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I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be beha

I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate regulations. U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?

geofft 5y ago
Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking. Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds? To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc. Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above? Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
Someone 5y ago
I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices. Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later. I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive. And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)
- cwalv 5y ago
  > I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive I think the anti-competitive part is refusing to make iMessage available anywhere other than on apple products, even though there are clearly users who would like to use it on other platforms
  - Someone 5y ago
    Deciding not to serve a market isn’t anti-competitive. I also don’t think keeping the protocol closed so that competitors cannot implement it is anti-competitive, but that’s getting borderline for me. I also think Apple, if they decided to provide android support, should be allowed make that a paid service. After all, it runs on their back-end. I guess even a reasonable pricing scheme would be met with resistance.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  There's an "easy" solution for Apple to stop being perceived as uncompetitive: create an Android app, with feature-parity. If Apple was a small company, no issue; but they are a $3T company, and conscious decisions taken by such behemoths to increase lock-in should be treated differently. They also have >50% of the market, not a minuscule of it. Of course they won't do it on a virtue, because they know it will lower the friction of switching. Every big company loves walled gardens that maximize the friction of changing; that's why maybe they should get some scrutiny from a regulator. What Apple did might have just been a well-intentioned engineering hack but it became insidious: giving the minimum compatibility, meaning you can have non-Apple people in the chats (our hands are clean! plus, disincentivizes groups to look for alternative tools), but everyone gets inferior experience (non-Apple folks get less features, Apple folks get the white-text-on-green-bg which is unpleasant to read), and "blaming the victim" starts.

geofft 5y ago

Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking. Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds? To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc. Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above? Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?

Someone 5y ago

I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices. Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later. I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive. And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)

cwalv 5y ago
> I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive I think the anti-competitive part is refusing to make iMessage available anywhere other than on apple products, even though there are clearly users who would like to use it on other platforms
- Someone 5y ago
  Deciding not to serve a market isn’t anti-competitive. I also don’t think keeping the protocol closed so that competitors cannot implement it is anti-competitive, but that’s getting borderline for me. I also think Apple, if they decided to provide android support, should be allowed make that a paid service. After all, it runs on their back-end. I guess even a reasonable pricing scheme would be met with resistance.
jakub_g 5y ago
There's an "easy" solution for Apple to stop being perceived as uncompetitive: create an Android app, with feature-parity. If Apple was a small company, no issue; but they are a $3T company, and conscious decisions taken by such behemoths to increase lock-in should be treated differently. They also have >50% of the market, not a minuscule of it. Of course they won't do it on a virtue, because they know it will lower the friction of switching. Every big company loves walled gardens that maximize the friction of changing; that's why maybe they should get some scrutiny from a regulator. What Apple did might have just been a well-intentioned engineering hack but it became insidious: giving the minimum compatibility, meaning you can have non-Apple people in the chats (our hands are clean! plus, disincentivizes groups to look for alternative tools), but everyone gets inferior experience (non-Apple folks get less features, Apple folks get the white-text-on-green-bg which is unpleasant to read), and "blaming the victim" starts.