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Comment by moreira | Hacker News Reader

The problem, I believe, is the market share. If your OS is only on 3 or even 4 out of 10 phones, then you're not in a dominant position, and whatever you do, you're not abusing your market power, which is what antitrust is all about.

So Apple and their OSs will always be safe from this kind of thing because they're simply not the biggest player when it comes to market share.

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So why is it that when people want to paint Apple in a positive light they dismiss market share and point to profits? If Apple pulling in 90% of the profits in the industry is what counts when evaluating the relative strengths of both platforms then why doesn't it matter when considering abuses of market position?

I think it's pretty clear that despite selling a minority of devices Apple has at least as much power to drive the overall direction of the market as Google.

You bring up the exact point that I was just thinking about, namely why market share is used as a criteria for defining whether certain behaviors fall into the anticompetitive realm but profit share isn’t.

Apple taking 90% of overall worldwide smartphone profits may not be good for competition or the consumer, yet that isn’t regulated, not that I am suggesting that it should be. Apple obviously has enormous power due to its profitability that gives it a competitive advantage.

I guess the thing I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is exactly when normal competitive practices become anticompetitive, requiring legal intervention from regulators, and why these seem to center solely around market share and not other things like profits.

> Apple obviously has enormous power due to its profitability that gives it a competitive advantage.

The law doesn't care about competitive advantage. It cares about making sure that your competitive dominance doesn't translate into dominating other markets.

For instance, Microsoft dominating personal OS market and making sure that their product stays on top is OK. Microsoft using their domination of that market to drive competition out of other markets is not.

That makes a lot of sense but just to play devil's advocate are we considering the OS/App market separate from the hardware market? If so, and considering Apple makes a not insignificant amount from the App Store and doesn't allow competing stores on iPhone hardware, wouldn't that be an example of trying to dominate another market?

Again, I don't want to come off as needlessly argumentative, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of this topic.

In my opinion, it's less problematic to run a closed environment, than to run an "open" environment, only to swindle the people that you just invited in your backyard.

The whole idea is that if you're going to let people build on your platform but compete with them and leverage your platform in order to do so, you effectively lured people into thinking that it was possible to build on your platform when in fact it was not, and that you benefit from this misunderstanding. And that's dishonest. If you open a "public market", then you should be accountable for keeping it fair and unbiased.

Keep in mind that the last part about how it "should" be is an opinion and not fact on the law.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. You make an especially good point about being accountable when running a "public market" that I hadn't really considered.

Profits are important for the market you are in. Market share can be important for dominating markets you are currently not in. That is the base of all antitrust probes: A dominant market share is not illegal. Using that dominant market share to boost your position in other markets is illegal.

So, the central question is: Does Google use the dominant market share of Android and its position to further their position in other markets, e.g. the browser market (Chrome), the mail application market (GMail App), news market (Google News) and so on. If yes, there is a problem with european antitrust law.

Apple is clearly levering the market power and integration of iOS and their other services to drive their agenda in TV, music, mobile payments, cloud storage, music and video production software, etc etc. I don't see much difference here.

Dominant market power and leveraging it are needed. Apple may leverage their market power, but they aren't dominant. Let me ask directly: Do you not understand it (so, do further explanations help) or do you not want to understand it because it goes against your positions? Both are ok, just asking for clarification to make sure I don't waste your and my time.

They are utterly dominant in the one metric Apple boosters usually claim is the one that counts. So why is that metric suddenly irrelevant now? I realize that as the law is written this may not matter but if we're discussing whether the government should intervene here it's perfectly relevant.

I'm an iOS developer by the way so I'm not anti Apple. I just think there is already healthy competition in mobile and government intervention is going to hurt consumers in this case. Apple can regain market share any time it chooses to by lowering its unprecedented profit margins.

I don't understand that law as well. So, you start being good, keep 'mostly' doing good and grow, and at one point, what has been good suddenly becomes bad just because you have grown more than anybody else?

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