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Apple is a monopoly in tech just like Louis Vuitton is a monopoly in luggage, so no. Okay, maybe for US it's Samsonite but for the rest of the world Apple is mo

by mrtksn 5y ago

Apple is a monopoly in tech just like Louis Vuitton is a monopoly in luggage, so no. Okay, maybe for US it's Samsonite but for the rest of the world Apple is more like Louis Vuitton - a premium brand that is one of the leaders in design that everyone else follows. Just being popular in some circles doesn't change the fact that they hold a minority share in the market. Maybe people in Orange County might believe that Louis Vuitton is a monopoly but it's not. Apple do control the reach of search engines to their customers in a similar manner of LV might choose to allow Cartier sell bracelets in their shops instead designing and selling their own bracelets. The point is, people can always go to Chanel if that arrangement doesn't fit them. At worst, it could be a situation where the clients of a company are not happy with the recent products and they need to start buying from another shop. I don't see how regulators should intervene in this. If not happy, go buy Samsung or Google pixel.

laumars 5y ago
Except there is already precedence regarding their App Store. So if Apple defaulted to their own search engine and didn’t allow a way of changing that default then the courts might well find that anti-competitive too.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  You don't need to disallow changing the default search engine because the average user doesn't even know or bother how to change it. That is the reason Google pays everyone (Apple, Mozilla, Android OEMs through GService allowance) a buttload of money to be the default.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    While that is true, offering the option to change the default might still be enough to avoid any anticompetitive claims (which I think was the point the GP was making). That said, Microsoft were still forced to present a randomized list of browser options to the user upon first install so there is also precedence of changeable defaults not being enough to satisfy complaints of anticompetitive business. This is all hypothetical though because it's still far from clear that Apple have ever wanted to enter the search market, let alone got paid not to, let alone what might happen to the iPhone if they did.
pronlover723 5y ago
They don't hold a minority share. Monopolies are not decided by the world, they're decided by countries for that country's market Plenty of sites claim they have a majority in the USA https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta... UK https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kingdom https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... Japan https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan Each of those countries could easily bring suit. They wouldn't care at all that in some other country Apple is not the largest player. Louis Vuitton is a bad example as their market share is tiny. AFAIK there is no clothing brand with a market percent as large as Apple's mobile market percent. Maybe Luxotica in eyewear but some articles claim their market is only around 20%
- mrtksn 5y ago
  That's hardly a monopoly, there's hardly any absence of competition. Even if it was a monopoly it would't be illegal by default but it's not a monopoly anyway. It's more like %50 to %70 of the people in US/JP/UK have chosen to purchase the products of that company but they could have chosen any other brand that is available to them. In fact, people in countries of similar affluence have chosen the other way around with France %63, Netherlands %54, Germany %58, Spain %78 Android and there's nothing stopping the UK/US/JP do the exactly the same as the alternatives are available and competative. It looks like Apple managed to design devices that Americans like more than the ones the other brands designed and there's nothing wrong about it. Can Apple abuse it's position position in the market, even the smallest company can do that but the key is that if that happens people do have the option to do purchases from somewhere else.
  - paulluuk 5y ago
    So do you feel that anything other than 100% market share counts as a monopoly? Where would you draw the line?
    - mrtksn 5y ago
dathinab 5y ago
Apple is a OS monopoly on the Apple hardware platform which affects millions of people with marked effects which can make switching away from it costy and hard. It abuses this Monopoly position to force through other products, like it's app store, and give major advantage to it's services over the competition. Sometimes outright debiting l denying it's competition marked entry. Even if we only look at a while phone OS marked it's a dis dual pool with Google (all attendings a minor enough to not matter). And both abuse this close to Monopol position, though one more then the other.
- politelemon 5y ago
  Sorry you're being downvoted but this is HN and it's common to give Apple benefit of the doubt. You are right, and the term is monopolistic power, which is different from monopoly. Monopolistic power involves platform abuse which is what you're describing. Additionally they use their position to enforce their own services, so their forced rollout of Apple Login was an example. Another example is all browsers being forced to use Safari under the hood. It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
  - lwkl 5y ago
    > It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it. Is it though? Safari seems to be pretty close to the HTML standard and at least not implement any proprietary features. Sure there may be bugs or they may lag behind but they are making an effort to be compliant. I'd say Google seems to be the one leading a lot of decisions regarding to standards and implement them the way they want before they are actually standardizes and because they have the biggest market share Apple and Firefox just have to follow their decision. Ideally Apple would allow third party browsers on iOS, but I think it's beneficial for users that they don't. I do believe that without it Chrome would have a much bigger market share and developers wouldn't be forced to support browsers other than Chrome and Google would have even more power over web standards than today. I guess Chromium being open source would make it a bit better.
    - 5y ago
heavyset_go 5y ago
Apple has 60% of the mobile market in the US[1], and more than double the revenue from their dominant stake in the mobile app distribution market than Google[2], both off which make up over 99% of that market. Also, our layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[3]: > Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-android-dominates-in-china-and-india https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-... [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/ [3] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
- mrtksn 5y ago
  As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process. I would say, Apple is very popular in the US but I don't see how it can be a monopoly when you can just order another device from Amazon and that device being just good or maybe better. In many other rich countries, people are choosing Samsung, Americans can do that too if they want.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process. I would love to make this argument the next time vaccines are mentioned. Remember vaccines cause autism and turn the frogs gay. Any attempt to correct this using medical jargon or methods is literally out of scope for the average hacker news commenter and should be avoided.
    - mrtksn 5y ago
nikitaga 5y ago
Apple might have a minority of units sold, but they have a very convincing majority of revenues and profits in several markets, e.g. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-handset-market-operating-profit-q2-2021/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-handset-market-o... "Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments." And those are global numbers. Now what do you think their US numbers look like, or their app store numbers? They hold plenty of monopolistic power to enable abuse, and that's enough to be regulated if the government was so inclined. And, this lawsuit isn't just about Apple, it's about Google too. Certainly you don't have any doubts about their monopoly status. > I don't see how regulators should intervene in this. TFA proposes some remedies in very broad strokes. Looks good to me. Unregulated monopolies and oligopolies extract excessive profits from consumers and limit choice through anti-competitive practices. You might be fine with that. I'm not.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Making more money by selling less implies large margins and I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly. Actually, it means that their customers are so happy with the Apple product that they are willing to pay a premium to have it. Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch. You can verify that people are not paying Apple more because they don't have an option not to do so by by checking the shops for availability of other brands(they are available) and their viability(They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple).
  - nikitaga 5y ago
    > I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly. > Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch. In a functioning free market, competitors would have picked up the slack long ago (iPhone is 14 years old now), and cashed in on those high profit margins too. Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices. That doesn't deny the popularity of Apple's products, by the way. Believe it or not they can be both genuinely popular and monopolistic / anti-competitive, with both of those factors contributing to insanely above-market profit margins. "You can buy LG" just shows that you don't understand the distinction between concentrated market power power, anti competitive business practices, and actual monopoly, nor the fact that antitrust regulations do not require their target to be an actual monopoly with zero competitors available for sale (and for good reason). > They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple Bing and DDG are also available and viable, and "[some] techies say" that they're better than Google. So what. This metric is utterly irrelevant.
ximeng 5y ago
If you’re not happy with Apple and Google behaving monopolistically “buy Google Pixel” doesn’t seem like a great solution. Nor does buy a phone running Google’s operating system feel like a great answer.
- cokeandpepsi 5y ago
  Just buy iPhone, it's comfy
- mrtksn 5y ago
  If you are not happy with the competition too, I guess you can watch Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to cheer you up or go make your own device.
  - ximeng 5y ago
    The allegation is these companies are not competing with each other, they are working together. This includes working together to prevent competitors making their own devices. There are very limited alternatives if you want to avoid Google and Apple completely. I'm not familiar with the Eurovision show you mention, so not sure of the relevance.

