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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Apple themselves went and made an entire competing ecosystem that depends not just on a competing DRM standard (Fairplay), but competing apps and playback devices.

Yes! Exactly. And the fact that Apple was successful doing that is sort of a killer argument against an antitrust case.

Look, antitrust isn't about enforcing your personal idea of a perfect browser ecosystem. It's about protecting the competetive efficiency of the market by guaranteeing that new and smaller players (and new technologies) don't see an unfair barrier to entry.

Your argument is just that Chrome is an unhealthy monoculture ecosystem. I even agree. But that's not an antitrust case and you need to stop pretending that someone is going to come around and rule Chrome illegal for you. The arguments I've seen are all very narrow and will have very narrow remedies.

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The unfair barrier to entry is that in order to compete at making a browser the competitor has to build much, much more than just a browser. The fact that it was apple that was successful in building an also-ran competitor isn't helpful for google, because Apple's size allows other companies to argue that unless they are as large as google or apple, they cannot compete at all, which means new or smaller players can't fairly compete.

If the goal is to build a browser, then everything else (the alternative ecosystem, the alternative OS, the alternative hardware, the custom chips for the hardware, etc.) not required for the actual browser is waste. That's the exact opposite of efficiency.

The issue isn't chrome's ecosystem. The issue is that Chrome is being used to create unfair barriers of entry for Chrome competitors which then allows Google to use Chrome to harm consumers because there are limited competitors for consumers to switch to.

Can people use or license Apple's version of DRM instead?

Kinda? There's other patent issue with HLS that keeps it mostly Apple only since Apple foots the costs on apple products, which can be similarly argued creates/continues an unfair barrier of entry: http://www.overdigital.com/2012/04/17/the-hidden-licensing-c...

But being required to license anything in order to implement what is a supposed to be an open standard is already a problem for a standard that's supposed to be open, even if it's not an antitrust issue.

> Can people use or license Apple's version of DRM instead?

There's no public mechanism for doing so. If Apple would do so to people it liked is not known.

You could license PlayReady from Microsoft though, and lots of people do for various implementations. There are also a few other companies that do similar modules, mostly aimed at the global pay TV market.

The terms would be fairly painful for a free browser vendor I expect, but "I priced my product at a level where I can't afford to buy in the things my users want from any of the independent vendors" isn't really an anti-trust concern.

Absurd. Apple is the #2 biggest company in the world, the fact that they are build their own parallel system is in no way proof that it isn't an unfair barrier to entry to "new and smaller players".

You're hanging that "absurd" entirely on my use of the word "smaller" and ignoring the first clause of that sentence.

The simple truth is that an antitrust case needs to show some kind of harm to consumers, not to browser vendors. Again, I cite the fact that MS straight up murdered Netscape and got away with it (though it was scary for them for a bit).

Thankfully the misguided consumer welfare model of antitrust has slowly been changing with Lina Khan's work.

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