Not to mention Apple employees are banned from making apps outside of company time, since they are aware of the issue with insiders having power to make apps that out compete the rest.
This is markedly different then, for example, Google altering search results to promote their own products, because Google owns something like 90% of Search.
In the retail/wholesale model, the retail store buys the third party products and their own store brand products, and sells them both. It might favor the store brand with more promotion or better shelf placement, but both products appear on the shelves, and the third-party has generally already been compensated for their goods (or is contractually owed compensation). In uncommon situations, such as with new products, compensation may be contingent on products sold through (to end customers), but that is not the norm.
In the appstore model, third-party app makers sell apps in Apple's store. Apple sells apps in Apple's store and promotes its own apps ahead of competing apps. It even promotes unrelated apps ahead of competing apps in a blatant attempt to push competitors off the first 2 pages of search results (i.e., off the shelf). Apple also frequently bans apps that compete with Apple's own apps or features, even if such competing apps existed for years before Apple's own apps.
Any one of the aforementioned acts by Apple could be treated as an antitrust issue. And that's not even a comprehensive list.
Well no. What you cited was related to the Supreme Court's analysis of the App Store case, but that was only related to the issue of standing.
How it differs from brick and mortar stores buying inventory isn't relevant to the actual merits of the case, which hasn't been in court yet.
Imagine a world where Apple continues to clamp down on 3rd party services that compete with their own offerings, like Spotify. Apple could completely ban Spotify from selling subscriptions outside the App Store, and raise their fee to 70%. Google, wanting to push their own Google Play Music service, eventually adopts similar rules on Android, or perhaps implements them in a theoretical successor like Fuchsia.
This would basically mean you cannot build a music streaming service without also building your own mobile platform. That in turn would effectively mean we can only ever have as many streaming services as we do mobile platforms.
Even though neither Google nor Apple have 80%+ marketshare, this behavior strikes me as deeply anti-competive. It's not a world I want to live in.
Offering rebates for using your product and not using someone else’s, for example, may be illegal if you are a monopoly but not illegal if you are not.
There are innumerable things a given company could do that harms its competition. Up to a point, that’s kinda the whole idea! It doesn’t become illegal unless it is done by leveraging a monopoly market position.
If Apple clamps down on 3rd party apps to the point where it is no longer serving its user-base, the user base has many good alternatives, and Apple would lose business.
I think the Spotify example is a good one; if Apple kicked off Spotify, there could be millions of people switching to Android just because of that. Apple might love the idea that only Apple Music should exist on their iPhone (in fact they was kinda Steve’s original vision) but they can’t get away with it specifically because they would be clobbered by the competition if they tried.
Even as (if) Apple’s reputation shifts away from “walled garden that protects you from junk and malware and spyware” toward “overlord trying to control what you can buy” this causes some users to leave.
As long as there’s viable competitors, I’d rather let users vote with their wallets. This is actually the best way to give people the choice of which system you would prefer using. If the fully open system is preferred by most users then most users will choose that product. But because there are actually huge trade-offs and very hard unsolved problems with a fully open system, it’s important to provide consumers both options.
We'll never know unless/until it happens, but I think you are 100% wrong on this point—most would just switch to Apple Music. Phones are much too expensive to switch immediately, and while some users might initially want to switch at their next upgrade cycle, they would need to sign up for Apple Music in the interim, and then they'll become accustomed to it.
iPhone users are a captive market. The costs of switching are too high, both economically and in terms of inertia.
The "market" is smaller than you think. A classic way to determine alternatives to a product is by asking "if I raise the price of all apps, how many people will buy something else?" Iphone owners are kinda stuck eating the increase, aren't they?
Apple controls 100% of the iPhone app market. An iPhone owner made a $1000 investment into their phone and cannot just switch to Android. Apple takes advantage of that fact for their own benefit.
And everyone makes a choice when they purchase a product— you could say invest in a product—if they want to buy into that.
Of course it costs money to buy something different. The salient point is that there is a obvious and competitive choice before you buy, that Apple does nothing to restrict you from making that choice before you buy, and that you can switch if you feel like it, which makes it not a monopoly.
Monopoly is not defined as the lack of compatibility between two competing products. Monopoly is also not defined as having a closed ecosystem.
I think it’s fair to argue if you think it should be illegal to have closed ecosystems. Personally I strongly disagree because there are clear trade-offs involved and the market should be able to decide if it wants a closed ecosystem product offering from Vendor A or an open ecosystem offering from Vendor B.
The problem with a closed ecosystem is when it is combined with a monopolistic market. In this discussion I believed the two points have become conflated, but while Apple certainly has a walled garden, there is compelling evidence the smartphone market is highly competitive.