by mrtksn 5y ago

laumars 5y ago

Except there is already precedence regarding their App Store. So if Apple defaulted to their own search engine and didn’t allow a way of changing that default then the courts might well find that anti-competitive too.

littlecranky67 5y ago
You don't need to disallow changing the default search engine because the average user doesn't even know or bother how to change it. That is the reason Google pays everyone (Apple, Mozilla, Android OEMs through GService allowance) a buttload of money to be the default.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  While that is true, offering the option to change the default might still be enough to avoid any anticompetitive claims (which I think was the point the GP was making). That said, Microsoft were still forced to present a randomized list of browser options to the user upon first install so there is also precedence of changeable defaults not being enough to satisfy complaints of anticompetitive business. This is all hypothetical though because it's still far from clear that Apple have ever wanted to enter the search market, let alone got paid not to, let alone what might happen to the iPhone if they did.

pronlover723 5y ago

They don't hold a minority share. Monopolies are not decided by the world, they're decided by countries for that country's market Plenty of sites claim they have a majority in the USA https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta... UK https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kingdom https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... Japan https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan Each of those countries could easily bring suit. They wouldn't care at all that in some other country Apple is not the largest player. Louis Vuitton is a bad example as their market share is tiny. AFAIK there is no clothing brand with a market percent as large as Apple's mobile market percent. Maybe Luxotica in eyewear but some articles claim their market is only around 20%

mrtksn 5y ago
That's hardly a monopoly, there's hardly any absence of competition. Even if it was a monopoly it would't be illegal by default but it's not a monopoly anyway. It's more like %50 to %70 of the people in US/JP/UK have chosen to purchase the products of that company but they could have chosen any other brand that is available to them. In fact, people in countries of similar affluence have chosen the other way around with France %63, Netherlands %54, Germany %58, Spain %78 Android and there's nothing stopping the UK/US/JP do the exactly the same as the alternatives are available and competative. It looks like Apple managed to design devices that Americans like more than the ones the other brands designed and there's nothing wrong about it. Can Apple abuse it's position position in the market, even the smallest company can do that but the key is that if that happens people do have the option to do purchases from somewhere else.
- paulluuk 5y ago
  So do you feel that anything other than 100% market share counts as a monopoly? Where would you draw the line?
  - mrtksn 5y ago

dathinab 5y ago

Apple is a OS monopoly on the Apple hardware platform which affects millions of people with marked effects which can make switching away from it costy and hard. It abuses this Monopoly position to force through other products, like it's app store, and give major advantage to it's services over the competition. Sometimes outright debiting l denying it's competition marked entry. Even if we only look at a while phone OS marked it's a dis dual pool with Google (all attendings a minor enough to not matter). And both abuse this close to Monopol position, though one more then the other.

