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The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him complaining about Amazon's reader app making

The App Store model was specifically implemented and approved by Steve Jobs. There's old internal e-mails from him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax. In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying. The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times. [0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.

dangus 2y ago
I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department. The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot." The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Global marketshare is irrelevant, Apple has over 60% of the mobile OS market in the US and are responsible for 70% of all mobile app sales in the US.
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  > The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant. *The US will let corporations do whatever they want while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges.
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct. We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved. People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is. But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
    - NekkoDroid 2y ago
      > Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position. Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
    - bix6 2y ago
      How is that insulting to the judge? If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market and exercise monopoly-like control. Especially considering all the colluding occurring.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power. Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android. But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist. As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does. [0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use. [1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation. [2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit. [3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    >27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power. 27% Worldwide And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android device makers. In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly when your closest competitor is at 24%. And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone. 80 fucking 7 % To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).
talldatethrow 2y ago
[flagged]
- plorg 2y ago
  I personally would not respect a doctor if he told me I could treat my cancer by eating good.
  - talldatethrow 2y ago
    The government and medical establishment has watched as cancer rates have risen over the last few generations. They're getting better at treating the things yes, as they help us get more over it. Take mammograms for example. Some European countries have stopped using them all together because even the US admits it raises the likelihood of getting breast cancer. But the US medical system will tell you it's worth increasing your chances of breast cancer from mammograms, because they help you catch breast cancer you may have gotten in other ways earlier, thus making it more treatable. Not a bet I would take personally. But women are rarely told that. Every women I've told that to is shocked.
    - plorg 2y ago
      So far as I can tell this is simply not true. There was a report made in Switzerland that suggested mammograms were ineffective, but that report appears to have been flawed and its recommendations were never implemented. Swiss doctors still recommend mammograms for women over 40. The point here, though, is that even if mammography were ineffective at identifying cancer or had large false positive rates - which no reputable medical body has suggested is the case - medical and surgical intervention would be the proper treatment, because they work and are effective for those forms of cancer. There is also simply no evidence that Western medicine is causing more cancer. I would believe that there are diets that can decrease the likelihood of it, but there is also not evidence nor any known mechanism by which a diet can cure cancer once it exists.
- brendoelfrendo 2y ago
  I don't know if I would call a guy who created a low-fat vegetarian fad diet that doesn't seem to have a basis in any understanding of nutritional science a "well respected doctor," but sure. I would argue that whatever good Steve Jobs did by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he could have done more by also taking good medical advice and treating his cancer.
ReptileMan 2y ago
>In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0] You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law. At some point (which we've already passed) both governments and corporations are so big and all-controlling that they act as one, and there is no "keeping them honest". Consumer rights go out the window because nobody is willing to enforce them when being a good government employee precludes becoming a corporate employee later on. Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
  - bondarchuk 2y ago
    >The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law. I don't see that at all. A very small government that is willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far. It's just that the will is not there.
karaterobot 2y ago
Not that I think Steve Jobs was a super nice guy, but he clearly cared about Apple's brand, including the part of about users and developers not thinking of them rapacious and hostile, which is sort of how I (and many others) view their pricing model today. I like to think he'd have seen how bad this choice has played out for Apple's brand and changed his position by now, if he were still around.
- Longhanks 2y ago
  You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course, the guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine? I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this, both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what happened to the company afterwards. He was more right than they were. > guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine Hilariously irrelevant. > both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate, when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting around the rate while small developers had to pay it. Nobody, in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60% fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
    - Longhanks 2y ago
      Both him getting fired and possibly dying earlier are directly related to the fact that the man does not easily change his mind. For his company, this turned out to be the better way, yes. For his body, it may have been better to go some other way. Either way, the point is that Steve Jobs does not easily change the course that he himself set.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
…him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax. Heh. Attempting to buy a book from the Kindle app was how I first became aware of these policies. Was fruitlessly searching for a buy button, but could not find anything. Did a web search to figure out why I was an idiot who could not spend my money. Only to discover that I was purposely getting a worse user experience because some mega corporations all wanted a taste of my transaction.
- mcguire 2y ago
  At least the Android app tells you that you cannot buy ebooks in it. :-)
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Under Steve Jobs the company ate the fees not the users. You were not allowed to charge more in the app than via your site. This is the difference I'm getting at: "We want a cut but our users shouldn't have to pay more" vs "We want a cut and our users can pay for it" Which is why it's specifically the approach of Tim Cook's Apple to it's customers.

