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The iPhone is not a store. The App Store is a store. Epic wants to be on the iPhone, but not necessarily in the App Store. Ideally, Epic wants to run its own st
by _qulr 6y ago
The iPhone is not a store. The App Store is a store. Epic wants to be on the iPhone, but not necessarily in the App Store. Ideally, Epic wants to run its own store on the iPhone.
In any case, App Store is the only store in town, where the "town" is the 1.5 billion iOS users. If there's only 1 store, with no competing stores, that's an entirely different situation legally.
- Spivak 6y agoApple will do just fine arguing that their devices are no different from Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Roku, Cable Boxes, Keurig, Vzw feature phones. I would be extremely surprised if the courts just up and anti-Tivo’d every device on the planet. You try to make a case about how phones are somehow special but they’re really not. You have millions of people who only have an Xbox and so you can’t reach them unless you contract with MS.
- _qulr 6y agoThe case is not about closed platforms in general, it's about monopolistic behavior. In the US (the legal jurisdiction), Apple is the largest smartphone vendor by far, with ~50% market share. Epic is trying to show that Apple is abusing its market dominance. That's the case.
- bmarquez 6y agoApple has 52.4% mobile marketshare in the US[1] The Justice department has said that more that 50% is generally required to be considered a monopoly power, but 70% is a stronger case[2] (not a lawyer, if someone can parse this better please do) [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held... [2]https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-2 https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Spivak 6y agoThe PS4 has 58% of the gaming console market currently. I’m trying to figure out where the monopoly argument comes from. Apple hasn’t demonstrated that they have monopoly pricing power since even the Windows store takes 30% and they’re obviously using their dominance in the smartphone space to advantage themselves in… the smartphone space.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoWindows and the Apple App Store don’t complete with each other. Also, if PlayStation has control of that much of the market, perhaps there ought to be some regulations there as well. Does Sony similarly force all in game sales to use their payment processor and forbid you from mentioning it or encouraging folks to pay you directly?
- spideymans 6y agoThere shouldn’t be any regulation of PlayStation, because consumers are actively choosing to buy into the PlayStation ecosystem. By the same vein, consumers are actively choosing to buy into the iOS ecosystem. No consumer has been forced into being part of the iOS or PlayStation ecosystem.
- JiNCMG 6y agoCorrect I don't by a Playstation and then cry that Stadia is not available for it.
- Reelin 6y agoYou seem to be ignoring the monopoly aspect. The argument is that when a vendor controls a large enough portion of the market, consumers might not be left with sufficient choice for market forces to prevent abusive behaviors. This idea has significant legal precedent and legislation behind it throughout the entire western world. The question isn't whether you actively chose to buy into the PlayStation ecosystem. It's whether you had a meaningful choice available to you and whether the vendor is abusing it's market power.
- 6y ago
- McAtNite 6y agoTo me this is exactly where their argument falls apart. I don’t get what Epic wants exactly. Even with Android where they initially had users side load their apps they eventually gave up and put it on the Play Store after complaining that there’s too many warnings when users load third party APKs (how dare they include security warnings of un-reviewed apps!) It seems to me that Epic expects Apple and Google to offer up an Epic App Store/Epic made games in their own App Stores free of charge, and conveniently ignore any developer terms they previously agreed to. Talk about entitlement.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoThey want platform providers (Apple with iOS and Google with Android) to get out of the way. They are both providing platforms, as well as market places, as well as competing apps/services.
- McAtNite 6y agoHow do they expect those competing platforms to be delivered? If via side loading through a website then we’ve already seen them complain about Google having warnings for that. If through the app stores themselves then they’re essentially asking for discoverability, hosting, and distribution of their products for free. At what point does a company deserve the right to compete with you on your own product? If Amazon continues to engulf online shopping can another company eventually sue to have their own store listings put on Amazon with no money going to Amazon? To me these two situations aren’t that different. Apple and Google have each built hardware and software systems for their services. Other companies like Samsung have developed their own app stores that they distribute on their phones. If Epic wants to be a service provider then there are already charted pathways to doing so that don’t involve suing over service fees you already agreed to.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago> At what point does a company deserve the right to compete with you on your own product? I get where you're coming from, I do -- but the answer to your question is somewhere around "when that company controls access to billions of eyeballs around the planet". These companies have greater access to and control of people than any government. They are beyond review, beyond accountability, and beyond reach. They are dictatorships controlling access to billions of people, the kind of power that would make any dictator in history blush. And I am not saying we should take from them all their power. They DID earn it, it's true and most of it is quite benign. But... giving them absolute power over who everyone in the world can do business with, just because they chose to buy that device (probably not knowing what the limitations would be)? For the sake of the future of the entire species I should think that this is not a situation we would consider ideal.
