Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

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> It's true that Apple does not have — even in the US — the amount of market share necessary to be deemed a monopolist and subject to anti-tying laws for its browser. Android is a strong alternative, and as long as it remains so Apple will be effectively immune from challenge.

How does a strong alternative help solving the following problem. Let's say you are a video service provider, and want to offer MPEG-DASH[1] based service which relies on browsers supporting Media Source Extensions[2].

Soon enough, you discover, that iOS users can't use your service, not only because iOS default browser doesn't support MSE, but because they can't even install any alternative that does (Apple doesn't let them).

You are literally forced to implement something[3] in addition to MPEG-DASH to address a substantial amount of Apple users and in the process potentially pay Apple and Co. for implementing it because they own related patents, or you need to agree to ignore them (which means a loss of money for you).

TL;DR: Apple stifled adoption of MPEG-DASH, and forced you to do double work and in theory can force you to pay them money too. This is just one example, there can be many like that, another big one is video codecs and etc., but you get the idea. All that bottlenecks on the same restriction - ban on competing browsers.

Shouldn't this be a subject of anti-trust regulation? If they managed to do it, they have enough control over the market. But again, may be anti-trust law simply isn't equipped to address this? I see it as a major problem.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Source_Extensions

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

It's just a threshold issue — if they don't have enough market share, then they can't be sued for tying/bundling. The questions about video standards may be legit, but the assumption of antitrust law is that if there are strong enough competitors in the market, then competitive forces will pressure things in a consumer-favorable direction.

This doesn't hold true always, and certainly not in the short-run, but it's better than having every company with moderate market share being sued by any other company that wishes they had different features in their products.

I don't mean for this to sound harsh, and I wish iOS were more open in various ways that would make things easier for my startup, but I recognize that companies need to have autonomy to build products as they wish — except in rare cases.

I don't think anyone stops Apple from building products. But it's about banning competition, not about their products. And their influence on the industry is way too big to ignore it. So I'm pretty convinced, that what they are doing with excluding competition, shouldn't be happening. It's not about demanding features from them - let them produce bad browsers that are behind modern ones. It's about allowing better ones to be actually used by their users. I.e. choice.

The competition isn't another browser, it's Android. If you don't like Safari, use Android. As long as iPhones are a minority device in the market, regulators won't care what they do.

I already explained above, how Android doesn't solve the problem. The damage Apple are causing is real.

You make an excellent argument as to why an OS that limits software's ability to access device hardware, run native code, do raw networking, or implement JIT VMs and thus doesn't allow things like alternative browser engines is a bad idea.

Which is why I'm glad FirefoxOS failed.

I never bought into idea of the Webby OS, that Mozilla were pushing for. But at the same time, no one stopped Mozilla from allowing transforming Firefox OS into normal Linux, with Web runtime as one of the options, rather than a strict requirement. It didn't evolve far to judge really, what it could have been.

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