politelemon 5y ago
Sorry you're being downvoted but this is HN and it's common to give Apple benefit of the doubt. You are right, and the term is monopolistic power, which is different from monopoly. Monopolistic power involves platform abuse which is what you're describing. Additionally they use their position to enforce their own services, so their forced rollout of Apple Login was an example. Another example is all browsers being forced to use Safari under the hood. It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
- lwkl 5y ago
  > It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it. Is it though? Safari seems to be pretty close to the HTML standard and at least not implement any proprietary features. Sure there may be bugs or they may lag behind but they are making an effort to be compliant. I'd say Google seems to be the one leading a lot of decisions regarding to standards and implement them the way they want before they are actually standardizes and because they have the biggest market share Apple and Firefox just have to follow their decision. Ideally Apple would allow third party browsers on iOS, but I think it's beneficial for users that they don't. I do believe that without it Chrome would have a much bigger market share and developers wouldn't be forced to support browsers other than Chrome and Google would have even more power over web standards than today. I guess Chromium being open source would make it a bit better.
  - 5y ago

heavyset_go 5y ago

Apple has 60% of the mobile market in the US[1], and more than double the revenue from their dominant stake in the mobile app distribution market than Google[2], both off which make up over 99% of that market. Also, our layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[3]: > Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-android-dominates-in-china-and-india https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-... [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/ [3] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

mrtksn 5y ago
As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process. I would say, Apple is very popular in the US but I don't see how it can be a monopoly when you can just order another device from Amazon and that device being just good or maybe better. In many other rich countries, people are choosing Samsung, Americans can do that too if they want.
- josefx 5y ago
  > As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process. I would love to make this argument the next time vaccines are mentioned. Remember vaccines cause autism and turn the frogs gay. Any attempt to correct this using medical jargon or methods is literally out of scope for the average hacker news commenter and should be avoided.
  - mrtksn 5y ago

nikitaga 5y ago

Apple might have a minority of units sold, but they have a very convincing majority of revenues and profits in several markets, e.g. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-handset-market-operating-profit-q2-2021/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-handset-market-o... "Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments." And those are global numbers. Now what do you think their US numbers look like, or their app store numbers? They hold plenty of monopolistic power to enable abuse, and that's enough to be regulated if the government was so inclined. And, this lawsuit isn't just about Apple, it's about Google too. Certainly you don't have any doubts about their monopoly status. > I don't see how regulators should intervene in this. TFA proposes some remedies in very broad strokes. Looks good to me. Unregulated monopolies and oligopolies extract excessive profits from consumers and limit choice through anti-competitive practices. You might be fine with that. I'm not.

mrtksn 5y ago
Making more money by selling less implies large margins and I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly. Actually, it means that their customers are so happy with the Apple product that they are willing to pay a premium to have it. Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch. You can verify that people are not paying Apple more because they don't have an option not to do so by by checking the shops for availability of other brands(they are available) and their viability(They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple).
- nikitaga 5y ago
  > I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly. > Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch. In a functioning free market, competitors would have picked up the slack long ago (iPhone is 14 years old now), and cashed in on those high profit margins too. Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices. That doesn't deny the popularity of Apple's products, by the way. Believe it or not they can be both genuinely popular and monopolistic / anti-competitive, with both of those factors contributing to insanely above-market profit margins. "You can buy LG" just shows that you don't understand the distinction between concentrated market power power, anti competitive business practices, and actual monopoly, nor the fact that antitrust regulations do not require their target to be an actual monopoly with zero competitors available for sale (and for good reason). > They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple Bing and DDG are also available and viable, and "[some] techies say" that they're better than Google. So what. This metric is utterly irrelevant.

ximeng 5y ago

If you’re not happy with Apple and Google behaving monopolistically “buy Google Pixel” doesn’t seem like a great solution. Nor does buy a phone running Google’s operating system feel like a great answer.

cokeandpepsi 5y ago
Just buy iPhone, it's comfy
mrtksn 5y ago
If you are not happy with the competition too, I guess you can watch Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to cheer you up or go make your own device.
- ximeng 5y ago
  The allegation is these companies are not competing with each other, they are working together. This includes working together to prevent competitors making their own devices. There are very limited alternatives if you want to avoid Google and Apple completely. I'm not familiar with the Eurovision show you mention, so not sure of the relevance.