But the take that I got from reading the article is if you say "Podcast" in the search box, you'll see pages and pages of Apple's own apps, unrelated to podcasts, before you start seeing podcast apps.
So there's that...
If I own the football team, and the field, and the city (hell, why not), then sure I can choose who plays QB, so I choose my son. Maybe at the start he's even not that bad of a QB, and our team wins some games. Everyone is happy.
After a little while though, people realize there's no sense trying out for QB on my team. My son, now left without anyone gunning for his job becomes complacent. We start losing games more and more.
With enough control over the market (like Apple has with the App Store), there become less and less QBs to choose from, and it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league.
It's as if you're the one selling all the tickets to the only stadium in town, and you make it so that when your team plays, tickets are cheaper, more abundant, and more visible.
Another local team wants to play too, but their ticket prices are outrageous, there's no promotion of the event either, and they might actually be banned from the stadium unless they use ONLY your equipment.
An iOS app/ticket/whatever wouldn't work/get you into the other "stadiums." Ergo, the market for the iOS thing does not include those other "stadiums."
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them. The antitrust issues are related to Apple's actions within the iOS app market. Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that you can't sell iOS apps on them. Selling iOS apps is not a basic human right, nor a market right. As long as you can still sell apps, there's no judge who cares if you can specifically sell iOS apps.
You can't sell your physical products at Costco either unless they accept them, and even if they do, they are always free to promote and prioritize their own brand over yours...
>Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
Only for authorities that's not a meaningful distinction...
Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls.
Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them.
They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing system.
Apple is not obligated to advertise those third party stalls over their own.
If they don't like the arrangement they can always go somewhere else (there is an even bigger stadium in town that has available food stalls).
For starters, nobody forces you to sell merchandise for this particular team's fans...
But the analogy breaks down here, because merchandize such as t-shirts is not dependent on the stadium to be used. You could sell it outside the stadium.
Whereas iOS software leverages the fact that the iOS is being sold, maintained, having the necessary APIs, and so on, and that iOS devices are being made and sell decently and lure people willing to pay for apps.
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
A privately owned stadium is not be required to open up its space to third-party sellers. But once it does, it cannot then abuse its position as the landlord to interfere with the market activities of those third parties. That's the part you're missing in your fervent defense of Apple's antitrust activities--Apple didn't have to open up the app store to third parties, but having done so, they must now act in a non-abusive matter.
So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.
I don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion.
I figured that it'd mean nobody tries out for QB on your team, all the best QBs go to other teams, eventually your team starts to suck and lose fans and therefore revenue, and the market forces either force you to get a new QB or your business in the team suffers and maybe folds. Problem solved either way, eventually.
Microsoft also had a court order to comply with that they forgot about in Windows 7. https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/microsoft-european-commi...
Microsoft had a dominant market position, and anti-competitively leveraged that market position in operating systems to muscle its way into the internet browser market.
Microsoft then had a monopoly on desktop OSes at the time, at 95+ (close to 97%, in fact).
Apple has a paltry sub-50% share of mobile OSes.
The "But they have 100% share on their own products" is not an argument, as far as the law is concerned, as monopolies are not judged this way. That's the same reason why you can't legally force McDonalds to also sell Burger King burgers, or GAP to sell Banana Republic clothes...
And even MS monopoly position wasn't the issue (having a monopoly naturally is not illegal). The issue was it used its monopoly position to threaten and bribe OEMs to not work with competitors.
Someone could sell cars for $5K and have 99% of the car market in a small city of 1000 people, while another one sells a single car for 100M and has 20 times the other's revenue. It's still the cheap car guy that has the monopoly.
It's not relevant for monopoly law and whether it's a monopoly, which is what's discussed here...
Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.
We don't get to pick our "complete" definition we prefer because "we deserve free money/mobile platform access". There's an actual, legal, one...
>Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.
Only in the same sense that McDonalds has power not to sell Burger King burgers, and a shop owner has owner to sell whatever the duck they want.
Not power related to monopoly over the mobile market or the app market in general.
Monopolies aren't inherently illegal. See e.g., patents and copyrights, which are legally granted or protected monopolies.
What is illegal is anti-competitive practices. This doesn't require a dominant or even majority market position--authorities in the US and EU have gone after companies with relatively small market shares that engaged in anti competitive actions (though they haven't done so in many years).
That's not what monopoly means legally.
>Monopolies aren't inherently illegal
That's true, but a vendor controlling their own store is not a monopoly.
Monopoly is when the vendor has 100% of the overall market...
From the DOJ guidance on antitrust law (https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...)
Regarding the first element, it is "settled law" that the offense of monopolization requires "the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market."(5) As discussed in chapter 2, monopoly power means substantial market power that is durable rather than fleeting--market power being the ability to raise prices profitability above those that would be charged in a competitive market.(6)