5 ms·

Nobody has ruled on whether the practices are actually monopolistic or not - this ruling just allows a suit against Apple to proceed, which will then make that

Nobody has ruled on whether the practices are actually monopolistic or not - this ruling just allows a suit against Apple to proceed, which will then make that determination about their business practices. The debate in this case was all about whether the end user was Apple's customer (thus able to sue Apple directly) or the developer's customer.

criddell 7y ago
There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly, is there? Don't you have to abuse that power before regulators step in?
- analognoise 7y ago
  Notably Walmart has been examined for as a monopoly but because in every case that was examined they decreased prices to consumers, no action was taken. I hate that they use federal money to subsidize their workforce' paychecks (non-living wages, supplemented by food stamps), but...they're great for the consumer.
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    the consumer price standard is a pretty poor metric for monopoly. You can thank Bork of Watergate fame for that one.
  - gwright 7y ago
    How could it be any other way? To the extent that government benefits increase I would expect hourly wages to go down for those beneficiaries. This would be the nature result of a competitive market place.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      I doubt you comprehend how absurd this situation is. Benefits are inversely proportional to income meaning that a below survivable wage requires people on the verge of not being able to eat to actually step down in pay in order to take the natural progression of an increase in wages. In order to avoid this you just don't let people pay less than a minimum survivable hourly wage so they can't force the government to subsidize them.
      - gwright 7y ago
        I understand what you are saying regarding the relationship between income and benefits. I think it is actually somewhat worse than you suggest due to the various step functions in the benefit calculations -- an increase in wage income can actually result in a larger decrease in benefits. In the absence of a minimum wage constraint, and all other things being equal, a change in government assistance is going to result in an opposite change in the market wage rate. This is just a statement of market mechanisms. When the labor pool has access to higher benefits, it is easier for an employer to find someone willing to work for a little less than before (and vice versa). The two situations are somewhat different though. In the first case you are talking about an individual moving themselves into a different market (unskilled/untrained labor to improved skills/experience, for example). Ensuring that this progression isn't penalized via overly aggressive reduction in benefits is a good thing irrespective of any minimum wage constraints. In the second case you are talking about a global change to the market constraints for all participants. So I was just responding to the parent to say that when the government changes its "formula" for benefits, it is entirely reasonable and expected for the market to find a new equilibrium. This isn't an example of Walmart or any other employer "using federal money to subsidize their workforce". This is just the market doing what it does. As for your minimum wage concerns, a minimum wage prices some people out of the labor market entirely. Someone with minimal skills or experience won't be able to bring enough value to an employer to cover the minimum wage. I think it would be much better to get rid of minimum wage rules and adjust benefits accordingly. It makes more sense for someone with minimal skills to have a job (and thus a path towards more skills) and some additional public assistance than to have no job at all and be 100% dependent on public assistance.
        michaelmrose 7y ago
