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The only solution I see is the FTC stepping in. I don't understand why they're sitting on their hands. What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they

The only solution I see is the FTC stepping in. I don't understand why they're sitting on their hands. What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they just bundled some extra software. By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them. It's amazing how brazen it is.

MBCook 4y ago
Apple supports standards they don’t own like h264 and h265. Why should they be forced to support this particular standard? Do we want the government dictating which video encoding standards we have to use? It’s not Apple is only allowing QuickTime, their fully owned protocol that others must license from them, and nothing else. What is Apple doing on this issue that would be an anti-trust issue?
- bagels 4y ago
  Av1 helps google and other competitors. It doesn't help apple much.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    I mean it may save them bandwidth on Apple TV+ or iTunes TV/movie purchases. But it seems they’ve chosen not to bother. Maybe all the re-encoding would negate the benefits for them? Maybe they didn’t think it was enough of an improvement over h264. Maybe they bet on h265 and it worked out well enough (for them) or it didn’t but they figure by the time they got everything set for VP1 something better will be ready. Who knows.
    - FireGrey 4y ago
      I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips. A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14. Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer. Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.
      - MBCook 4y ago
        That would certainly have been the argument at first. Battery life is EVERYTHING. But Netflix announced they would be using it in 2016. YouTube started using in 2018, the year the standard hit 1.0. Apple had plenty of warning and time to get the necessary hardware acceleration blocks available by now. Chips have multi-year timelines but it’s been 4+ years. Now on the other side, Netflix actually started using it in early 2020/late 2021, depending on device. YouTube rolled it out wide in 2020. Twitch is working on it. So Apple is at most 2 years behind the content. It’s not like it’s been 5+. And if they decided to wait to see how those early rollouts went due to hardware timelines it might make sense support only appears to be coming now (based on someone pointing out AV1 shows up now in the AVPlayer framework documentation).
      - alwillis 4y ago
        I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips. I doubt it. Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to decode AV1 in software. Sure, the battery life won’t be as good but there are other trade-offs that can be made. Their latest chips were developed before AV1 had gained enough traction to be concerned about. I suspect that future M2 and M3 and A-series SoCs will have hardware decoding for AV1 built-in. In the meanwhile, a future version of macOS Ventura and iOS 16 will have AV1 support; it’s just going to take a little longer. They probably want to roll it out simultaneously on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and iPadOS.
      - vetinari 4y ago
        When AMD/Nvidia/Intel and Samsung/Mediatek/Rockchip/etc were able to put AV1 blocks into their chips, I'm sure Apple would be capable of doing the same -- if they wanted. Now it looks that they do not want.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Apple do literally own necessary parts of those standards, and recieve royalties for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
- fyzix 4y ago
  Your argument is a straw man, he's saying that apple should be force to allow competing browser engines on iOS so other vendors can support what they don't want to...
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    So you are saying there are no advantages to a closed platform, no place in the world for it and it shouldn't be allowed by the government to exist. Because it's not like there are no alternatives. If there was no Android, I'd say yeah, regulate away.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Any time a statement starts with “so you are saying …” the answer is no. It’s a phrase entirely used for building strawmen.
      - tambourine_man 4y ago
        Which is what the grandparent is being accused of. I guess it’s strawmen all the way down.
        girvo 4y ago
        If we all accuse each other of building strawmen, we don’t have to interact with each others actual arguments. Kind of neat, in a sad way.
- throwup 4y ago
  The issue raised is not about video codecs, but about browsers. Apple is using their market position to artificially prevent Safari from being competed against by other vendors—that is classic antitrust behavior. For comparison, imagine Microsoft banned all browser engines other than EdgeHTML from running on Windows. Would you find that acceptable?
  - MBCook 4y ago
    This is an article about video codecs. I interpreted the above comments as complaining Safari was a problem for not supporting this video codec. So my comment was about their video codec policy.
    - MobiusHorizons 4y ago
