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Monopoly doesn't mean what you suggest - it's different from a locked-down ecosystem. Every monopoly dispute comes down to defining the market in question. Whet

• inopinatus 6y ago
  That is flatly incorrect. The market in question is the $150 billion mobile applications market, of which Apple controls 60% worldwide, well above the threshold for regulatory attention in many jurisdictions. The jurisprudence varies regionally on what "enough market power" means, before you may be accused of having abused it, but (for example) in Europe this starts at around 40%.
  • st1x7 6y ago
    Again, it depends on how you define the market. They have fewer devices, fewer apps, fewer app downloads, and more revenue. You just picked the one that they have the biggest share in. And even 60% of revenue isn't enough to determine a monopoly depending on other market dynamics.
    • inopinatus 6y ago
      There are no goalposts to move around here in some PR flack's hapless dream of muddying the issue. The market in question is the mobile applications market. It is one that is separately analyzed, well reported, clearly delineated, demonstrably an arena of choice, and significant to the consumer. This makes it difficult to ignore on any taxonomic basis of irrelevance. No threshold is itself enough, since there's no strict liability; generally speaking, it's not unlawful to have market power, it's unlawful to abuse it. Any regulatory or private action has to make a qualified case. But as far as thresholds go: that 60%, plus Apple's contractual requirement for market participants to actively mislead the consumer, is pretty terminal.
      • st1x7 6y ago
        > There are no goalposts to move around here in some PR flack's hapless dream of muddying the issue. It's specifically about the goalposts, that's my entire point. It's not as straightforward and clear-cut as you're suggesting. Even saying something like "mobile applications market" doesn't make it clear whether we're talking about number of users, revenue, number of apps, number of app downloads, which mobile devices and so on.
        • inopinatus 6y ago
          Marketplaces are quantified by economic value, there being no other universal unit. There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves. I guess it's related to the fallacy that the law is some kind of programming language.
          • st1x7 6y ago
            > Marketplaces are quantified by economic value So if Apple had 100% of all phone users and 100% of all apps but the apps were entirely free, that wouldn't be a monopoly? > there being no other universal unit. I suggested a number of other units above. > There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves. The question of defining the market is the basis of how the decision is made in court and the biggest point of argument between the legal teams. This isn't about tech arrogance. I also feel like this back-and-forth isn't constructuve so I'll stop here.
        • mdoms 6y ago
          Just take the L and move on, dude. This is getting embarrassing.
      • jbverschoor 6y ago
        Well only if it’s not good for the consumer. Amazon is bad for suppliers, but good for consumers.
        • mthoms 6y ago
  • jbverschoor 6y ago
    But the apps are not just mobile anymore. They are macOS apps, which happen to run on iOS
  • deeeeplearning 6y ago
    So If I sell 1 app for $101 Billion do I now have a Monopoly on the mobile app market since I will have >40% of the revenue?
    • inopinatus 6y ago
      I think the considered response to that must be, "Good luck with your startup".
      • deeeeplearning 6y ago
        It's a legitimate question highlighting the absurdity of defining a monopoly by revenue.
        • inopinatus 6y ago
          Since you cannot sell an app for that much money, it is not a legitimate question, and there is no reductio ad absurdum. Therefore it is a joke question. If you could sell one app for that much money, and real money or genuinely equivalent value is actually exchanged, then other apps would be worth similar amounts, and the entire segment would simply rescale to be quintillions of dollars; alternatively, if you or others were unable to repeat the sale, then the market has a weird transient spike one quarter, then goes back to normal, and everyone discounts the outlier as a Spiders Georg. Notwithstanding which, sure, monopolies are indeed not defined by revenue, they are defined by market control, which is enabled by market share, which is quantified by value (there being no other universal measure), i.e. by sales i.e. revenue, which is why it's part of the consideration but you still need some qualification to support the quantification. Such as, by way of painfully topical example, Apple successfully forcing other market participants to actively mislead the consumer or withdraw products, which is not merely a naked display of market power but also an egregious misuse thereof.
          • deeeeplearning 6y ago
            >and there is no reductio ad absurdum Hate to break it to you but there is and I showed it which is why you made this salty reply. Certainly in the US there is no major Anti-Trust case which revolved around revenue as a measure of monopoly. Not Microsoft, not ATT and not Standard Oil.
