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> Overall, Apple has not been a good steward of the App Store. But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corpor

> Overall, Apple has not been a good steward of the App Store. But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it? It's one thing to mandate how much pollution a factory may leak into a shared water supply. But the Apple app store is not a utility or natural resource. Apple built it from nothing and they're its sole owner. If it's a crappy experience, the solution to me still seems to be to migrate to a competitor (I'm toying with the idea of trading my Galaxy for a Librem 5). There seems to be a mentality that megacorps have to have their hand held to not be public menaces, but by doing this my fear is we fortify Goliath rather than giving David a shot to kill him. The main reason I see this hasn't happened yet is that we've let the giants get away with corporate murder (e.g. Facebook's acquisition of both Instagram and WhatsApp), not because innovation is dead. And national regulation is a pretty patchwork solution anyway to corporations that can (and sometimes do) go toe-to-toe with national governments.

jollybean 5y ago
"what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? " They key word is 'platform'. It's designed for 'broad public consumption', this is different than other, purely internal aspects of their service. So Ford or GM cannot stop you from buying other vendors stuff and tweaking your car. The very thought would be absurd. A car is designed to be at very least maintained, they can void warranties etc. but not have absolute control. BMW is stricter about those things, which is fine, but it's still outside of their control. Finally, I think the reach of the platforms actually does matter - once something becomes a public good, we treat it differently. Imagine if the electric company in 1921 only ever let you buy appliances 'made by them' suited for 'their electricity', it's just not good. A similar situation is MS using their platform monopoly to dominate other areas, such as MS Office, which I think should have been regulated as well. Using a platform monopoly, companies can definitely dominating adjacent economies - even while providing an inferior product or experience, which is bad for everyone. To your point, it's probably worthwhile for us to start defining in legal terms what we mean by 'platform' so the rules can be applied fairly.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  You don't have to make up an imaginary electric company example when the real life phone company pulled that bullshit (and still sort of do tbh). In the old days you couldn't just buy a phone or something that used the phone line like an answering machine or some other device. No you had to lease a phone from the telephone company that was approved and installed by them. Hell they tried to stop people putting rubber cups on their phone receivers. And they also happened to have a majority stake in the phone manufacturer too...
heavyset_go 5y ago
Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile app distribution market, and they're abusing that duopoly in an anticompetitive manner to prevent companies from competing with them in mobile app distribution. Anti-trust legislation gives regulators the right to order and prosecute companies for abusing their market positions and for limiting the ability of the free market to deliver to consumers better, more efficient and less costly solutions. Microsoft in the late 1990's and early 2000's was in a similar situation. They abused their position in the PC operating system market in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the browser market[1]. Microsoft built their OS and Internet Explorer, so who has the right to tell them what they can and cannot do with them? It turns out that the federal government and regulators around the world have that right. This is like asking why regulators have right to prevent Standard Oil from engaging in anticompetitive behavior, given that Standard Oil built their own pipelines and railroads, after all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- jpttsn 5y ago
  Can you think of any situation where bundling would be acceptable? Should e.g. a restaurant have to provide an open market for silverware providers?
  - username90 5y ago
    Restaurants doesn't sell silverware. And even if they did they wouldn't have 10% of EU as customers. EU puts their anti trust laws for marketplaces at 10% instead of defining it as a monopoly, at that size you have to play fair.
    - jpttsn 5y ago
      Restaurants sell a bundled experience. The use of their silverware is part of what I buy. You could argue that the restaurant shouldn’t be a gatekeeper. Other parties could let me enjoy a cheaper meal, competing to offer the most discounted silverware. My $10 burger could be $9 if I could rent a paper plate from a third party and eat on the floor. After all, the restaurant shouldn’t abuse it’s monopoly, right?
y7 5y ago
> What precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? This does not concern setting precedents. The antitrust laws are already there, this is just a case of them being applied. More broadly speaking, I'm not really sensitive to the argument "they built the platform, so they should get to choose to do with it whatever they want". Network effects are so large that there is effectively zero competition. What little competition there is can be easily squashed by Apple throwing a minuscule portion of its capital at it. We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance.
- indigochill 5y ago
  > Network effects are so large... Then are these network effects worth paying 30% for or not? If yes, you've just conceded the price is fair. If no, then Purism's Librem exists (and will not be bought by Apple). > We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance. The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom? National legislation historically has been a method of pulling up the ladder behind robber barons, not of giving the little guy a chance.
