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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.

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.)
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    You make some good points, in alot of ways comparisons to the MS of the 90's is tricky. Apple has less market share, but alot more users - and the market is shaped quite differently (only 2 hardware makers, where back then (and even now) there are hundreds of hardware makers for computers). Microsoft also had no means to prevent people from installing outside software on the device, which iOS does - to the tune of over 1 billion users. There are whole industries built on iOS now, which was also true then, but due to the much more limited hardware landscape and single means of installing software, this now plays differently with competition than just browser bundling. I don't think whether Apple is using monopoly power is the appropriate focus here; they can be anti-competitive without being a monopoly, and due to the fact that they control >1 billion users and control their hardware, there's a fair question to ask about this anti-competitive behavior.
  - nodamage 6y ago
    > 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. It's also worth noting this was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court remanded the question back to the district court for further analysis under the rule of reason, but that never actually happened as the case was eventually settled. Under the rule of reason, Microsoft would have been able to argue that it had legitimate justification for bundling a browser with Windows, and then it would have been up to the DOJ to argue that the anticompetitive effect of the bundling outweighed the justification given. I think Microsoft would have had a relatively strong argument there, as an operating system that shipped without a web browser (or media player, for that matter) would have been, in fact, less useful to the consumer.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      That's true, and a good point. I dimly remember thinking at the time that the browser was the wrong focus for this whole endeavor -- if there was anything Microsoft was doing that was legitimately shady, it was relating to some of their OEM agreements, which I (admittedly now fuzzily) recall had some terms in them which were pretty clearly meant to stifle competition with Windows. IIRC, you weren't allowed to ship computers that dual-booted Windows and another OS, for instance; if Windows was pre-installed it had to be the only OS. And if you shipped any computers that had Windows pre-installed, your OEM license was based on the number of total computers you shipped whether or not Windows was installed on all of them, e.g., if you sold 50 computers and only 30 of them had Windows pre-installed, you paid for 50 licenses.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Not allowing competitors to build a store on your property isn’t anti-competitive. And you clearly don’t understand the Microsoft case, where it had 90% of the operating system market. Customers want the best possible products, forcing Apple to make their product worse, with worse security, a worse purchase experience, robs customers of an important choice. Judges do make terrible rulings all the time. Like the Apple e-books case, where trying to ensure a level playing field was deemed “anti-competitive”, leading to Amazon to significantly grow market share and establishing an unassailable monopoly position since the ruling.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    > Not allowing competitors to build a store on your property isn’t anti-competitive. The difference is that in the real world, there is more property. In the digital world, there isn't, unless you count Android -- and the problem with that is you run into the "Well why don't the company men just leave the company town, then?" It's the "let them eat cake!" argument and it doesn't go over well.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > And you clearly don’t understand the Microsoft case, where it had 90% of the operating system market. Once again, the government does not require a literal monopoly for behavior to be anti-competitive. 50% of a market in the US could absolutely be enough to count as significant market power. The situations are pretty similar, because your argument about 90% is not what the courts care about. The courts care about market power, not necessarily a literal monopoly. > Judges do make terrible rulings all the time I mean, if you don't care about the courts system or the law, then I don't know what to tell you. Your opinion on it doesn't particularly matter, because the courts are the ones in charge of this, and the courts are the ones who make the decision here. > Like the Apple e-books case Well, too bad for Apple. The law is the law, and the court system is the court system. Personally, I only talk about what the courts do. I don't really care about someone's opinion if the courts disagree with them. Because the courts and the judges are the ones that make the decision here. They decide. And everything that I have said is within this context of what courts and judges have done in the past.
- scarface74 6y ago
  It doesn't matter. It is still anti-competitive. And in the USA anti-competitive practices are illegal in the US, Yet and still console makers have been doing just this for 30 years. Yes physical games still have to be approved by the console makers and the practice has not been eliminated. Which is more likely, companies have been breaking the law for years or HNs understanding of the law is flawed?
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > Yet and still console makers have been doing just this for 30 years. It is well accepted in anti-competition law, that the size of the market and market share matters greatly in determining whether certain behavior is illegal. The larger the market share that a company has, and the larger the market, the more likely the anti-competitive behavior is to be illegal. So, in the case of consoles, consoles have a smaller market and market share than Apple does. Apple is now a 2 trillion dollar company, and has about 50% of the phone market share, in the US, as of last month. They have significantly more control over a significantly larger market than consoles. Thus their behavior is much worse and much more likely to be illegal than that of consoles. > Which is more likely, companies have been breaking the law for years or HNs understanding of the law is flawed? Whats more likely is that you have not read any actual court cases or judicial decisions on the matter, to be frank. The stuff that I states is pretty well accepted among the experts.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      And yet and still you haven’t posted a single bit of case law. The other times I have asked HN lawyers posted examples where companies were sued for anti trust because they colluded with competitors. And it seems like none of the “experts” have won anymore cases in court where one company that didn’t have overwhelming share was convicted of anti trust than anyone posting on HN.

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.)
