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> I find headlines like this much more appropriate when placed in terms of days of revenue: "Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near 2 days o

> I find headlines like this much more appropriate when placed in terms of days of revenue: "Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near 2 days of revenue!" I feel like fines aren't even an appropriate remedy for this. They're both inherently arbitrary and not something that actually fixes it. And that combination gives governments a perverse incentive, because they get $2B to put in their own pockets while leaving the monopolist to continue monopolizing so they can come back and extract more later instead of actually solving it. What they should be doing is breaking up companies that do this sort of thing.

pacifika 1y ago
Imagine the response if the uk tried to break up apple
- londons_explore 1y ago
  I'd love it if a government would decide that the hardware side of the company needs to split from the software side. Suddenly we could buy macos to run in a VM. Or we could buy iPhones running android.
  - amelius 1y ago
    But that would be like a sudden outbreak of common sense.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    We'd have to pay for iOS upgrades. Which, given my feelings about iOS 26, might be a good thing. I mean, if their revenue depends on the OS actually being good rather than inevitable…
  - pacifika 1y ago
    Or split Apple UK off. And then fine them.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Imagine the response if the uk tried to break up apple This right here is why they need to be broken up. Are we supposed to have a company more powerful than a country?
  - immibis 1y ago
    Yes? In feudalism, kings control everything. In capitalism, investors control everything. It's what the system is named after - kinda hard to miss.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Investors don't control Apple, the CEO of Apple does. The investors are random people holding shares of it in their 401k. The company being so big is also they reason they can't control it effectively, because the people holding it are so diffuse that they have significant coordination costs.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy. Investors are "one share, one vote", rather than democracy "one person, one vote". The recent thing with Musk/Tesla and his trillion dollar options is being voted on, and Apple face campaigns and have votes, too: https://apnews.com/article/apple-dei-shareholder-proposal-annual-meeting-96637c8d4fa3d5e2a73dc59a59c2485b https://apnews.com/article/apple-dei-shareholder-proposal-an...
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy. That depends how big it is. For something the size of the US, sure, and that's a problem. It's one of the reasons the central government was meant to have limited powers. For something the size of a small town or local business, absolutely not, because then each vote both matters more to the outcome and has more direct consequences to the voter, which dramatically lowers the coordination costs. A single individual could change the outcome just by convincing a small number of local people who are each more inclined to care about it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
immibis 1y ago
Fines can work. We should continue fining them one day of revenue every day until compliance occurs.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  You believe that breaking them up is geopolitically infeasible but a fine larger than the GDP of Finland would fly? On top of that, giant bureaucracies are great at "compliance". That isn't the same as doing the thing you actually wanted though.
  - immibis 1y ago
    The UK could give Apple a choice: Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import. To achieve the thing you wanted, word the law vaguely and have a judge interpret it. You know, the same way the law is applied to poors like you and me. Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? (I note they may be found innocent of murder but guilty of something like manslaughter - which is fine! Different degrees of violation of the law can result in greater or lesser sentences. Proportionality is a good thing. Apple should only have to pay half the fine if the judge estimates they've done half what they should)
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import. That's what breaking them up is. "Stop being a monopoly" is breaking them up. Leaving them in one piece and trying to pass a separate rule against every monopolistic practice they can come up with while they remain in one piece is an exercise in futility. > Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? Some people do, in fact, e.g. because the evidence was seized unlawfully and the government's penalty for that is not getting to use it, or because the charges were filed in the wrong jurisdiction etc. This is why rich people often get away with things -- they have money to pay lawyers to trawl through thousands of pages of regulations to find the mistake the government made or bamboozle the jury or the court. See e.g. O.J. Simpson. But the problem in cases like this is much harder than that, because there is no murder without a body. It isn't a normal thing to be having to decide if the person who killed someone is guilty of murder because it isn't a normal thing to be the person who killed someone. Whereas it is a normal thing for companies to sell things for money and enter into contracts etc. Which means you're not trying to decide if they did something wrong in an outrageous event that happens zero times in the median person's life, you're trying to decide if they did something wrong in any of the millions of transactions they take part in every day. Is requiring a fee or the use of an identification service in order to publish an app just recovering their costs, or is it a ploy to inhibit people from doing it? Is preventing third party software from performing certain system functions a security measure, or a means to prevent competitors making an app store that actually functions properly? You can't be getting into the weeds like that or their lawyers will eventually come up with something the government accepts as the former while it still has the effect of the latter. You have to remove the structural incentive they have to do it to begin with, which comes from these separate products all being tied together within the same company.
wkat4242 1y ago
You can't jail a company. And breaking one up is pretty much impossible considering the geopolitical pressures on huge companies like this.
- blitzar 1y ago
  You can't jail a company, but you can jail a CEO.
  - IsTom 1y ago
    Always talking about bigger pay because of bigger responsibility. Might finally start making sense if they actually start putting them in jails.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  You can imagine things a country could do in this respect. Require the devices they sell in your country to be completely unlocked with respect to third party app stores and operating systems, but also with respect to regions so that people can buy the unlocked ones there and use them anywhere. Invalidate their copyrights in your country so that third parties can ship phones with iOS. It's punishment, they're not supposed to like it. There are plenty of things they wouldn't like. Also, putting aside whether the UK could actually break them up, the US or the EU could actually break them up.
  - kvemkon 1y ago
    > and operating systems This must be an essential requirement for all PC-like devices. > regions People in different regions have very different average income. As long as manufacturer scales prices accordingly, I think locking to this region might be appropriate. > buy the unlocked ones there and use them anywhere In the case if the price is already the worldwide highest one, you're right, no locking to the region is needed. > EU could actually break them up I think, EU could only achieve that a non-EU-based company leaves EU.