  - username90 5y ago
    > Then are these network effects worth paying 30% for or not? If yes, you've just conceded the price is fair. If no, then Purism's Librem exists (and will not be bought by Apple). EU forcing Apple to lower app store fees to 5% or something similar wouldn't remove the network effect though, there is no incentive for EU to allow Apple to extract that fee. Tell me this, what would EU lose by capping App store fees in general? App stores would still operate there, App store companies would still be very profitable, they would just be less of a leech on the economy. > The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom? Regulating those companies greatly reduced their ability to extract money from the market and therefore contributed to the plethora of small companies in other domains we see today. We don't see small companies in oil or pharma since those domains requires scale, which is why we instead of forcing competition force regulations on them to make them do the right thing. I mean, imagine if we let the oil companies take 30% of GDP as revenue, it would totally ruin the economy and prevent us from progressing as a society. You could argue that those oil companies deserved to get that much money since without them how would we get to work? But, fact is that giving large companies that much money doesn't benefit anyone but their shareholders.
pyrale 5y ago
> what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it? We are setting no new precedent. In the US, internet provider are regulated as utilities and are stripped of any power on the content they serve, and the platform thrived as a result. What would Internet look like today if AOL had applied Apple's policies? If we go by that precedent, destroying the closed gardens around platforms is the best thing that could happen. If we choose to ignore it, then shouldn't we welcome that network carriers demand their 30% share of Apple's profits?
- toast0 5y ago
  > In the US, internet provider are regulated as utilities and are stripped of any power on the content they serve, and the platform thrived as a result. What would Internet look like today if AOL had applied Apple's policies? About the same as it looks today. AOL was a walled garden, and unregulated internet was so compelling that AOL was forced to offer it, or die, like so many other services did; of course, AOL still pretty much died, but it lasted the longest of the pre-internet national information services. Incidentally, that was back when it was easy to switch between competitive ISPs or set up your own and there was not much in the way of regulation. Now, we live under the threat of the cable and telephone companies pushing their products. Not a whole lot of clear regulation now, and not even the basis for local loop unbundling like congress provided in 1996, but the FCC watered down until it meant hardly anything.
amelius 5y ago
Of fundamental importance is that they run a platform. A platform creates a new economy and letting one party (which is not the government) regulate a market is a bad idea. Also, there is the network effect and there is vendor lock-in. In the past other companies could not use Bell's telephone network, so the government stepped in. The same could happen with OSes.
alexvoda 5y ago
Microsoft also solely built Windows and the EU still forced them to introduce the browser selection screen. No new precedent here.
keenboy 5y ago
These are very legitimate points. In my uneducated opinion, allowing other app stores to compete with Apple's would reduce the power of incumbents and allow Apple to compete on a level playing field. If another app store is better at filtering out spammy apps, or takes a smaller fee, then I just might install from their app store. It pushes Apple to improve their services than gouge as deeply as possible.
Orphis 5y ago
Don't forget, they built the platform, but 3rd party apps are what gives it value. Very few people would use an Apple device if they didn't have access to their games or productivity apps. Moreover, users pay a high premium for their device to access the platform. Why should companies also pay in addition to the annual subscription fee to their developer program?
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I’m a bit curious about this. I’ve been developing an impression that my willingness to install an app on my phone is a bit anomalous and that, as a rule, the trend is to install a core group of apps and use the browser for everything else. Even for my day-to-day uses there’s only one or two third-party apps that really “add value” for me (Slack, Taskmator and Signal)
httpsterio 5y ago
If Apple wants to keep a tight control on the app offerings and pricing on their store, they should be able to do that. But as there's no official way to install apps outside of that, it's really an unfair position to put the users and developers in to.
perfobotto 5y ago
What about Microsoft and Windows then. People complained to death back in the day for anticompetitive behavior (and were right). The iPhone success is not only Apple’s success. Apple has to thank all the devs that supported its platform with their apps (yeah Facebook and google included) and without which the iPhone would be a gimmick. We can’t just ignore this and tell every developer after they get Sherlock ed to “suck it up and create your own platform you loser”.
- notSupplied 5y ago
  Totally, the flow of value goes BOTH ways. The Mac in the 90s was on the verge a death, because you’d pay a premium for a platform with far fewer apps available for it than Windows 98. If Microsoft didn’t bring Office to the Mac, it would have been even more irrelevant. Apps are the difference between “A phone with extra tricks” and “A computer in your pocket.”