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  You make some good points, in alot of ways comparisons to the MS of the 90's is tricky. Apple has less market share, but alot more users - and the market is shaped quite differently (only 2 hardware makers, where back then (and even now) there are hundreds of hardware makers for computers). Microsoft also had no means to prevent people from installing outside software on the device, which iOS does - to the tune of over 1 billion users. There are whole industries built on iOS now, which was also true then, but due to the much more limited hardware landscape and single means of installing software, this now plays differently with competition than just browser bundling. I don't think whether Apple is using monopoly power is the appropriate focus here; they can be anti-competitive without being a monopoly, and due to the fact that they control >1 billion users and control their hardware, there's a fair question to ask about this anti-competitive behavior.
- nodamage 6y ago
  > 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. It's also worth noting this was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court remanded the question back to the district court for further analysis under the rule of reason, but that never actually happened as the case was eventually settled. Under the rule of reason, Microsoft would have been able to argue that it had legitimate justification for bundling a browser with Windows, and then it would have been up to the DOJ to argue that the anticompetitive effect of the bundling outweighed the justification given. I think Microsoft would have had a relatively strong argument there, as an operating system that shipped without a web browser (or media player, for that matter) would have been, in fact, less useful to the consumer.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    That's true, and a good point. I dimly remember thinking at the time that the browser was the wrong focus for this whole endeavor -- if there was anything Microsoft was doing that was legitimately shady, it was relating to some of their OEM agreements, which I (admittedly now fuzzily) recall had some terms in them which were pretty clearly meant to stifle competition with Windows. IIRC, you weren't allowed to ship computers that dual-booted Windows and another OS, for instance; if Windows was pre-installed it had to be the only OS. And if you shipped any computers that had Windows pre-installed, your OEM license was based on the number of total computers you shipped whether or not Windows was installed on all of them, e.g., if you sold 50 computers and only 30 of them had Windows pre-installed, you paid for 50 licenses.
valuearb 6y ago
Not allowing competitors to build a store on your property isn’t anti-competitive. And you clearly don’t understand the Microsoft case, where it had 90% of the operating system market. Customers want the best possible products, forcing Apple to make their product worse, with worse security, a worse purchase experience, robs customers of an important choice. Judges do make terrible rulings all the time. Like the Apple e-books case, where trying to ensure a level playing field was deemed “anti-competitive”, leading to Amazon to significantly grow market share and establishing an unassailable monopoly position since the ruling.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  > Not allowing competitors to build a store on your property isn’t anti-competitive. The difference is that in the real world, there is more property. In the digital world, there isn't, unless you count Android -- and the problem with that is you run into the "Well why don't the company men just leave the company town, then?" It's the "let them eat cake!" argument and it doesn't go over well.
- stale2002 6y ago
  > And you clearly don’t understand the Microsoft case, where it had 90% of the operating system market. Once again, the government does not require a literal monopoly for behavior to be anti-competitive. 50% of a market in the US could absolutely be enough to count as significant market power. The situations are pretty similar, because your argument about 90% is not what the courts care about. The courts care about market power, not necessarily a literal monopoly. > Judges do make terrible rulings all the time I mean, if you don't care about the courts system or the law, then I don't know what to tell you. Your opinion on it doesn't particularly matter, because the courts are the ones in charge of this, and the courts are the ones who make the decision here. > Like the Apple e-books case Well, too bad for Apple. The law is the law, and the court system is the court system. Personally, I only talk about what the courts do. I don't really care about someone's opinion if the courts disagree with them. Because the courts and the judges are the ones that make the decision here. They decide. And everything that I have said is within this context of what courts and judges have done in the past.
scarface74 6y ago
It doesn't matter. It is still anti-competitive. And in the USA anti-competitive practices are illegal in the US, Yet and still console makers have been doing just this for 30 years. Yes physical games still have to be approved by the console makers and the practice has not been eliminated. Which is more likely, companies have been breaking the law for years or HNs understanding of the law is flawed?
- stale2002 6y ago
  > Yet and still console makers have been doing just this for 30 years. It is well accepted in anti-competition law, that the size of the market and market share matters greatly in determining whether certain behavior is illegal. The larger the market share that a company has, and the larger the market, the more likely the anti-competitive behavior is to be illegal. So, in the case of consoles, consoles have a smaller market and market share than Apple does. Apple is now a 2 trillion dollar company, and has about 50% of the phone market share, in the US, as of last month. They have significantly more control over a significantly larger market than consoles. Thus their behavior is much worse and much more likely to be illegal than that of consoles. > Which is more likely, companies have been breaking the law for years or HNs understanding of the law is flawed? Whats more likely is that you have not read any actual court cases or judicial decisions on the matter, to be frank. The stuff that I states is pretty well accepted among the experts.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And yet and still you haven’t posted a single bit of case law. The other times I have asked HN lawyers posted examples where companies were sued for anti trust because they colluded with competitors. And it seems like none of the “experts” have won anymore cases in court where one company that didn’t have overwhelming share was convicted of anti trust than anyone posting on HN.