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Comment by ryanhuff | Hacker News Reader

They are changing the rules, yes, but they are changing it along with a new set of circumstances. With multitasking support coming, the consequences for user tracking is growing. Considering Apple's zealous focus on user experience, I can see how they would want to manage the exposure of third party marketers to their users.

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Nope, sorry. This has very little if anything to do with the user.

Apple wanted to buy Admob, but Google got them instead. This change will prevent Admob ads from being well targeted on iPhone, and will prop up their (assumed to be upcoming) rebranded Quattro mobile ads.

This smacks of anti-competitive practices. (That is, assuming Quattro ads are allowed to use location aware targeting.)

Anti-competitive tactics are entirely legal unless they have a good chance of resulting into, or furthering a monopoly.

I have never seen "anti-competitive" being used in a positive light. A quick search shows it has mainly been used by prosecutors and plaintiffs to describe their adversary.

You don't need to believe me though, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices (We can /all/ trust wikipedia, right?) "Barriers to entry" is relevant.

Read the Sherman's Act instead of Wikipedia, it's quite unambiguous about this subject.

Thanks for the tip. European law is relevant in this case as well, and I'm not sure it requires a strict monopoly over the market. That said, clearly if iPhones were a small part of the mobile ad platforms, nobody would care if Apple limited the ads that could be shown on them. I don't think that's the case though.

The point I was trying to make was: If we switched this around, and Microsoft had the number one smartphone, and they did something like this, regulators (though you're right, probably not American ones) would have them bent over a table.

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