        You yourself said that offering generous benefits inspires low end workers to tend to work for less because they can live on it and ultimately drives down wages. In a fictional world without minimum wage or assistance a low wage employee can't afford to work for less than would be required to live for very long so one would expect the wage to float to somewhere in that neighborhood. Lets completely arbitrarily set that value at $10 an hour without worrying what the actual value would be. Imagine that the company expects to create $15 of value on average for each $10 paid out. Note that in this universe even without a minimum wage the wage still can't float arbitrarily low because people can't live and certain people who truly don't create the needed value are STILL pushed out of the labor market by more employable people. Without any benefits they just die. Now lets add welfare! People with enough to eat, free medical, cheap rent can indeed afford to work for less even if the company is still generating the same $15 net on each labor hour. Say the person effectively gets $7 an hour in benefits and companies average out to pay $5. This means that in the original arrangement customers paid out $15 and the employee collected $10 the employer $5. In the new situation the customer paid out $15, society kicked in $7, and the employee collected $12, the employer collected $10. One could have achieved the same societal benefit by giving the employees $2. Nations that provide sizable benefits to poor are obliged to set a minimum wage to avoid the situation where the social safety net represents a net transfer of wealth to low end employers by allowing employees to offer below living wages.
  - ashelmire 7y ago
    > they're great for the consumer They are only great at the point of purchase. They make it harder to run a competing business, they create a tax burden by paying low wages, they distort local markets and cause local economies to suffer, they benefit foreign suppliers of products produced at wages and in conditions below American legal minimums (at the expense of American companies that compete with them, which affects American workers at those companies).
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  There’s nothing illegal about having a monopoly, but by the same token, you don’t have to have a monopoly to run afoul of antitrust regulation. This is an oversimplification, but the Sherman Act was about monopolies, while its later companion the Clayton Act was about anticompetitive practices.
delinka 7y ago
I think this debate is interesting, but I don't expect Apple to be happy about the final outcome. A developer publishing solely on Apple's App Store (and relying solely on Apple features to provide functionality) has no direct access to the customer* - Apple prevents that fairly well. In this case, I feel like, as a consumer, I'm Apple's customer. I think courts, and especially juries, would agree. That said, I don't see how the App Store is a monopoly. How would "monopoly" be defined to even formulate a case against Apple? * - notwithstanding that many apps want you to create an account on their systems - Apple does indeed allow this.
- Majromax 7y ago
  > That said, I don't see how the App Store is a monopoly. How would "monopoly" be defined to even formulate a case against Apple? I think the argument would be fairly straightforward: the App Store is the exclusive avenue to distribute paid applications to iPhone users. In so doing, it acts as a single seller of applications to consumers and a single buyer of applications from developers, and its arbitrarily-set fees are incorporated into prices. The fine parsing comes in whether "iPhone users" are a sufficiently distinct market to effectively make the App Store a monopoly, and I think reasonable people could have different opinions here.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    There was a story recently about how "83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357 So, they're certainly a monopoly in that market today and possibly in the general market in the near future. I have also read that you don't even need to have a higher than 50% market share to be considered a monopoly. You simply need to affect the entire market, which Apple certainly does with their 45% general market share in the US.
    - threeseed 7y ago
      It's ridiculous to think that Apple will be a monopoly in the future. The overwhelming trend is towards Apple losing share as Chinese phone manufacturers start to increasingly capture the middle market.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