      You may not be aware, but chrome does exist on iOS, but even so, it is actually running the safari rendering engine because apple prevents other browser engines from running. This effectively prevents chrome or Firefox from offering a browser with av1 support (as far as I am aware) so the browser engine is relevant to the codec policy discussion.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    I don't believe Apple has banned alternative engines. It's just that they don't allow JIT code execution for security reasons which is needed for a comparatively performant engine.
    - Jasper_ 4y ago
      Yes, they have banned alternative engines. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5.6 https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5... > Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
      - enkrs 4y ago
        Which is the reason why I choose iOS: I trust Apple to implement the integrations in the WebView for best battery life. To get new OS features in the browser right away. Would Google Chrome implement picture-in-picture on the iPhone if they were running their own engine? I use Firefox on iOS for the password and tab sync integration, and am supper happy that it’s using the WebKit framework. I care about the iOS experience more than some video codec support.
- kersplody 4y ago
  Apple might have made a deal with one or more major h.265 patent holders that discourages them from fully supporting av-1, similar to how Google pays apple nine digits a year to keep Google search default in the Apple ecosystem. Court action could compel any deal like this to be made public.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Honestly, being Apple, it could 100% be a “screw Google, it doesn’t hurt us” move without any direct financial incentive. They’ve done it many times before (though usually in the Steve Jobs era).
  - hatware 4y ago
    > similar to how Google pays apple nine digits a year I couldn't believe this and looked it up. It's $9 billion. Which is ten digits. Good god.
majormajor 4y ago
> What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they just bundled some extra software nah........ that's not true
derefr 4y ago
> By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them. Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to. In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)
- scarface74 4y ago
  Again absolutely nothing changed with respect to IE in the US as a result of the FTC case.
  - derefr 4y ago
    Who said it did? The precedent people are always citing is that the FTC cared to sue Microsoft for doing it; not that anything came of it.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      And that’s about as useless as the EU caring to protect users privacy and writing a 99 section 11 chapter law and the only thing users got were cookie pop ups.
    - alwillis 4y ago
      not that anything came of it. You’re joking, right? The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard. We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
scarface74 4y ago
Why do people act like the results of the FTC case is lost to the annals of history? Absolutely nothing happen with the case with respect to bundling. There was never a browser choice initiative nor was there ever a time since IR was bundled with Windows was it not bundled.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> I don't understand why they're sitting on their hands. What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison Windows had, IIRC, something like 97% of the market. It appears[0] that iPhones have a bit over half the phone market today, but they have nothing like the monopoly that Microsoft held. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/02/iphone-us-market-share/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/02/iphone-us-market-share/
- tristan957 4y ago
  You don't have to have an actual monopoly for the government to act on anti-trust practices.
alwillis 4y ago
What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they just bundled some extra software. Microsoft threatened to cancel the Windows license of several PC manufacturers including HP for making Netscape Navigator their default web browser instead of Internet Explorer. This would essentially put those companies out of business, so they had to comply. Not to mention, for corporate and home users, Netscape Navigator was commercial product that customers had to purchase while Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free. This was back in the day when most people didn’t have broadband and stores sold shrink-wrapped boxes of software containing floppy disks or CDs. I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in either PCs or smartphones; there are plenty of alternatives to iOS and macOS. There are lots of examples of platforms where the platform owner decides what can run on that platform, starting with game consoles.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  >I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers. Ah yes, the free market will come up with a solution to this.
  - TimeBearingDown 4y ago
    This feels like simply a facetious non-sequitur Do you have anything constructive to add?
- tristan957 4y ago
  You don't have to have a monopoly for the FTC to come after you. You just have to have a sizeable portion of a market.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  There are other requirements on effective monopolies. But the US executive branch has decided not to bother enforcing most of them. Used to be, using monopoly power to drive other companies out of business or out of a market was an abuse of that power. Now all the USDoJ will enforce is charging excessive prices. Reiterating, being a monopoly in the US is not illegal, but it having chosen to have a monopoly makes you subject to extra fairness laws. These laws should be enforced as written, but no recent administration has been willing to step up, and Americans are the poorer for it.
