. that's a story where there was actually taken some action. but, for example, for years it's been frowned upon that companies like apple "bank" their money in, for example, ireland and get away with not paying taxes in the countries they actually have offices. that's a story where there has been no action for a (known) issue like the one described in the aticle. so how likely will it be that tech giants will create a legal entity abroad, hosting their platform, whilst they will continue to be the biggest player on that platform? i'm not saying ms. warren doesn't have a point, just that it seams that this is just another "symptom control" item which sounds politically correct, but won't get any traction in the "real world"

IdontRememberIt 8y ago

I honestly do not understand who she is trying to please: tech is not banking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_investment_and_retail_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_investment_and_r... ). There is no systemic risk or too-big-to-fail risk for the government. Also, she would make the US companies considerably weaker against the chaebols (Samsung) and Chinese competitors having the same but more agressive strategy. http://www.businessofapps.com/guide/app-stores-list/ http://www.businessofapps.com/guide/app-stores-list/

charlesism 8y ago
tech is not banking It's 2019. That argument would hold more weight if FAANG weren't aleady in the payments market ( eg: apple.com/applepay , pay.google.com ). If they aren't banks now, they will be soon.
- coredog64 8y ago
  I believe “banking” in this context isn’t “retail banking” (moving money around) but “investment banking”. It’s good to have some reasonable regulation of the former, but it’s the latter that allegedly poses a threat to the economy at large. FAANG is unlikely to sell CDOs around “likes and shares” ;)
  - justizin 8y ago
    > FAANG is unlikely to sell CDOs around “likes and shares” ;) Let's revisit this in 10 years ;)
- IdontRememberIt 8y ago
  What I mean by "tech is not banking": Investment banking was playing with the money of their retail bank division. In some crazy years, you could have an unsupervised trader leveraging at 95% with money from the retail division. In that case, it was normal that politicians had to break the retail and investment.
- mliker 8y ago

WaltPurvis 8y ago

Elizabeth Warren apparently knows very little about Apple; she's making a random and meaningless recommendation based in ignorance. Her rationale for breaking up Apple is "you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store." But Apple mostly doesn't "play in the store." Aside from Final Cut and Logic Pro, they sell virtually no products in the app store. All the apps that Apple sells combined together amount to a tiny fraction of one percent of Apple's revenues. It's probably not even one-tenth of one percent. Apple doesn't care at all about this revenue. I'm not sure why Elizabeth Warren cares about it. They could spin their apps off into a separate company, like they did with Claris years ago, but I doubt they'd even bother; they'd either just kill the products or, more likely, give them away for free. (Unless Warren thinks Apple shouldn't be able to provide free software to users, in which case she should really stop while she's not too far behind.)

bitcurious 8y ago
>All the apps that Apple sells... I imagine from the point of view of Elizabeth Warren the problem is all of the apps that Apple doesn't sell - a maps app the integrates as tightly as Apple Maps. A browser that doesn't use Safari as its backend. A messaging app that can read SMS and replace Messages.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >A messaging app that can read SMS and replace Messages... And now we've hit on the essential flaw in Warren's "break them up!" soundbite based policy. Her ideas do NOTHING to address the real problem, a lack of data privacy. If you tell apple they have to let people make apps that can access things like sms, boom, all of the users lose control of that data. The App developer takes it, and now it can go anywhere. It'd actually be worse than what we have now. Here's the really sad part about all of this: A law to make the sharing of data between companies explicitly illegal is actually EASIER to implement than the whole "break 'em up!" strategy. So you have to ask yourself, "Why won't they just make it illegal to share data?" And when you start brainstorming potential answers to that question, it can be a bit unsettling. It makes me think we need such a law even more.

mc32 8y ago

Using a metric such as revenue is too simplistic. There are some concerns about power over competitors, consumers, etc., but arbitrarily setting the measure af revenue of X per year (plus inflationary adjustment of whatever) is not the way to go about it, but maybe this is a ruse to get a constituency excited and doesn’t really mean it. I do believe some of thd giants have too much leverage but I don’t see anything magical about $25BB/year.

jrs95 8y ago

This is a bit off topic, but at this point I'm curious why Warren is even running. By splitting the progressive vote with Bernie she's reducing the odds that a progressive candidate wins the nomination. So at best it seems like a selfish attempt to get a VP or cabinet spot at the expense of the ideas she claims to support, or she's doing this intentionally to support the Democratic establishment.