- inopinatus 6y agoIf you recall, Microsoft got a punch in the nose for their abuse of market power, stuck with billion-dollar fines for it, then more similarly scaled fines when they tried to circumvent the ruling in 2013. They learned an important corporate lesson, which is why Xbox games can link to external subscription payment options. Apple have not yet learned this lesson.
- nodamage 6y agoMicrosoft held significantly more market power at the time of their antitrust case (95%) than Apple currently does.
- inopinatus 6y agoThat did not set 95% as some kind of magic threshold. The test is written as "a dominant position within the common market or in a substantial part of it". The jurisprudence on this actually starts at 40%. Of the $100bn global app store sector pie, Apple have ~2/3 of it.
- nodamage 6y agoI am aware of that, however it is much easier to win an antitrust case against a company that has 95% market share. > The jurisprudence on this actually starts at 40%. Can you provide more background on this?
- inopinatus 6y agoYou can do worse than start with the, er, "brief synopsis" of the history of Article 102 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_the_Functioning_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_t.... As one might imagine the full history is a bottomless pit of claim, counterclaim, strong-arm tactics, PR, subversion, argument, opinion etc where the truth goes to die.
- 6y ago
- treeman79 6y agoMonopoly. At some point this will head to regulators
- jonny_eh 6y agoSimilarly, if I can buy an iPhone from a store (like Target), and it contains a store… why can't I get Fortnite from the App Store then buy V-Bucks from Fortnite?
- JiNCMG 6y agoYou can also before leave Target you can pickup a vbucks card that cost Epic 30% as well.
- jonny_eh 6y agoBut on the iPhone, I don't buy V-bucks in the App Store, I buy it in Fortnite, and if Epic can go through the trouble of processing the payment, they deserve all the proceeds.
- romanoderoma 6y agoConversely, if you sell iPhones you only get 10% at most by Apple (Retailers' margins have been reduced to 4.5 per cent from 6.5 per cent, and it further reduces to 1.5-2 per cent if the customer opts to pay by card for the iPhone X). Why?
- Aeolun 6y agoYeah, I bought a $1000 device, but somehow Apple gets to decide what I run on it? I just cannot see how that is a desireable situation.
- mcphage 6y agoIt's true for every video game console, which have run to up to $600. I'm not sure if $400 makes that much of a difference.
- Causality1 6y agoA game console is not a general-purpose computer.
- yladiz 6y agoWhat is the definition of "general purpose computer"?
- Causality1 6y agoOne that is advertised as not constrained to a single genre of use. Game consoles are for entertainment. Consumption. That's why I can say "game console" and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Smartphones are for anything and everything. "There's an app for that."
- JiNCMG 6y agoNot a legal classification.
- Causality1 6y agoI'm making a moral argument, not a legal one. Legally Apple can do whatever they want and I give Epic's lawsuit a very low chance of doing anything at all.
- 6y ago
- Fezzik 6y agoThink of the iPhone as a mall then - it still gets to pick its tenants by whatever criteria it sees fit (that are not illegal, and fees are not illegal). Epic is not winning this one. Edit: added the bit about fees.
- _qulr 6y ago> Think of the iPhone as a mall then Why?
- ViViDboarder 6y agoSure, but does that one mall capture 50% of all physical good sales nationwide? This is an issue of monopoly power, which depends on scale. If you use an analogy that doesn’t demonstrate the same market power, of course it’s going to seem absurd.
- Fezzik 6y ago
- lstroud 6y agoCan’t Epic build their own phone? Are their barriers to entry that Apple has put in place to prevent them from building and selling a phone?
- sabujp 6y agosurely you jest. Has samsung been able to get a flagship phone sold without android?
- uberduper 6y agoSamsung made phones before Android existed.
- Twisell 6y agoWell the point being that the smartphone market is suffering from poor alternative. If so many people here seems to believe that neither iOS, nor Android, provide both flexibility and privacy they seek market opportunity might be ripe for new competitors.
- woko 6y agoThe issue is that new competitors have to go against... Apple and Google. Given what happened to Epic (retaliation on Unreal Engine after #FreeFortnite), you can be sure that any competitor which would get a little bit of traction would be hammered into the ground by some Apple/Google money-powered shenanigans.
- pjmlp 6y agoPlenty, Symbian, Bada OS before Android was born, and Tizen is a thing in Asian.
- sbuk 6y agoWhy do they have a right to be on the platform?
- boublepop 6y agoI would also like to run my own store in the corner of Walmart’s buildings. Obviously I can’t force that through a lawsuit or by claiming that wallmart is abusing their monopoly on space in their buildings by only allowing their own store to operate in their buildings.