• turbinerneiter 6y ago
  Monopoly is not defined by market share.
  • frereubu 6y ago
    Monopoly (n) (an organization or group that has) complete control of something, especially an area of business, so that others have no share https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/monopoly https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/monopoly
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      Rolling out a dictionary definition works in seventh grade debate class, not in a court of law. Amazingly, hundreds of very thick books about what legally defines a monopoly are not the same as a single sentence from a web site.
      • echelon 6y ago
        Let's let the Department of Justice decide.
      • frereubu 6y ago
        I don't think you needed the snark. I was responding directly to the comment which says that a monopoly is not defined by market share. But that is exactly what a monopoly is defined as - it's the "mono" part in the word. If what the parent comment was talking about is not a monopoly, then they could have said that and pointed out what it is instead.
        • mthoms 6y ago
          The snark was uncalled for indeed. But keep in mind that there are legal definitions of some things, and those often differ greatly from the colloquial definitions we use from day-to-day.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Exactly. You can't have a monopoly on stupidity. If idiots want to pay extra to buy into a walled garden nothing should stop them. Apple customers pay for lack of functionality and to signal to others how much money they have. A FAR cry from a monopoly.
• ardy42 6y ago
  > Every monopoly dispute comes down to defining the market in question. Whether the market is phones, tablets, smartwatches or personal computers, Apple's market share comes nowhere near close to being a monopoly. Exactly, which is why it's in no way clear that "Apple's market share comes nowhere near close to being a monopoly." If you defined Standard Oil's market as "fuels," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against coal and wood. If you defined AT&T's market as "communication services," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against TV, Radio, and the Post Office. And if you defined Apple's market as "3rd party software distribution, in general," you'd get the same result, but maybe not if its market is "3rd party software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users." Since the advent of antitrust law, every monopolist has a definition of its market that magically makes it not a monopoly and obscures its anticompetitive behavior; but that's not the definition we should use to judge them.
  • johncolanduoni 6y ago
    I think there’s a pretty clear difference between “3rd party smartphone software distribution” and “3rd party smartphone software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users, and I get to pick which users, and coincidentally I only pick Apple users”. You’re the one stacking the deck in that instance, not Apple.
    • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      Sure, but I think there's a tendency to try and make this seem way more clear-cut in either direction than it really is, e.g., Apple clearly {is | is not} guilty of antitrust violation by using their position as platform owner to dictate what applications and services are legally allowed on their platform. There's very little precedence in computing history for this other than game consoles, and it's not super crazy to ask whether that's a model that should apply to smartphones and tablets. (To me, that seems to be actually be a fundamental question, and I don't think I have an answer.)
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > I think there’s a pretty clear difference between “3rd party smartphone software distribution” and “3rd party smartphone software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users, and I get to pick which users, and coincidentally I only pick Apple users”. You’re the one stacking the deck in that instance, not Apple. Not really, if you look at it from the perspective of software developers. If an Android developer no longer wants to be a customer of the Play Store (or gets rejected by them), they can go to a 3rd party app store or tell their users to sideload. An iOS developer has no options besides Apple: they either stick with them or essentially `rm -rf AllMyIOsInvestment/`.
• fossuser 6y ago
  I thought it was a step beyond that? Market dominance paired with leveraging that dominance in a way that hurts consumers. If it’s levered in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers, that may be hyper competitive and other businesses may not like it, but that’s not a monopoly abuse. At least that’s my layman’s understanding of the law. Apple’s behavior is arguably good for most users (restricting tracking/spying). I don’t think Apple’s behavior meets that consumer harm standard.
• kbenson 6y ago
  That's why I like to use the "anti-competitive" terminology when I talk about this. Anti-competitive behavior is the problem, a monopoly is a specific very problematic example of anti-competitive behavior, but it's that it's anti-competitive that makes it a problem. Apple may not be a monopoly. They've definitely set up the ecosystem to be anti-competitive. Whether that's harmful to consumers (which is what matters) is debatable. I tend to think it's harmful, but they've done such a complete job of locking it down that it's hard to even compare without having to change a lot or things, since they control and exclude others from the hardware all the way up to sales transactions for services, and everything in between. That said, the fact that Apple was able to quickly cut their fees from 30% to 15% for some developers just because of growing public sentiment seems to indicate that competition is not working well to normalize these app store fees, and that likely means developers and by extension users are paying more because of that.