This is like complaining that it's unfair that only McDonald's are allowed to sell inside a McDonald's.
There are only two pocket computers. And they're both beating people up over protection money.
Moreover, computing used to be free like water. These companies locked it down so you have to go through them.
Imagine if you had to pay McDonald's to open your own restaurant.
Imagine if every restaurant in the US had to do so.
Imagine if McDonald's gathered data about your customers.
Imagine if McDonald's saw what worked about your restaurant, copied it, and then hid yours from consumers.
It's not okay. This is one of the worst abuses of the American consumer and small businesses in history.
Edit: I think we're all being downvoted by corporate brigading. Every one of my posts is being downvoted. I made a compelling and respectful argument, and note the lack of rebuttals.
There are thousands of powerful smartphones on the market, from many different companies and even countries.
> It's not okay.
I'm okay with it.
There are only 2 major OS's.
The central question at hand is the App Store monopoly, and your argument was:
> There are thousands of powerful smartphones on the market, from many different companies and even countries.
But that number willfully misrepresents the current state of the market as it pertains to the current discussion because all but one of those powerful smartphones only operate on one other OS, and by extension, one other App Store regime.
Whether this OS duopoly is acceptable is the whole debate.
Of course I know what it means — the argument is way more nuanced than "hurr durr there are 2 and 2 > 1".
Couple things:
1. The argument isn't that it's a monopoly, it's that it's arguably monopsony. The issue is less that users don't have the choice to buy the phone they want with the OS they want, it's that developers/suppliers are unable to access a huge chunk of the market without being forced to pay 30% of earnings.
2. While it's closer to a "duopsony" than a "monopsony", it gets a little more complicated when you look at the level of each regional market. In the US, Apple's market share is closer to 50%.
Maybe it's not anti-competitive for there to be only 2 app buyers on the market, but maybe it is. That's the debate, and it's by no means clear cut.
Google and Apple are a cartel.
They made the world worse than it was for software distribution. It used to be open in the 90's and 00's.
You're being deceptive here. Apple App Store and Google Play Store are what we are talking about. There aren't many other avenues that can reach consumers.
> I'm okay with it.
You're okay with me having to pay hard earned money to Apple and Google? Having to work that much harder? To be unable to afford to lean into scaling? Because that's awful.
Fuck that.
These companies are anti-entrepreneur.
I'm using your own words - you said 'pocket computers'.
And you can load your own applications onto Android, can't you? So use that!
If you're trying to make the argument that maybe we should change the laws to make monopolies illegal, it would be easier to discuss if you define what the guiding principle is. Are you saying companies shouldn't own more than X% of a market? Companies should comply with a set of practices? etc
Here's why it's difficult when you just use anecdotes. Consider your example, restaurants. Restaurants are a local industry with lower barriers to entry so naturally you have thousands to choose from. Online marketplaces tend to be global marketplaces with very high barriers to entry. So comparing restaurants to the App Store is a stretch at best.
A better example might be a national every day low price store like Walmart. So let's try your examples with them.
Imagine if you had to pay Walmart to open your own store INSIDE Walmart ... sounds reasonable.
Imagine if every store that wanted to open a store in Walmart had to do so ... again, reasonable. Starbucks pays to be inside target, Wells Fargo inside Safeway, etc.
Imagine if Walmart gathered data about your customers. They do, and again reasonable.
Imagine if Walmart saw what worked at your store and copied it and hid yours from your consumers. This happens as well. Consider Equate, Walmart's private brand. Or Safeway select. Basically the same thing.
> Arguably, Apple has monopoly power in the market they built so nothing wrong there.
Apple embraced the web and the internet, then extinguished it as a means of getting software to consumers.
> Online marketplaces tend to be global marketplaces with very high barriers to entry.
This is false. The web is a free for all.
A better analogy for iPhone and Android being marketplaces is x86 and ARM being marketplaces. Can you imagine having to pay to run your code and your commerce on CPUs?
Phones should be utilities.
> A better example might be a national every day low price store like Walmart.
I don't know. There's Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Whole Foods, Kroger, REI, Dick's, CVS, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, ...
Why don't Netflix and DHH try to sell their wares there?
Not sure why this is relevant to EU regulation.
> This is false. The web is a free for all.
Somewhat. The web is a free for all and is part of the high barrier to entry for online marketplaces. I probably should qualify that as a serious online marketplace for third parties.
> Can you imagine having to pay to run your code and your commerce on CPUs?
Sure can. It was called the 90's. I remember paying per cpu/per end user licensing fees to run things on my own cpus.
> Phones should be utilities.
As an opinion, I can't really argue this.
> Target, Home Depot, Lowes, Whole Foods, Kroger, REI, Dick's, CVS, Dollar Tree, Dollar General,
These are great examples that continue to make my point. * almost all have private brands that compete brands they sell * many allow stores in their stores (which they charge for) * they collect data on those stores (within their stores)
BTW, my intent is not to convince you. I normally wouldn't have responded at all, but since you seemed genuinely curious why you weren't seeing responses so I thought I would give you my perspective.
(a) no smartphone exists that is a perfect fit for my ideal requirements
and
(b) having some smartphone is now almost essential to function normally within society
I would say yes, I absolutely do want the government to intervene. Market competition is obviously not doing the job, and none of us individually is strong enough to force the issue with the suppliers. That is exactly the situation where regulatory intervention is appropriate to protect the little guy from the power of the big guy.
Well I don't know what to say apart from this is incredibly selfish.
You can't find a product suited to your particular esoteric requirements so you want the government to force someone else to perform labour to build the product you want.