Telemakhos 4y ago
I may be misremembering things, and I'd appreciate the correction if someone can show me my error here. When the iPhone was first released, telcos were extremely paranoid, because there were legit scams by which an abuse of the telco network could result in monetary transfers. If you called the wrong number, whether a US (and Apple was a US company first and foremost) 900 number or an international number, you might owe a great deal on your next telco bill. The original iPhone had no native code applications, only web apps, because of the paranoia resulting from scams that had been perpetrated in the 90's. The telcos required a level of security that, in the early 00's and its embrace of Adobe Flash and other high-vulnerability-surface technologies, seemed prudent. A short while later, Apple proved its security model enough to allow native code applications. This happened because, despite the initial fears of a "smart phone" being a lure for scammers, Apple's security model, which included mandating WebKit so that its security model would be imposed on anything touching the web, kept those web things separate from telco charges. Fast-forward to 2022: now we wonder why Apple keeps locking things down so that no app can use a security model that Apple has not vetted. In this era, rogue calls to Nigeria don't drain thousands of dollars from your account. Now, we wonder why Apple seems so paranoid. For me, whose memory reminds me that there was a time that telephony involved the risk of connecting to the wrong number and losing money, there seems to have been a time that "smart phones" ran the risk of presenting an attack surface that could incur dire financial consequences for individuals. I also suspect that those times have passed, but I'm not sure. I have to wonder what the intersectional implications of a more open environment for a device capable of both web browsing (with its security issues) and telephony (with its billing issues) might be. When I wonder about things like that, I'm happier with walled gardens that I would not accept on my laptop, which is not connected to a phone number and billing account. A computer running Windows and using IE is one thing, namely a computer on an IP network; a phone running iOS is two things, a computer and a telephone, and there are (or were) mechanisms by which a telephone could charge money that a computer cannot (or could not).
est31 4y ago
The difference is a) the FTC was way more lax in enforcing anti-monopoly laws than back in the day, b) Microsoft was a monopolist, c) downloading software from the internet hasn't been as much of a thing back then, so obtaining internet explorer replacements was more complicated, so preinstalling something was going to influence pepole's descisions way more than now where installing an app is just one visit to the app store app away. Only years later with improved internet speeds for everyone we got the ability to install chrome with a simple download. Lastly, d), you also have to consider that Chrome and Chromium based engines basically have a monopoly right now. So I'm not sure what the government stepping in will bring to users: Right now it's more that Safari is the only non-Chrome browser that most web devs care about. Re b: Apple has never been a monopolist so they never got into that situation. This allowed them to have such opinionated choices that would have never worked for Microsoft. However, this might be changing. Recent statistics show that they have extreme market shares in the teenager demographic. If those kids grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple will become one, in the US market at least, and this means they will have to change.
shellac 4y ago
> What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison You really don't know what you are talking about. The issue with Microsoft was not bundling a piece of software and not fixing the box model. Microsoft (of the 90s) deliberately worked to undermine the web using their dominant market position, adding their own extensions to ensure lock in. Their behaviour in the web standards process was appalling, and directed from above (sometimes by phone outside meeting). "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" was not hyperbole.
rkangel 4y ago
It's possible the EU has sorted this out for us already. The Digital Markets Act comes into effect 1st November and really begins to apply in May next year. One of the thing that it specifies is that Gatekeepers (Apple in this case) can't prefer their own services and apps over other people's - they must allow third party interoperability. If I understand it correctly: * You must be able to uninstall preloaded first party apps * You must be able to install your preferred third party equivalents (e.g. Firefox) * I believe also - you can install alternative app stores We shall see what actually happens once Apple's lawyers dig out loopholes, and we'll see if the Gatekeepers of this world have an alternate 'EU vs rest of world strategy'. Also, if that does happen, which side the UK falls in...

