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They bundled _while_ having a monopoly. They could have bundled or they could have had a monopoly, but doing both is where it crosses the anti-trust line since

• bduerst 8y ago
  Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. Having a popular or high-quality product is not the same as having no competition. You can run an ecommerce business online entirely through instagram if you wanted to. Amazon theoretically is abusing it's market power by being selective about which products it sells in it's stores. When they removed competing AppleTV/Chromecast products from their own and seller lines, to promote their firestick, that was monopolistic behavior. There's also arguments that Amazon is promoting their own line of products on their platform as well, by replicating products that end up being successful, but this is a new area for antitrust that needs to be sussed out.
  • number_six 8y ago
    Isn't that what Apple is doing in this case with Apple Music vs. Spotify?
  • sinnoh 8y ago
    really the entire concept of a 'store' has been bastardized by these companies (another thing we can thank apple for) and is a misdirect. the locked down software platforms wherein users can't install anything on their own devices without the owning company's say-so is the artificial monopoly. they're trying to get away with adding things like device management now to weasel out of it but in reality these are artificially high barriers to entry for any competing software distribution services or 'stores'. when Amazon can barely even get a foothold in a competing ecosystem with its own 'app store' you know it's anticompetitive and it's working.
    • threeseed 8y ago
      Amazon can build their own phones and run their own store. In fact they did. It’s just that their products were terrible and consumers didn’t want them. And the barrier to building your own ecosystem really isn’t that high anymore. We have hundreds of Chinese companies doing this today.
    • bduerst 8y ago
      Agreed, and this is where some set of standardization is needed for antitrust law. Store doesn't mean much. There needs to be a difference between hosting an online store that sells your own products and services, and hosting an online platform that sells your own things but also allows other businesses to sell on it as well. The latter needs more guidelines on how the host ensures competition, especially when it starts to get market dominance and abuses control of the platform to promote it's own products.
  • oarsinsync 8y ago
    Google search has a 92% market share[0] Microsoft desktop market share in 2009 was still over 90%[1] Google search has no significant competition, much like Microsoft Windows had no significant competition. [0] http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/2009 http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/...
    • bduerst 8y ago
      Again, having a popular product is not a monopoly. Monopoly is tied to access to competition. Monopolies have market dominance, but not all market dominant companies are monopolies. Windows was more of a monopoly in the 1990's because you went into a computer store and could typically only buy windows machines. This limits consumer options. You can type https://www.bing.com https://www.bing.com into your browser right now, or any other number of accessible competitors, meaning that while popular, Google is not a monopoly. Consumers have a myriad of options and choose one because of it's quality, which is how competition on open markets work.
      • Jommi 8y ago
        However, this argument falls apart when you look deeper into the fray of competition and examine barrier to entry. Because so far search seems to be a self-perpetuating machine, it can be unfair to compare google and other searches as the amount of data Google already has could pose as an unfair advantage. What if some other company had the same amount of data? Could they be doing a lot better job? Would the favor for google products dissapear?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• sinnoh 8y ago
  "their" platform. nominally you can install whatever you want using profiles, but effectively having to do so is an artificially high barrier to entry for competing app stores (not to mention you have to pay apple $100/year for the 'privilege' of installing whatever you want on your own device for a year. no way to do so permanently.) the degree to which apple has singlemindedly anticompetitively abused their vertical integration frankly astonishes me. the breaking point for me was opening the music app on the at the time 'latest' ios to be presented with a full page ad for apple music. utter garbage and I hope they get what's coming to them before they have a chance to worm out of it.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    The law will not see a company as having a monopoly just because they have a monopoly on their product. (Especially when that product has a minority market position.) Now there is a completely separate question of unfair competition, but this has to be answered on an App by App basis. Does Apple have an app that provides the service in question? Does Apple disallow competing apps which provide that same service? Is there a compelling reason for the prohibition (Security, physical safety, etc.)? There's an awful lot that goes into those questions. That said, it seems to me that if Apple is prohibiting spotify from being on its devices, this could be unfair competition. I don't really see any issue of safety with spotify. (I don't use it though, so if there is some safety or security issue with it, I'll freely admit I'm wrong.) Then, of course, the issue of the tax. That's a non-starter. Apple, actually any company, is allowed to charge for services rendered. They can't be compelled to provide app store and ecommerce services at no cost.
    • PunksATawnyFill 8y ago
      I don't even see why Apple needs a reason. As has been noted, they don't have a monopoly, and it IS their app store. I don't see why they can't just openly reject competing apps. If I'm running a doughnut shop where I sell my own doughnuts, I can let another vendor come in and sell coffee but turn away a competing doughnut maker. Now... that doesn't mean that Apple aren't jagoffs in this matter. I'm sure they have bullet-proof fine-print, but the best attack one can make on them is that they're stealing from vendors by letting them waste development resources and then changing the rules when the development's done.
