4 ms·

Your analogy is false on it’s face. It’s not anticompetitive at all to get 50% of a market through excellence. No way a successful mall is ever bothered with an

Your analogy is false on it’s face. It’s not anticompetitive at all to get 50% of a market through excellence. No way a successful mall is ever bothered with an antitrust claim merely for being successful. And Google doesn’t control 100% of Android, there are alternate app stores available. So your analogy fails at multiple levels. The Apple Mall succeeded because it’s a better customer experience, why should that be illegal, and why shouldn’t Apple benefit from their foresight and efforts? The App Store is so big because Apple made it the best App Store. Every attribute of their walled garden contributes to its value, not just for Apple, but for developers and customers. Apple has about 15% of phone sales. It’s developers make more than half the entire mobile app market revenues. How is Apples behavior hurting them?

stale2002 6y ago
> It’s not anticompetitive at all to get 50% of a market I never said that getting 50% of the market, on its own, is anti-competitive. Instead, what is anti-competive, is once you have a large amount of market power, such as 50%, it now becomes illegal to use anti-competitive practices to keep out competitors. > No way a successful mall ..... merely for being successful. I never said this. Instead, what I am saying is that using large amounts of market power, to keep out competitors, is anti-competitive. > The App Store is so big because Apple made it the best App Store. It doesn't matter if you got to 50% of the market through being good. It is still illegal to use large amounts of market power to keep out competitors. > Apple has about 15% of phone sales. Apple has 50% of the market in the USA. And the lawsuits are happening in the USA, so thats all that matters. > How is Apples behavior hurting them? It is hurting competing app stores from entering the market, because of Apple's actions that make it very difficult for competing app stores to be installed. > why shouldn’t Apple benefit from their foresight and efforts? They can benefit. They just shouldn't be allowed to use their large amount of market power to keep out competitors, because that is anti-competitive.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Apple has zero obligation to allow competitive app stores in iOS. It’s never been a feature they promised customers, and it’s not wanted by most app developers. It’s not anticompetitive to refuse to build access to your property for new competitors. In this case it’s clearly not anticompetitive when forcing them to allow alternate app stores would be both anti-consumer and anti-developer.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > Apple has zero obligation to allow competitive app stores in iOS. Well, that is a pretty anti-competitive practice. So, actually, it seems like they might have an obligation to do this. > It’s never been a feature they promised customer It doesn't matter. It is still anti-competitive. And in the USA anti-competitive practices are illegal in the US, if a company with a large amount of market share is engaging in them. > It’s not anticompetitive to refuse to build access to your property for new competitors. It actually is! The courts have already proved this to be the case. Microsoft lost their court case because of a very similar situation. I would really recommend that you go read up on similar anti competitive case, such as the Microsoft one, to learn the court justifications for this stuff. It is pretty enlightening. > it’s not wanted by most app developers. "Customers don't want competition" is not an argument that any court would accept. It is assumed to be true, automatically, that competition is a good thing. And the judge residing over this case, actually made similar statements, in the preliminary hearing that I listened to, where she talked about how competition is a good thing, as a justification that the courts use.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I have read up on the Microsoft case, and I think I disagree -- it's hard to draw direct comparisons here. Microsoft Windows had over 90% of the entire personal computer operating system market, which was clearly a de facto monopoly position. The antitrust element was them leveraging that monopoly to give them an ostensibly unfair advantage in the browser market. There was no "gatekeeping" aspect involved; it was about whether bundling application software with the OS to undermine commercial competition was fair. Apple's case is very different. They have much less than 90% of the mobile phone operating system market, but they control access to 100% of the application market for iOS devices. This isn't about bundling, like Microsoft's case was, nor did Microsoft act as a gatekeeper for Windows. The closest precedents are game consoles, but those don't seem to offer a lot of guidance here in terms of case law -- although Apple's very likely to draw the comparison, e.g., Sony has a "monopoly" on downloadable applications for all PlayStations. Consumers know that limitation when they buy either a PlayStation or an iPhone, and see it as a feature, not a bug. In a lot of ways, the ultimate argument here is whether a device manufacturer can or should be legally forced to treat their devices more like general purpose computing devices than like consoles. And that's not like Microsoft at all. This is a fundamentally different question. (The sort of ironic footnote in drawing a comparison to the Microsoft case is that while bundling IE with Windows killed Netscape's commercial prospects and it was certainly done with malice aforethought, it was also fundamentally the right call. Applications that achieve such amazing runaway success that their functionality quickly becomes essential to everyone are almost certain to be bundled into either the operating system or a suite that everyone has.)
deleted 6y ago
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stale2002 6y ago