jollybean 5y ago

"what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? " They key word is 'platform'. It's designed for 'broad public consumption', this is different than other, purely internal aspects of their service. So Ford or GM cannot stop you from buying other vendors stuff and tweaking your car. The very thought would be absurd. A car is designed to be at very least maintained, they can void warranties etc. but not have absolute control. BMW is stricter about those things, which is fine, but it's still outside of their control. Finally, I think the reach of the platforms actually does matter - once something becomes a public good, we treat it differently. Imagine if the electric company in 1921 only ever let you buy appliances 'made by them' suited for 'their electricity', it's just not good. A similar situation is MS using their platform monopoly to dominate other areas, such as MS Office, which I think should have been regulated as well. Using a platform monopoly, companies can definitely dominating adjacent economies - even while providing an inferior product or experience, which is bad for everyone. To your point, it's probably worthwhile for us to start defining in legal terms what we mean by 'platform' so the rules can be applied fairly.

salamandersauce 5y ago
You don't have to make up an imaginary electric company example when the real life phone company pulled that bullshit (and still sort of do tbh). In the old days you couldn't just buy a phone or something that used the phone line like an answering machine or some other device. No you had to lease a phone from the telephone company that was approved and installed by them. Hell they tried to stop people putting rubber cups on their phone receivers. And they also happened to have a majority stake in the phone manufacturer too...

heavyset_go 5y ago

Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile app distribution market, and they're abusing that duopoly in an anticompetitive manner to prevent companies from competing with them in mobile app distribution. Anti-trust legislation gives regulators the right to order and prosecute companies for abusing their market positions and for limiting the ability of the free market to deliver to consumers better, more efficient and less costly solutions. Microsoft in the late 1990's and early 2000's was in a similar situation. They abused their position in the PC operating system market in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the browser market[1]. Microsoft built their OS and Internet Explorer, so who has the right to tell them what they can and cannot do with them? It turns out that the federal government and regulators around the world have that right. This is like asking why regulators have right to prevent Standard Oil from engaging in anticompetitive behavior, given that Standard Oil built their own pipelines and railroads, after all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

jpttsn 5y ago
Can you think of any situation where bundling would be acceptable? Should e.g. a restaurant have to provide an open market for silverware providers?
- username90 5y ago
  Restaurants doesn't sell silverware. And even if they did they wouldn't have 10% of EU as customers. EU puts their anti trust laws for marketplaces at 10% instead of defining it as a monopoly, at that size you have to play fair.
  - jpttsn 5y ago
    Restaurants sell a bundled experience. The use of their silverware is part of what I buy. You could argue that the restaurant shouldn’t be a gatekeeper. Other parties could let me enjoy a cheaper meal, competing to offer the most discounted silverware. My $10 burger could be $9 if I could rent a paper plate from a third party and eat on the floor. After all, the restaurant shouldn’t abuse it’s monopoly, right?

y7 5y ago

> What precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? This does not concern setting precedents. The antitrust laws are already there, this is just a case of them being applied. More broadly speaking, I'm not really sensitive to the argument "they built the platform, so they should get to choose to do with it whatever they want". Network effects are so large that there is effectively zero competition. What little competition there is can be easily squashed by Apple throwing a minuscule portion of its capital at it. We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance.

