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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone app-approval market leaps to mind.

If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly. It’s just a store that they control. Would you say that their physical stores are a monopoly that they abuse by not selling samsung phones?

Then why are we seeing eg https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains... ?

Regardless, their behaviour with their own Dev relations is very much like what they're accusing Qualcomm of.

The supreme court didn't say Apple was a monopoly it said that people could sue them to see if they were.

The Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits of the case. The actual antitrust case is extremely weak against Apple. You'd need a nonsensical market definition to say Apple has monopoly power, and it wouldn't hold up in court.

> If you mean Apple owns and runs an App Store, then yes, but that’s not a monopoly.

They also refuse to permit their customers to run apps not approved by Apple on the phones they have bought. That's the monopoly.

That’s factually false. You can side load apps, plenty of enterprises do it.

last i looked that requires a couple hundred dollar per year special developer account from apple, with special checks to make sure you're actually a business doing it for business reasons.

and they still sign your apps, they just do it automatically, i think.

So? You can still side load. Developers do it all the time. The approval process is only for distributing your private app to hundreds of people using Apple’s servers and hardware.

look, buddy, i'm with you on the monopoly issue, but this whole side loading thing is bullshit. i don't think these mechanisms work the way you think they do, and they're certainly not reasonable for even expert users to keep an app up to date on their device. it just isn't legally relevant.

Having side loaded apps personally, I'm not really sure why you're so pissed off.

Huh? That’s still not a monopoly. Argue that they’re violating anti-consumers laws to have access to device you purchased, sure, but what you’re describing is in no way a monopoly.

I think it comes down to how narrow you want to define the market. And even if it is a monopoly, that doesn't mean anything by itself. Monopolies aren't illegal.

The monopoly is that no other software distributor can be used on iOS other than Apple.

That is a monopoly in their own product, not in a market.

Doesn't matter, Apple is the only supplier of iOS apps and forbids any competition here.

LG is the only supplier of apps for their TVs and forbids any competition there.

So?

Exactly.

So does LG take a 30% rake of all app sales? It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to take advantage of that fact with non-competitive pricing.

This poor understanding of what a monopoly is on your part is a testament to how uncommon true monopolies have become thanks to modern regulation.

Time will tell.

In this case, I think it's both. Contrast Android, where other people have set up app stores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_app_stores

If I want to sell an app to users on iOS, and those users want my app, there's no way for them to get it without Apple. That's a vertical market monopoly. And even if it doesn't qualify as a monopoly in your mind, it can still run afoul of anti-trust law.

If you want to sell a product in Apple’s physical store, there’s no way to do it without Apple.

That’s not a monopoly. That’s them exercising control over their own property.

What’s the rationale to treat Apple’s digital store different than Apple’s physical store?

You could say the same about console makers. They have been doing the same thing since the 80s....

That's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on what food appears on their menu. It's non-sensical as a complaint.

In United States v. Microsoft Corp.[0] it was determined that Microsoft abused monopoly it's power by simply preventing OEMs from removing internet explorer.

Apple demands that all web browsing is done via Safari on IOS as I understand it.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

Microsoft had a 90%+ market share in computer operating systems, aka a monopoly. So there's that.

But Microsoft did have a monopoly in the browser market at that time. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the browser market or the phone market or the app market. You can’t abuse a monopoly you don’t have.

The monopoly was in the OS market. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to use that monopoly to create a new one in the nascent browser market.

And Apple has no monopoly. Having a monopoly is a pre-requisite for being found guilty of using a monopoly to leverage your way into an adjacent market.

End of story.

QCOM doesn't have a monopoly in the baseband market either, yet Koh's court found QCOM's monopoly there. The FTC simply redefined a market where QCOM had a dominant marketshare -- the "premium" modem market (LTE) -- for Koh to come to that ruling.

So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.

> So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.

If Apple used its dominance in some niche subgroup PC market to force buyers to pay a percentage of the total cost of all USB-C devices they buy, including non-Apple devices, to Apple to pay for Apple's patents related to USB-C. And if those buyers were companies like Best Buy that needed to be able to buy Apple devices or else lose access to over half their market. And if Apple refused to sell buyers any devices unless they agreed to those terms. And if Apple promised during standardization of USB-C to offer licenses to said patents on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms. Then that analogy might hold a little water.

You can use Chrome on iOS.

Chrome on iOS still uses Safari's renderer and JS engine.

My understanding is that Google is allowed to use their own renderer and their own Javascript engine - as long as it doesn't do JIT compilation. The ability to mark pages or files as executable is a platform security model thing.

Chrome uses WebKit because Google would rather use a WebKit/JSC engine than a slow Blink/V8 engine - especially since Blink is a WebKit fork.

If the alternative is something so slow that nobody would actually use it, does the why really matter that much in practice?

No, the case of Apple is more like McDonald's being able to prevent its customers from ever eating food not signed-off on by McDonald's.

How so? Apple can’t stop you from using a different phone.

I think people are confusing mild inconvenience with monopolistic oppression.

They can do that, if you are sitting in a McDonald’s dining room.

They can’t stop you from walking over to Burger King.

It's analogous to McDonald's selling you a dining room and then regulating what food you can eat in it.

Except you're perfectly aware of that fact when you buy the dining room.

The question is how you want to characterize an iPhone. If the phone is Apple's property that they're letting you use, then Apple's app store restrictions are analogous to McDonalds deciding what going on their menu. If the iPhone is a product that you bought from Apple, then Apple's app store policies are equivalent to GE selling me an oven that will only cook food purchased from GE's grocery store.

Luckily, oven technology doesn't really make that business model feasible so GE doesn't try to do it. But I think there are reasons for antitrust authorities to take a careful look at the behavior of companies that do have this kind of power over their customers.

But none of those things are a monopoly. A GE oven that only cooks GE food isn’t a monopoly, it’s just a shitty oven.

Plus, monopolies aren’t illegal, using them anti-competitively is. So the analogy would be GE buying or putting out of business all the other oven makers, then saying you can only cook GE food in a GE oven.

It's maybe not a monopoly, but it's definitely tying, which is still covered under anti-trust law.

What? That's not the same thing at all. McDonald's doesn't let third party companies sell food on their menu. McDonalds is a place, not a platform. Your analogy falls short in so many ways I have to assume you're being disingenuous.

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