criddell 7y ago

There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly, is there? Don't you have to abuse that power before regulators step in?

analognoise 7y ago
Notably Walmart has been examined for as a monopoly but because in every case that was examined they decreased prices to consumers, no action was taken. I hate that they use federal money to subsidize their workforce' paychecks (non-living wages, supplemented by food stamps), but...they're great for the consumer.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  the consumer price standard is a pretty poor metric for monopoly. You can thank Bork of Watergate fame for that one.
- gwright 7y ago
  How could it be any other way? To the extent that government benefits increase I would expect hourly wages to go down for those beneficiaries. This would be the nature result of a competitive market place.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    I doubt you comprehend how absurd this situation is. Benefits are inversely proportional to income meaning that a below survivable wage requires people on the verge of not being able to eat to actually step down in pay in order to take the natural progression of an increase in wages. In order to avoid this you just don't let people pay less than a minimum survivable hourly wage so they can't force the government to subsidize them.
    - gwright 7y ago
      I understand what you are saying regarding the relationship between income and benefits. I think it is actually somewhat worse than you suggest due to the various step functions in the benefit calculations -- an increase in wage income can actually result in a larger decrease in benefits. In the absence of a minimum wage constraint, and all other things being equal, a change in government assistance is going to result in an opposite change in the market wage rate. This is just a statement of market mechanisms. When the labor pool has access to higher benefits, it is easier for an employer to find someone willing to work for a little less than before (and vice versa). The two situations are somewhat different though. In the first case you are talking about an individual moving themselves into a different market (unskilled/untrained labor to improved skills/experience, for example). Ensuring that this progression isn't penalized via overly aggressive reduction in benefits is a good thing irrespective of any minimum wage constraints. In the second case you are talking about a global change to the market constraints for all participants. So I was just responding to the parent to say that when the government changes its "formula" for benefits, it is entirely reasonable and expected for the market to find a new equilibrium. This isn't an example of Walmart or any other employer "using federal money to subsidize their workforce". This is just the market doing what it does. As for your minimum wage concerns, a minimum wage prices some people out of the labor market entirely. Someone with minimal skills or experience won't be able to bring enough value to an employer to cover the minimum wage. I think it would be much better to get rid of minimum wage rules and adjust benefits accordingly. It makes more sense for someone with minimal skills to have a job (and thus a path towards more skills) and some additional public assistance than to have no job at all and be 100% dependent on public assistance.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        You yourself said that offering generous benefits inspires low end workers to tend to work for less because they can live on it and ultimately drives down wages. In a fictional world without minimum wage or assistance a low wage employee can't afford to work for less than would be required to live for very long so one would expect the wage to float to somewhere in that neighborhood. Lets completely arbitrarily set that value at $10 an hour without worrying what the actual value would be. Imagine that the company expects to create $15 of value on average for each $10 paid out. Note that in this universe even without a minimum wage the wage still can't float arbitrarily low because people can't live and certain people who truly don't create the needed value are STILL pushed out of the labor market by more employable people. Without any benefits they just die. Now lets add welfare! People with enough to eat, free medical, cheap rent can indeed afford to work for less even if the company is still generating the same $15 net on each labor hour. Say the person effectively gets $7 an hour in benefits and companies average out to pay $5. This means that in the original arrangement customers paid out $15 and the employee collected $10 the employer $5. In the new situation the customer paid out $15, society kicked in $7, and the employee collected $12, the employer collected $10. One could have achieved the same societal benefit by giving the employees $2. Nations that provide sizable benefits to poor are obliged to set a minimum wage to avoid the situation where the social safety net represents a net transfer of wealth to low end employers by allowing employees to offer below living wages.
- ashelmire 7y ago
  > they're great for the consumer They are only great at the point of purchase. They make it harder to run a competing business, they create a tax burden by paying low wages, they distort local markets and cause local economies to suffer, they benefit foreign suppliers of products produced at wages and in conditions below American legal minimums (at the expense of American companies that compete with them, which affects American workers at those companies).
mortenjorck 7y ago
There’s nothing illegal about having a monopoly, but by the same token, you don’t have to have a monopoly to run afoul of antitrust regulation. This is an oversimplification, but the Sherman Act was about monopolies, while its later companion the Clayton Act was about anticompetitive practices.

delinka 7y ago

I think this debate is interesting, but I don't expect Apple to be happy about the final outcome. A developer publishing solely on Apple's App Store (and relying solely on Apple features to provide functionality) has no direct access to the customer* - Apple prevents that fairly well. In this case, I feel like, as a consumer, I'm Apple's customer. I think courts, and especially juries, would agree. That said, I don't see how the App Store is a monopoly. How would "monopoly" be defined to even formulate a case against Apple? * - notwithstanding that many apps want you to create an account on their systems - Apple does indeed allow this.

Majromax 7y ago
> That said, I don't see how the App Store is a monopoly. How would "monopoly" be defined to even formulate a case against Apple? I think the argument would be fairly straightforward: the App Store is the exclusive avenue to distribute paid applications to iPhone users. In so doing, it acts as a single seller of applications to consumers and a single buyer of applications from developers, and its arbitrarily-set fees are incorporated into prices. The fine parsing comes in whether "iPhone users" are a sufficiently distinct market to effectively make the App Store a monopoly, and I think reasonable people could have different opinions here.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  There was a story recently about how "83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357 So, they're certainly a monopoly in that market today and possibly in the general market in the near future. I have also read that you don't even need to have a higher than 50% market share to be considered a monopoly. You simply need to affect the entire market, which Apple certainly does with their 45% general market share in the US.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    It's ridiculous to think that Apple will be a monopoly in the future. The overwhelming trend is towards Apple losing share as Chinese phone manufacturers start to increasingly capture the middle market.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]