Dawsrallah 8y ago

I don't like the breakup idea, but I like the idea of threatening the big tech companies, even crudely, so as to extort more R&D from firms that may eventually revert to the low-investment, high divident BigCo norm when founders die/retire. Government contracting is corrupt and government agencies are not always good at productization and other stages of research BigCos combine the state's giant revenues and scale with the private sector's personnel discipline and agility. Breakup and civil settlement threats may effectively cajol firms into buying the goodwill of the state through breakthroughs that please voters and increase US power in the international system

vinceguidry 8y ago

Breaking up giant commercial monoliths is essential creative destruction for the economy. They're not going to do it themselves. It's not a question of whether they're going to break up, it's only a question of when. I hope it happens sooner rather than later because I want to live in the Brave New World where dozens of services have to compete for the markets left behind.

timbit42 8y ago
It makes sense to break up Google and Amazon. Facebook, not so much but they need to be regulated. Google needs to be regulated as well. I don't see the justification for breaking up Apple.

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0815test 8y ago

Frankly I don't see what the point of breaking up Apple would be. Where's the monopoly potential/barrier to entry in the markets Apple is serving? They have quite viable competitors in pretty much all of them. I think a bit of well-designed regulation would go a lot further here, especially around right-to-repair (and "right to keep older hardware going after it loses support") and general platform openness for things like the App store.

timbit42 8y ago
Agreed. Also Facebook just needs to be regulated. Amazon and Google should be broken up however. Also, Google needs to be regulated as they punish websites that compete with their own products.

dwiel 8y ago

If we are talking about breaking tech monopolies, how about comcast? You can break up google and apple and Amazon, but I still only have one real choice for the internet connection I use to access them. I believe this is true for about 80% of americans.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I think cable providers should be forced to open up their lines for other resellers that then can compete with different plans. It works pretty well for cell phones where you have multiple MVNOs offering plans on the big networks. In short the ownership of infrastructure should be separate from selling to end users.

maxxxxx 8y ago

I think in principle it’s a good thing to avoid having companies that are very big. These giants are not very innovative compared to their size so having multiple smaller competitors is probably healthy. Breaking up large companies may be a form of “creative destruction “. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this big I am convinced that very large companies are not good for a market economy.

fmli 8y ago

Wow. Fucking stupid. Not that it really matters, since there's no real singular vision behind Apple anymore, and never will be again, but... vertical integration is the fundamental strength of the company itself. Put another way, Apple has likely outlived its capacity to innovate, now that Jobs is gone, and there's no real hero to rally under, or respect on a fundamental level and a persona/personality. So the organization is coasting on repackaged derivative works (sort of like when dead rappers catalogs magically expand, posthumously, because reciting vapid poems with confidence requires little more than an ego and a wind bag to ham it up, and you can dump outtakes into primitive synthesized drum loops and call it a song), and nostalgia for the moment. To dissect this being, and force the organs to stand alone will basically kill the golden goose. What a fucking moron.

sasasassy 8y ago

Yes please. All monopolies are damaging to consumers, capitalism and democracy. Please do away with as many as possible. The only notable exceptions are business areas where the physical constraints force a single company to operate, like sanitation and sewage.

mikhailt 8y ago

While everyone else covered the main topic, there is one aspect of her proposal I disagree with; preventing the platform owners from selling/offering said apps on the said platform. (I could be misunderstanding Warren on this, please correct me if I'm wrong on this). Software/hardware integration is a good thing, not a bad thing. Safari and Edge remains the most efficient browsers on their platforms because the platform owners know the deeper levels, they're the most experienced and they're in place to optimize both the software and hardware. Now, one could say that the said platform owners must open up the APIs fully (which I have no problem with as long as it doesn't violate any security / privacy issues), so other browsers could be just as efficient but how would the platform owners know how to improve if they don't try it first? Everything else, I kinda agree with. I would love to see all platforms require a separation/firewall between the platform owners and App Store but mainly because it allows customers the ability to use other tools that is not normally available with sideloading other App Stores and also other OSes (maybe?)

tracer4201 8y ago

Her political stances are going the extreme route. These ideas on breaking tech companies has literally no well thought merit, at least from Warren. How exactly is Apple a monopoly? Because they have an App Store? They don’t really sell products in there other than maybe Final Cut Pro. So is the issue that no company should be able to set the terms of what it allows in its App Store? What’s the legal basis here? How is this detrimental to society or even just the US? This sounds more like Warren might be getting bankrolled by Apples competitors (best case) or she’s completely clueless about how business or economics works, completely ignorant of who Apple competes with (it’s an international market, recall Samsung), etc. It was the same nonsense the other day about breaking up Amazon. I asked then and I’ll ask again - by what metric are they a monopoly? Is warren going to break up WalMart and every other business that established a store brand? No of course not. This is nonsense, pandering to the fringes of the left, much like Trump panders to the racists, intolerance folks on the right. I don’t think her campaign is going to go anywhere, and if anything, she’s ruining her credibility. I want Trump gone in 2020, but I don’t want to replace one dangerous loon with another.