• nikofeyn 8y ago
  > What does Apple have a monopoly on? i feel this is dangerous thinking. maybe apple doesn't have a monopoly on a particular market in terms of market share, but their influence on businesses, markets, policies, etc. is massive and is basically indistinguishable from a market monopoly. with their amount of money and position in the market, they have near limitless influence on other companies and ways of abusing this influence to act in their favor. they've done it many, many times, and continue to do it.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    >but their influence on businesses, markets, policies, etc. is massive and is basically indistinguishable from a market monopoly... That won't hold up well in a court of law. That's the problem, we need to change the law. Because the law as it is currently written, just doesn't see something like Apple as anything close to a monopoly.
    • ethbro 8y ago
      Imho, the modern monopoly phrasing should be "a substantial market share" (where substantial is defined both in absolute terms AND as a userbase large enough to be self-sufficient and fund best-of-breed category development). Iff that is true, you should be prohibited from preinstalling, offering, or endorsing any marketplace... without a customer being able to substitute another at their discretion. Thereby requiring that you make any and all technical considerations necessary for an alternate marketplace to interface with the end user in exactly the same way your marketplace does. (Aka a public, dogfooded API, and no secret internal API shenanigans).
      • bilbo0s 8y ago
        That wouldn't fly. A small company could release a best of breed product, and everyone could say it meets the definition of a monopoly. Unless you mean that the company would have to have a certain minimum marketshare AND ALSO would have to have best of breed product. (But even that would be problematic. We could likely get courts to go for something like 60%+, or even 50%+ with effort. But the courts are just gonna have a big problem with anything less than 50%.)
• ac29 8y ago
  Apple clearly has a monopoly on the sales and distribution of iPhone apps, and as evidenced by Spotify, they are wielding that monopoly anti-competitively. "Just use a different smartphone" isn't a real defense in my opinion, any more than "just use a unix workstation" would be to Microsoft's desktop computer monopoly in the 1990s.
  • toasterlovin 8y ago
    Comparing Apple to 90s Microsoft is a bad analogy. Apple has like sub-20% market share of smart phones. Google/Android is the 90s Microsoft in the smartphone market, not Apple.
    • underwater 8y ago
      Comparing Microsoft to Apple in the 2010's is a bad analogy. Microsoft tried to bundle a web browser by default. Apple outright bans competitor apps and takes a cut of almost every transaction that happens on the device.
      • toasterlovin 8y ago
        Consumers have a viable and realistic alternative in Android and 80% of consumers choose to use that alternative. Consumers did not have a viable and realistic alternative to Windows in the 2000s.
        • underwater 8y ago
          My point is that Apple and Microsoft are different situations. You can't look at just the market share and ignore the other dimensions where they are arguable behaving worse than Microsoft ever did.
          • toasterlovin 8y ago
            The illegality of what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer was contingent on them holding a monopoly on personal computing. They were using their monopoly as leverage to obtain other advantages. Apple does not have a monopoly on smartphones. Looking at marketshare is essential.
• PunksATawnyFill 8y ago
  Microsoft never had a monopoly. Apple existed at the time, as did Unix variants. The attack on Microsoft was grandstanding BS, while the government has allowed the REAL customer-harming monopoly of Ticketmaster to not only continue but grow with its acquisitions of LiveNation and StubHub.
• mortenjorck 8y ago
  This has very little to do with monopolies and much more to do with enforcement. The most persistent misconception about antitrust regulation in the US, and one repeated over and over on HN and in this thread, is that it only applies to businesses in a monopoly position. While the original Sherman Act of 1890 explicitly targeted monopolies, the 1914 Clayton Act expanded its scope to encompass a range of anticompetitive practices, including predatory pricing. [1] A market actor need not be a monopoly to engage in these behaviors, only a dominant position that they are abusing. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/clayton-antitrust-act.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/clayton-antitrust-act.a...
• kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  MS also had a monopoly position on notepad.exe by bundling it without any choice. No enforcement there.
• herf 8y ago
  >What does Apple have a monopoly on? This argument is so prevalent, but it needs to be unpacked: would most iPhone customers buy a totally different phone only to run an app that Apple doesn't allow? Whether or not someone can switch phones isn't really the issue, but whether or not the phone has replaced general-purpose computing and access to the entire software industry is the issue.
  • threeseed 8y ago
    If Apple blocked Instagram I guarentee you hordes of users would switch to Android. Buy Spotify is just another music app.