> It’s not anticompetitive at all to get 50% of a market I never said that getting 50% of the market, on its own, is anti-competitive. Instead, what is anti-competive, is once you have a large amount of market power, such as 50%, it now becomes illegal to use anti-competitive practices to keep out competitors. > No way a successful mall ..... merely for being successful. I never said this. Instead, what I am saying is that using large amounts of market power, to keep out competitors, is anti-competitive. > The App Store is so big because Apple made it the best App Store. It doesn't matter if you got to 50% of the market through being good. It is still illegal to use large amounts of market power to keep out competitors. > Apple has about 15% of phone sales. Apple has 50% of the market in the USA. And the lawsuits are happening in the USA, so thats all that matters. > How is Apples behavior hurting them? It is hurting competing app stores from entering the market, because of Apple's actions that make it very difficult for competing app stores to be installed. > why shouldn’t Apple benefit from their foresight and efforts? They can benefit. They just shouldn't be allowed to use their large amount of market power to keep out competitors, because that is anti-competitive.

valuearb 6y ago
Apple has zero obligation to allow competitive app stores in iOS. It’s never been a feature they promised customers, and it’s not wanted by most app developers. It’s not anticompetitive to refuse to build access to your property for new competitors. In this case it’s clearly not anticompetitive when forcing them to allow alternate app stores would be both anti-consumer and anti-developer.
- stale2002 6y ago
  > Apple has zero obligation to allow competitive app stores in iOS. Well, that is a pretty anti-competitive practice. So, actually, it seems like they might have an obligation to do this. > It’s never been a feature they promised customer It doesn't matter. It is still anti-competitive. And in the USA anti-competitive practices are illegal in the US, if a company with a large amount of market share is engaging in them. > It’s not anticompetitive to refuse to build access to your property for new competitors. It actually is! The courts have already proved this to be the case. Microsoft lost their court case because of a very similar situation. I would really recommend that you go read up on similar anti competitive case, such as the Microsoft one, to learn the court justifications for this stuff. It is pretty enlightening. > it’s not wanted by most app developers. "Customers don't want competition" is not an argument that any court would accept. It is assumed to be true, automatically, that competition is a good thing. And the judge residing over this case, actually made similar statements, in the preliminary hearing that I listened to, where she talked about how competition is a good thing, as a justification that the courts use.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I have read up on the Microsoft case, and I think I disagree -- it's hard to draw direct comparisons here. Microsoft Windows had over 90% of the entire personal computer operating system market, which was clearly a de facto monopoly position. The antitrust element was them leveraging that monopoly to give them an ostensibly unfair advantage in the browser market. There was no "gatekeeping" aspect involved; it was about whether bundling application software with the OS to undermine commercial competition was fair. Apple's case is very different. They have much less than 90% of the mobile phone operating system market, but they control access to 100% of the application market for iOS devices. This isn't about bundling, like Microsoft's case was, nor did Microsoft act as a gatekeeper for Windows. The closest precedents are game consoles, but those don't seem to offer a lot of guidance here in terms of case law -- although Apple's very likely to draw the comparison, e.g., Sony has a "monopoly" on downloadable applications for all PlayStations. Consumers know that limitation when they buy either a PlayStation or an iPhone, and see it as a feature, not a bug. In a lot of ways, the ultimate argument here is whether a device manufacturer can or should be legally forced to treat their devices more like general purpose computing devices than like consoles. And that's not like Microsoft at all. This is a fundamentally different question. (The sort of ironic footnote in drawing a comparison to the Microsoft case is that while bundling IE with Windows killed Netscape's commercial prospects and it was certainly done with malice aforethought, it was also fundamentally the right call. Applications that achieve such amazing runaway success that their functionality quickly becomes essential to everyone are almost certain to be bundled into either the operating system or a suite that everyone has.)

deleted 6y ago

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