indigochill 5y ago
> Network effects are so large... Then are these network effects worth paying 30% for or not? If yes, you've just conceded the price is fair. If no, then Purism's Librem exists (and will not be bought by Apple). > We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance. The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom? National legislation historically has been a method of pulling up the ladder behind robber barons, not of giving the little guy a chance.
- username90 5y ago
  > Then are these network effects worth paying 30% for or not? If yes, you've just conceded the price is fair. If no, then Purism's Librem exists (and will not be bought by Apple). EU forcing Apple to lower app store fees to 5% or something similar wouldn't remove the network effect though, there is no incentive for EU to allow Apple to extract that fee. Tell me this, what would EU lose by capping App store fees in general? App stores would still operate there, App store companies would still be very profitable, they would just be less of a leech on the economy. > The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom? Regulating those companies greatly reduced their ability to extract money from the market and therefore contributed to the plethora of small companies in other domains we see today. We don't see small companies in oil or pharma since those domains requires scale, which is why we instead of forcing competition force regulations on them to make them do the right thing. I mean, imagine if we let the oil companies take 30% of GDP as revenue, it would totally ruin the economy and prevent us from progressing as a society. You could argue that those oil companies deserved to get that much money since without them how would we get to work? But, fact is that giving large companies that much money doesn't benefit anyone but their shareholders.

pyrale 5y ago

> what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it? We are setting no new precedent. In the US, internet provider are regulated as utilities and are stripped of any power on the content they serve, and the platform thrived as a result. What would Internet look like today if AOL had applied Apple's policies? If we go by that precedent, destroying the closed gardens around platforms is the best thing that could happen. If we choose to ignore it, then shouldn't we welcome that network carriers demand their 30% share of Apple's profits?

toast0 5y ago
> In the US, internet provider are regulated as utilities and are stripped of any power on the content they serve, and the platform thrived as a result. What would Internet look like today if AOL had applied Apple's policies? About the same as it looks today. AOL was a walled garden, and unregulated internet was so compelling that AOL was forced to offer it, or die, like so many other services did; of course, AOL still pretty much died, but it lasted the longest of the pre-internet national information services. Incidentally, that was back when it was easy to switch between competitive ISPs or set up your own and there was not much in the way of regulation. Now, we live under the threat of the cable and telephone companies pushing their products. Not a whole lot of clear regulation now, and not even the basis for local loop unbundling like congress provided in 1996, but the FCC watered down until it meant hardly anything.

amelius 5y ago

Of fundamental importance is that they run a platform. A platform creates a new economy and letting one party (which is not the government) regulate a market is a bad idea. Also, there is the network effect and there is vendor lock-in. In the past other companies could not use Bell's telephone network, so the government stepped in. The same could happen with OSes.

alexvoda 5y ago

Microsoft also solely built Windows and the EU still forced them to introduce the browser selection screen. No new precedent here.

keenboy 5y ago

These are very legitimate points. In my uneducated opinion, allowing other app stores to compete with Apple's would reduce the power of incumbents and allow Apple to compete on a level playing field. If another app store is better at filtering out spammy apps, or takes a smaller fee, then I just might install from their app store. It pushes Apple to improve their services than gouge as deeply as possible.

Orphis 5y ago

Don't forget, they built the platform, but 3rd party apps are what gives it value. Very few people would use an Apple device if they didn't have access to their games or productivity apps. Moreover, users pay a high premium for their device to access the platform. Why should companies also pay in addition to the annual subscription fee to their developer program?

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
I’m a bit curious about this. I’ve been developing an impression that my willingness to install an app on my phone is a bit anomalous and that, as a rule, the trend is to install a core group of apps and use the browser for everything else. Even for my day-to-day uses there’s only one or two third-party apps that really “add value” for me (Slack, Taskmator and Signal)

httpsterio 5y ago

If Apple wants to keep a tight control on the app offerings and pricing on their store, they should be able to do that. But as there's no official way to install apps outside of that, it's really an unfair position to put the users and developers in to.

perfobotto 5y ago

What about Microsoft and Windows then. People complained to death back in the day for anticompetitive behavior (and were right). The iPhone success is not only Apple’s success. Apple has to thank all the devs that supported its platform with their apps (yeah Facebook and google included) and without which the iPhone would be a gimmick. We can’t just ignore this and tell every developer after they get Sherlock ed to “suck it up and create your own platform you loser”.

notSupplied 5y ago
Totally, the flow of value goes BOTH ways. The Mac in the 90s was on the verge a death, because you’d pay a premium for a platform with far fewer apps available for it than Windows 98. If Microsoft didn’t bring Office to the Mac, it would have been even more irrelevant. Apps are the difference between “A phone with extra tricks” and “A computer in your pocket.”