8 ms·
It's a monopoly, and it's illegal.
by mFixman 6y ago
It's a monopoly, and it's illegal.
- dleslie 6y agoApple clearly has competitors that have a much larger share of the market.
- emptysongglass 6y agoThey have one competitor on which users are allowed to install their own market (see F-Droid.) [1] [1] https://www.f-droid.org/ https://www.f-droid.org/
- dleslie 6y agoF-Droid itself relies upon Android's openness to allow it to be installed. If you don't like Apple's walled garden then use Android.
- im3w1l 6y agoAnd if you want to install whichever apps you want, AND not be spied on by your OS, there are basically no options. Linageos is a possibility, but with the play services situation, running any mainstream app without phoning home to google is if not impossible, extremely difficult and filled with footguns. Pine and Librem are exciting emerging possibilities but they have only been available for a very short time so it remains to be seen what will happen there.
- dleslie 6y agoPinePhone is available to order right now; and it's cheap as hell.
- onion2k 6y agoWhen people talk about Apple having a monopoly they're referring to Apple having complete control over the sale of iOS software. There is no one else in that market. Apple has 100% market share.
- dleslie 6y agoThere are other people in the _mobile software_ market; if the argument for monopoly requires being as specific as _mobile software that operates on a specific manufacturer of a minority of all phones_ then perhaps it's not a monopoly at all.
- shadowgovt 6y agoCorrect. The relevant terms are "horizontal monopoly" and "vertical monopoly." A horizontal monopoly is if one company made all the cars. A vertical monopoly is if one car manufacturer owned all the roads in Detroit and only their cars were authorized to drive on those roads. Apple is a vertical monopoly across its hardware, the software that runs on that hardware (they don't own the software, but they own the distribution channel), and some of the suppliers that manufacture components for the hardware.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago> A vertical monopoly is if one car manufacturer owned all the roads in Detroit and only their cars were authorized to drive on those roads. That's not a good analogy. It's more like if you bought X's car model and X had a policy that you could only buy official, certified parts from certified dealers through which they get a cut. (App Store) You can go for after market parts but if you break the car it's on you. ("Jailbreaking" AKA flashing your device)
- sixstringtheory 6y agoiOS is not a market, it’s a product. This is like saying Uber has a monopoly on all of their own assets. Wrong terminology.
- nodamage 6y agoSorry but a market consisting of a single manufacturer's own product is generally not considered a valid antitrust market for legal purposes. You can't simply declare an arbitrarily narrow market like this because every manufacturer would then have a monopoly over its own products.
- notatoad 6y agoyou don't need to have a literal monopoly to engage in illegal anticompetitive behaviour, nor is having a monopoly even illegal. Apple has monopoly-like control over the mobile app market - if you don't make an iPhone app, your product is dead in the water. and apple is using that power to crush any competition to their own in-app payment solution.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoApple does not have a monopoly on phones. Not even smartphones.
- supercanuck 6y agoThey have a monopoly over the apps on the iOS.
- zepto 6y agoIn that case every single retail store has a monopoly on the products they sell. This is a meaningless definition of monopoly.
- supercanuck 6y agoI don’t need to spend $1,000 to enter a store. The issue is market power
- realusername 6y agoExcept in the retail world, there's competition between stores. Competition is non-existent in the mobile world, there's only two companies and both have the exact same fees and very similar policies.
- zepto 6y agoSo we need more entrants. Why doesn’t this coalition of multi-billion dollar corporations invest in creating an Android based alternative with different policies? That would add choice to the market rather than taking it away. They can clearly afford to do so, but it seems like they just don’t feel the need to make the investment.
- realusername 6y agoThat's because of the market lock-in and power of both companies, you can't use any of the Apple stack and Android without the Play Store is a commercial death sentence.
- dimitrios1 6y agoCalling a company that has ~13% of the market share in mobile devices is quite the take. It will never hold up in court.
- tempsy 6y agoIt's a duopoly between Android and iOS. Better? And the current lawsuits are arguing that Apple has a monopoly on payments on their own devices, not that they have a monopoly on the smartphone market. Big difference.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- supercanuck 6y agoThey control 100% of the apps on an iPhone
- zepto 6y agoEveryone controls 100% of what happens on their own platform. Epic is a monopolist.
- onion2k 6y agoEpic has a share of the PC games software market.
- zepto 6y agoYes - and they control their own platform. Therefore they are a monopolist. /s I clearly don’t actually believe this, but the point is that if Apple is a Monopolist, then so is Epic.
- shadowgovt 6y agoApple is a vertical monopolist across a large-market-share hardware platform it manufactures and an exclusive system for putting software onto that platform. Epic has a store, but doesn't have a large-market-share hardware platform they control exclusively to go with it. Any machine I can install the Epic app store on, I can also install Steam on.
- disposekinetics 6y agoIt's a monopoly in the same way Spotify not hosting some episodes of Joe Rogan is a monopoly.
- ijidak 6y agoI don't believe monopolies are illegal. It's using an advantage in one area to force concessions in an unrelated area that I believe is illegal. For example, Microsoft had an effective monopoly over PC operating systems. That was unfortunate, but not illegal. It was when they used that monopoly to disadvantage a rival browser maker --- Netscape -- that they broke anti-trust law. I'm most interested in seeing what happens over Apple's decisions to force app providers to use Apple Sign-in if the offer any other 3rd party SSO. As a developer, I may have valid security concerns regarding Apple Sign-in. So their app store dominance seems unrelated to SSO infrastructure. And I don't fully understand how they can force me to use it if I decide to support Google or Facebook SSO in my app. So I do wonder if that is an anti-trust violation.
- 0xDEEPFAC 6y agoWe are at a state where these tech companies have the same value as countries and entire stock indexes. It is obscene, and yet they make their devices more locked down, harder/ILLEGAL! to fix by paying off politicians both to not enforce laws and to write them in their favor at the expense of smaller competition. The merger of state and corporate powers is complete. We live in a fascist world with surveillance that Stalin could only dream of. So yea, a bit "unfortunate"
- arrosenberg 6y ago> It's using an advantage in one area to force concessions in an unrelated area that I believe is illegal. Can you find me a single example of a monopoly (excluding regulated utilities) that don't use their power to force concessions in an unrelated area? What's the point otherwise?