MBCook 4y ago

Apple supports standards they don’t own like h264 and h265. Why should they be forced to support this particular standard? Do we want the government dictating which video encoding standards we have to use? It’s not Apple is only allowing QuickTime, their fully owned protocol that others must license from them, and nothing else. What is Apple doing on this issue that would be an anti-trust issue?

bagels 4y ago
Av1 helps google and other competitors. It doesn't help apple much.
- MBCook 4y ago
  I mean it may save them bandwidth on Apple TV+ or iTunes TV/movie purchases. But it seems they’ve chosen not to bother. Maybe all the re-encoding would negate the benefits for them? Maybe they didn’t think it was enough of an improvement over h264. Maybe they bet on h265 and it worked out well enough (for them) or it didn’t but they figure by the time they got everything set for VP1 something better will be ready. Who knows.
  - FireGrey 4y ago
    I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips. A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14. Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer. Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.
    - MBCook 4y ago
      That would certainly have been the argument at first. Battery life is EVERYTHING. But Netflix announced they would be using it in 2016. YouTube started using in 2018, the year the standard hit 1.0. Apple had plenty of warning and time to get the necessary hardware acceleration blocks available by now. Chips have multi-year timelines but it’s been 4+ years. Now on the other side, Netflix actually started using it in early 2020/late 2021, depending on device. YouTube rolled it out wide in 2020. Twitch is working on it. So Apple is at most 2 years behind the content. It’s not like it’s been 5+. And if they decided to wait to see how those early rollouts went due to hardware timelines it might make sense support only appears to be coming now (based on someone pointing out AV1 shows up now in the AVPlayer framework documentation).
    - alwillis 4y ago
      I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips. I doubt it. Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to decode AV1 in software. Sure, the battery life won’t be as good but there are other trade-offs that can be made. Their latest chips were developed before AV1 had gained enough traction to be concerned about. I suspect that future M2 and M3 and A-series SoCs will have hardware decoding for AV1 built-in. In the meanwhile, a future version of macOS Ventura and iOS 16 will have AV1 support; it’s just going to take a little longer. They probably want to roll it out simultaneously on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and iPadOS.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      When AMD/Nvidia/Intel and Samsung/Mediatek/Rockchip/etc were able to put AV1 blocks into their chips, I'm sure Apple would be capable of doing the same -- if they wanted. Now it looks that they do not want.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Apple do literally own necessary parts of those standards, and recieve royalties for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
fyzix 4y ago
Your argument is a straw man, he's saying that apple should be force to allow competing browser engines on iOS so other vendors can support what they don't want to...
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  So you are saying there are no advantages to a closed platform, no place in the world for it and it shouldn't be allowed by the government to exist. Because it's not like there are no alternatives. If there was no Android, I'd say yeah, regulate away.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Any time a statement starts with “so you are saying …” the answer is no. It’s a phrase entirely used for building strawmen.
    - tambourine_man 4y ago
      Which is what the grandparent is being accused of. I guess it’s strawmen all the way down.
      - girvo 4y ago
        If we all accuse each other of building strawmen, we don’t have to interact with each others actual arguments. Kind of neat, in a sad way.
throwup 4y ago
The issue raised is not about video codecs, but about browsers. Apple is using their market position to artificially prevent Safari from being competed against by other vendors—that is classic antitrust behavior. For comparison, imagine Microsoft banned all browser engines other than EdgeHTML from running on Windows. Would you find that acceptable?
- MBCook 4y ago
  This is an article about video codecs. I interpreted the above comments as complaining Safari was a problem for not supporting this video codec. So my comment was about their video codec policy.
  - MobiusHorizons 4y ago
    You may not be aware, but chrome does exist on iOS, but even so, it is actually running the safari rendering engine because apple prevents other browser engines from running. This effectively prevents chrome or Firefox from offering a browser with av1 support (as far as I am aware) so the browser engine is relevant to the codec policy discussion.
- threeseed 4y ago
  I don't believe Apple has banned alternative engines. It's just that they don't allow JIT code execution for security reasons which is needed for a comparatively performant engine.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    Yes, they have banned alternative engines. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5.6 https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5... > Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
    - enkrs 4y ago
      Which is the reason why I choose iOS: I trust Apple to implement the integrations in the WebView for best battery life. To get new OS features in the browser right away. Would Google Chrome implement picture-in-picture on the iPhone if they were running their own engine? I use Firefox on iOS for the password and tab sync integration, and am supper happy that it’s using the WebKit framework. I care about the iOS experience more than some video codec support.
kersplody 4y ago
Apple might have made a deal with one or more major h.265 patent holders that discourages them from fully supporting av-1, similar to how Google pays apple nine digits a year to keep Google search default in the Apple ecosystem. Court action could compel any deal like this to be made public.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Honestly, being Apple, it could 100% be a “screw Google, it doesn’t hurt us” move without any direct financial incentive. They’ve done it many times before (though usually in the Steve Jobs era).
- hatware 4y ago
  > similar to how Google pays apple nine digits a year I couldn't believe this and looked it up. It's $9 billion. Which is ten digits. Good god.