dangus 2y ago

I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department. The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot." The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.

heavyset_go 2y ago
Global marketshare is irrelevant, Apple has over 60% of the mobile OS market in the US and are responsible for 70% of all mobile app sales in the US.
NekkoDroid 2y ago
> The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant. *The US will let corporations do whatever they want while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges.
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct. We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved. People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is. But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
  - NekkoDroid 2y ago
    > Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position. Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
  - bix6 2y ago
    How is that insulting to the judge? If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market and exercise monopoly-like control. Especially considering all the colluding occurring.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power. Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android. But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist. As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does. [0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use. [1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation. [2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit. [3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  >27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power. 27% Worldwide And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android device makers. In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly when your closest competitor is at 24%. And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone. 80 fucking 7 % To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).

talldatethrow 2y ago

[flagged]

plorg 2y ago
I personally would not respect a doctor if he told me I could treat my cancer by eating good.
- talldatethrow 2y ago
  The government and medical establishment has watched as cancer rates have risen over the last few generations. They're getting better at treating the things yes, as they help us get more over it. Take mammograms for example. Some European countries have stopped using them all together because even the US admits it raises the likelihood of getting breast cancer. But the US medical system will tell you it's worth increasing your chances of breast cancer from mammograms, because they help you catch breast cancer you may have gotten in other ways earlier, thus making it more treatable. Not a bet I would take personally. But women are rarely told that. Every women I've told that to is shocked.
  - plorg 2y ago
    So far as I can tell this is simply not true. There was a report made in Switzerland that suggested mammograms were ineffective, but that report appears to have been flawed and its recommendations were never implemented. Swiss doctors still recommend mammograms for women over 40. The point here, though, is that even if mammography were ineffective at identifying cancer or had large false positive rates - which no reputable medical body has suggested is the case - medical and surgical intervention would be the proper treatment, because they work and are effective for those forms of cancer. There is also simply no evidence that Western medicine is causing more cancer. I would believe that there are diets that can decrease the likelihood of it, but there is also not evidence nor any known mechanism by which a diet can cure cancer once it exists.
brendoelfrendo 2y ago
I don't know if I would call a guy who created a low-fat vegetarian fad diet that doesn't seem to have a basis in any understanding of nutritional science a "well respected doctor," but sure. I would argue that whatever good Steve Jobs did by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he could have done more by also taking good medical advice and treating his cancer.

ReptileMan 2y ago

>In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0] You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.

kmeisthax 2y ago
The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law. At some point (which we've already passed) both governments and corporations are so big and all-controlling that they act as one, and there is no "keeping them honest". Consumer rights go out the window because nobody is willing to enforce them when being a good government employee precludes becoming a corporate employee later on. Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  >The bigger we let companies get, the bigger the government has to get in order to enforce the law. I don't see that at all. A very small government that is willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far. It's just that the will is not there.

karaterobot 2y ago

Not that I think Steve Jobs was a super nice guy, but he clearly cared about Apple's brand, including the part of about users and developers not thinking of them rapacious and hostile, which is sort of how I (and many others) view their pricing model today. I like to think he'd have seen how bad this choice has played out for Apple's brand and changed his position by now, if he were still around.

Longhanks 2y ago
You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course, the guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine? I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this, both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > You mean the guy that literally had to be fired from his very own company because he refused to change course Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what happened to the company afterwards. He was more right than they were. > guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine Hilariously irrelevant. > both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate, when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting around the rate while small developers had to pay it. Nobody, in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60% fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
  - Longhanks 2y ago
    Both him getting fired and possibly dying earlier are directly related to the fact that the man does not easily change his mind. For his company, this turned out to be the better way, yes. For his body, it may have been better to go some other way. Either way, the point is that Steve Jobs does not easily change the course that he himself set.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

…him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax. Heh. Attempting to buy a book from the Kindle app was how I first became aware of these policies. Was fruitlessly searching for a buy button, but could not find anything. Did a web search to figure out why I was an idiot who could not spend my money. Only to discover that I was purposely getting a worse user experience because some mega corporations all wanted a taste of my transaction.

mcguire 2y ago
At least the Android app tells you that you cannot buy ebooks in it. :-)

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

Under Steve Jobs the company ate the fees not the users. You were not allowed to charge more in the app than via your site. This is the difference I'm getting at: "We want a cut but our users shouldn't have to pay more" vs "We want a cut and our users can pay for it" Which is why it's specifically the approach of Tim Cook's Apple to it's customers.