pacifika 1y ago

Imagine the response if the uk tried to break up apple

londons_explore 1y ago
I'd love it if a government would decide that the hardware side of the company needs to split from the software side. Suddenly we could buy macos to run in a VM. Or we could buy iPhones running android.
- amelius 1y ago
  But that would be like a sudden outbreak of common sense.
- ben_w 1y ago
  We'd have to pay for iOS upgrades. Which, given my feelings about iOS 26, might be a good thing. I mean, if their revenue depends on the OS actually being good rather than inevitable…
- pacifika 1y ago
  Or split Apple UK off. And then fine them.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Imagine the response if the uk tried to break up apple This right here is why they need to be broken up. Are we supposed to have a company more powerful than a country?
- immibis 1y ago
  Yes? In feudalism, kings control everything. In capitalism, investors control everything. It's what the system is named after - kinda hard to miss.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    Investors don't control Apple, the CEO of Apple does. The investors are random people holding shares of it in their 401k. The company being so big is also they reason they can't control it effectively, because the people holding it are so diffuse that they have significant coordination costs.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy. Investors are "one share, one vote", rather than democracy "one person, one vote". The recent thing with Musk/Tesla and his trillion dollar options is being voted on, and Apple face campaigns and have votes, too: https://apnews.com/article/apple-dei-shareholder-proposal-annual-meeting-96637c8d4fa3d5e2a73dc59a59c2485b https://apnews.com/article/apple-dei-shareholder-proposal-an...
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > In the same way, one could say that the president, prime minister, or similarly titled person controls a democracy. That depends how big it is. For something the size of the US, sure, and that's a problem. It's one of the reasons the central government was meant to have limited powers. For something the size of a small town or local business, absolutely not, because then each vote both matters more to the outcome and has more direct consequences to the voter, which dramatically lowers the coordination costs. A single individual could change the outcome just by convincing a small number of local people who are each more inclined to care about it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

immibis 1y ago

Fines can work. We should continue fining them one day of revenue every day until compliance occurs.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
You believe that breaking them up is geopolitically infeasible but a fine larger than the GDP of Finland would fly? On top of that, giant bureaucracies are great at "compliance". That isn't the same as doing the thing you actually wanted though.
- immibis 1y ago
  The UK could give Apple a choice: Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import. To achieve the thing you wanted, word the law vaguely and have a judge interpret it. You know, the same way the law is applied to poors like you and me. Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? (I note they may be found innocent of murder but guilty of something like manslaughter - which is fine! Different degrees of violation of the law can result in greater or lesser sentences. Proportionality is a good thing. Apple should only have to pay half the fine if the judge estimates they've done half what they should)
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import. That's what breaking them up is. "Stop being a monopoly" is breaking them up. Leaving them in one piece and trying to pass a separate rule against every monopolistic practice they can come up with while they remain in one piece is an exercise in futility. > Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? Some people do, in fact, e.g. because the evidence was seized unlawfully and the government's penalty for that is not getting to use it, or because the charges were filed in the wrong jurisdiction etc. This is why rich people often get away with things -- they have money to pay lawyers to trawl through thousands of pages of regulations to find the mistake the government made or bamboozle the jury or the court. See e.g. O.J. Simpson. But the problem in cases like this is much harder than that, because there is no murder without a body. It isn't a normal thing to be having to decide if the person who killed someone is guilty of murder because it isn't a normal thing to be the person who killed someone. Whereas it is a normal thing for companies to sell things for money and enter into contracts etc. Which means you're not trying to decide if they did something wrong in an outrageous event that happens zero times in the median person's life, you're trying to decide if they did something wrong in any of the millions of transactions they take part in every day. Is requiring a fee or the use of an identification service in order to publish an app just recovering their costs, or is it a ploy to inhibit people from doing it? Is preventing third party software from performing certain system functions a security measure, or a means to prevent competitors making an app store that actually functions properly? You can't be getting into the weeds like that or their lawyers will eventually come up with something the government accepts as the former while it still has the effect of the latter. You have to remove the structural incentive they have to do it to begin with, which comes from these separate products all being tied together within the same company.

wkat4242 1y ago

You can't jail a company. And breaking one up is pretty much impossible considering the geopolitical pressures on huge companies like this.

blitzar 1y ago
You can't jail a company, but you can jail a CEO.
- IsTom 1y ago
  Always talking about bigger pay because of bigger responsibility. Might finally start making sense if they actually start putting them in jails.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
You can imagine things a country could do in this respect. Require the devices they sell in your country to be completely unlocked with respect to third party app stores and operating systems, but also with respect to regions so that people can buy the unlocked ones there and use them anywhere. Invalidate their copyrights in your country so that third parties can ship phones with iOS. It's punishment, they're not supposed to like it. There are plenty of things they wouldn't like. Also, putting aside whether the UK could actually break them up, the US or the EU could actually break them up.
- kvemkon 1y ago
  > and operating systems This must be an essential requirement for all PC-like devices. > regions People in different regions have very different average income. As long as manufacturer scales prices accordingly, I think locking to this region might be appropriate. > buy the unlocked ones there and use them anywhere In the case if the price is already the worldwide highest one, you're right, no locking to the region is needed. > EU could actually break them up I think, EU could only achieve that a non-EU-based company leaves EU.