majormajor 4y ago

> What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they just bundled some extra software nah........ that's not true

derefr 4y ago

> By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them. Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to. In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)

scarface74 4y ago
Again absolutely nothing changed with respect to IE in the US as a result of the FTC case.
- derefr 4y ago
  Who said it did? The precedent people are always citing is that the FTC cared to sue Microsoft for doing it; not that anything came of it.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And that’s about as useless as the EU caring to protect users privacy and writing a 99 section 11 chapter law and the only thing users got were cookie pop ups.
  - alwillis 4y ago
    not that anything came of it. You’re joking, right? The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard. We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript

scarface74 4y ago

Why do people act like the results of the FTC case is lost to the annals of history? Absolutely nothing happen with the case with respect to bundling. There was never a browser choice initiative nor was there ever a time since IR was bundled with Windows was it not bundled.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> I don't understand why they're sitting on their hands. What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison Windows had, IIRC, something like 97% of the market. It appears[0] that iPhones have a bit over half the phone market today, but they have nothing like the monopoly that Microsoft held. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/02/iphone-us-market-share/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/02/iphone-us-market-share/

tristan957 4y ago
You don't have to have an actual monopoly for the government to act on anti-trust practices.

alwillis 4y ago

What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison—they just bundled some extra software. Microsoft threatened to cancel the Windows license of several PC manufacturers including HP for making Netscape Navigator their default web browser instead of Internet Explorer. This would essentially put those companies out of business, so they had to comply. Not to mention, for corporate and home users, Netscape Navigator was commercial product that customers had to purchase while Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free. This was back in the day when most people didn’t have broadband and stores sold shrink-wrapped boxes of software containing floppy disks or CDs. I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in either PCs or smartphones; there are plenty of alternatives to iOS and macOS. There are lots of examples of platforms where the platform owner decides what can run on that platform, starting with game consoles.

bobkazamakis 4y ago
>I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers. Ah yes, the free market will come up with a solution to this.
- TimeBearingDown 4y ago
  This feels like simply a facetious non-sequitur Do you have anything constructive to add?
tristan957 4y ago
You don't have to have a monopoly for the FTC to come after you. You just have to have a sizeable portion of a market.
pencilguin 4y ago
There are other requirements on effective monopolies. But the US executive branch has decided not to bother enforcing most of them. Used to be, using monopoly power to drive other companies out of business or out of a market was an abuse of that power. Now all the USDoJ will enforce is charging excessive prices. Reiterating, being a monopoly in the US is not illegal, but it having chosen to have a monopoly makes you subject to extra fairness laws. These laws should be enforced as written, but no recent administration has been willing to step up, and Americans are the poorer for it.

Telemakhos 4y ago

I may be misremembering things, and I'd appreciate the correction if someone can show me my error here. When the iPhone was first released, telcos were extremely paranoid, because there were legit scams by which an abuse of the telco network could result in monetary transfers. If you called the wrong number, whether a US (and Apple was a US company first and foremost) 900 number or an international number, you might owe a great deal on your next telco bill. The original iPhone had no native code applications, only web apps, because of the paranoia resulting from scams that had been perpetrated in the 90's. The telcos required a level of security that, in the early 00's and its embrace of Adobe Flash and other high-vulnerability-surface technologies, seemed prudent. A short while later, Apple proved its security model enough to allow native code applications. This happened because, despite the initial fears of a "smart phone" being a lure for scammers, Apple's security model, which included mandating WebKit so that its security model would be imposed on anything touching the web, kept those web things separate from telco charges. Fast-forward to 2022: now we wonder why Apple keeps locking things down so that no app can use a security model that Apple has not vetted. In this era, rogue calls to Nigeria don't drain thousands of dollars from your account. Now, we wonder why Apple seems so paranoid. For me, whose memory reminds me that there was a time that telephony involved the risk of connecting to the wrong number and losing money, there seems to have been a time that "smart phones" ran the risk of presenting an attack surface that could incur dire financial consequences for individuals. I also suspect that those times have passed, but I'm not sure. I have to wonder what the intersectional implications of a more open environment for a device capable of both web browsing (with its security issues) and telephony (with its billing issues) might be. When I wonder about things like that, I'm happier with walled gardens that I would not accept on my laptop, which is not connected to a phone number and billing account. A computer running Windows and using IE is one thing, namely a computer on an IP network; a phone running iOS is two things, a computer and a telephone, and there are (or were) mechanisms by which a telephone could charge money that a computer cannot (or could not).

est31 4y ago

The difference is a) the FTC was way more lax in enforcing anti-monopoly laws than back in the day, b) Microsoft was a monopolist, c) downloading software from the internet hasn't been as much of a thing back then, so obtaining internet explorer replacements was more complicated, so preinstalling something was going to influence pepole's descisions way more than now where installing an app is just one visit to the app store app away. Only years later with improved internet speeds for everyone we got the ability to install chrome with a simple download. Lastly, d), you also have to consider that Chrome and Chromium based engines basically have a monopoly right now. So I'm not sure what the government stepping in will bring to users: Right now it's more that Safari is the only non-Chrome browser that most web devs care about. Re b: Apple has never been a monopolist so they never got into that situation. This allowed them to have such opinionated choices that would have never worked for Microsoft. However, this might be changing. Recent statistics show that they have extreme market shares in the teenager demographic. If those kids grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple will become one, in the US market at least, and this means they will have to change.

shellac 4y ago

> What Microsoft did in the 90s was pale by comparison You really don't know what you are talking about. The issue with Microsoft was not bundling a piece of software and not fixing the box model. Microsoft (of the 90s) deliberately worked to undermine the web using their dominant market position, adding their own extensions to ensure lock in. Their behaviour in the web standards process was appalling, and directed from above (sometimes by phone outside meeting). "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" was not hyperbole.

rkangel 4y ago

It's possible the EU has sorted this out for us already. The Digital Markets Act comes into effect 1st November and really begins to apply in May next year. One of the thing that it specifies is that Gatekeepers (Apple in this case) can't prefer their own services and apps over other people's - they must allow third party interoperability. If I understand it correctly: * You must be able to uninstall preloaded first party apps * You must be able to install your preferred third party equivalents (e.g. Firefox) * I believe also - you can install alternative app stores We shall see what actually happens once Apple's lawyers dig out loopholes, and we'll see if the Gatekeepers of this world have an alternate 'EU vs rest of world strategy'. Also, if that does happen, which side the UK falls in...