Can you see how wacky that sounds when you write it out like that?
I don't think it's selfish to argue that government should protect the little guy from being exploited by the big guy who has much greater power, for each of the numerous little guys affected by a situation. Indeed, that is arguably one of the most important functions of any government.
I would have less of a problem with this if we were discussing some luxury item that people could easily do without. However, the reality is that many organisations -- including government entities at various scales in my country as well as other essential services -- now effectively require the use of certain technologies in order to function as a normal member of society. It is therefore reasonable to ensure that the technologies available are provided on an acceptable basis.
If a supplier doesn't want to play by those rules, they're not forced to perform any labour for me or anyone else here. They're perfectly entitled to simply exit the market instead.
But you can already access these Government services - the apps already work, right? You don't need a third-party-app-store to use them?
So that isn't a reason to change anything.
You want the iPhone to be changed so you can do other things with the iPhone, unrelated to these Government services.
The fundamental point is still that, for practical purposes, many people now have to have a smartphone. There are, for practical purposes, two types of smartphone available. If neither of those meets some reasonable conditions that many people would prefer to have -- for example, retaining control of your own device and data -- then this implies a lack of effective competition in the marketplace. Government regulation is the solution to that problem.
Arguing that people don't have to buy the product isn't helpful. Many people are effectively forced into buying one product or the other.
Arguing that people don't have to buy the Apple product isn't helpful. Buying an Android one instead is worse in other respects.
When you try to give a concrete example I show how that concrete example doesn't make any sense to me.
If the fundamental point doesn't translate to any concrete situations then it's a dud.
> neither of those meets some reasonable conditions that many people would prefer to have -- for example, retaining control of your own device and data
But I don't think these are a reasonable conditions.
And I don't think many people want them - I think the number is probably absolutely tiny.
I think using legislation to force Apple to accomodate the unreasonable and abstract preferences of a tiny number of people from a group that isn't specially protected is morally unjust.
But I won't keep arguing it further as I think we probably just have different morals.
So we can see. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be in the interests of owners of Apple devices, or that Apple shouldn't be prevented from exploiting its dominant position to restrict the market to the detriment of those owners.
I wonder whether you'd be OK with an electricity supplier saying you're only allowed to plug in equipment they have approved and they can change the rules or revoke approvals any time they like. If you don't like it, you can go to the other electricity supplier, who will give you their list of acceptable equipment instead. If you want to use equipment from both lists, don't worry, just buy two houses. And of course no-one makes any equipment that isn't on either list, because there is no possibility you'd ever want to power anything that wasn't approved by at least one electricity supplier.
Or you can buy Car A that goes only to one set of locations, or Car B that goes only to another set. Other locations might be happy to welcome you, but even if they build the roads to reach them, your car will artificially prevent you from driving that way.
If you buy an iPhone and get upset that you can't install your own apps, you're unreasonable.
There's a big difference between the two, and the key difference here is ... Property.
But i like your example because its shows the mindset that the iPhone you bought, is in the end the property of Apple, not really yours, and that you are "fine with it".
But you cannot require that Apple do work to build support for third-party app stores. Property rights do not extend to forcing other people to do labour for you.
If your phone doesn't come with support for third-party stores when you buy it then I don't see how it would be your right to have that feature added.
You and I can't, at least not directly. But governments certainly can, if they deem it in the interest of the citizens they serve.
Tyranny defined. “Do what we tell you to do, it’s ‘for our citizens.’” That’s how you get Australia forcing companies to backdoor encryption.
A more apt analogy is perhaps that you’re a McDonalds franchise owner, and you can’t serve Subway food there.
The problem here is a centralized point of control, that basically controls, or can eventually exercise this control to define in the end how you experience your life in the digital realm.
As the subtraction, or whats left out, will happen before, people wont even notice whats being taken from them.
That's why its hard to compare to anything that happened before, because its unparalleled.
I really think this is a more accurate take than "Apple restricts what you can do to your device therefore you don't really own it." Yes, they restrict what I can do with the device, but yes, I really own it. And bonus: f I decide those restrictions are too much to bear, well, buying a new phone is way easier than buying a new house.
But suppose that they define which cars you need to have to live in that neightborhood? You would start to think that now they are being unreasonable..
The thing is, Apple can change those "ok, now this is unreasonable" things behind your back without you even being aware of it. How can you know that you would want that car that the "owners" of your neighborhood did not allowed that car seller to offer you? (And no, this is not a stretch, remember that your digital life is a whole big dimension of your life, imagine a centralized point of control)
You wont feel as you would if they forced you to a limited set of cars, but there are a lot of damages happening by allowing them to do as they please, and not only about your rights as a owner of the product, because there are developers and other technological, social and political issues happening with those decisions being made like that.
Unfortunately it cant be compared as just a house that you have not full control of it, because in that case it would most "damage" you in the end.
The decisions Apple are making hurting digital and material property rights have broader implications to the society in general.
Let say Apple is BMW, and when you buy BMW your gas tank has a proprietary connector that will work only on BP gas stations. You can choose different gas there (different octane number, etc.), but you can't tank at e.g. Statoil.
I admit I probably wouldn't buy such a car myself as I don't see any advantages. I do see advantages to the Apple model - simplicity and cleanliness. If you disagree then you should probably do as I would with the BMW - buy something else instead.
Lets say at some point drivers of GM vehicles buy 60% of the gas sold. Gas stations must agree to use proprietary connectors to service GM cars. Because of GM's market share, the majority of gas stations decide to use GM-only connectors, which then sells more GM cars...
Such a cycle is great for GM but probably not good for consumers if you think competitive markets are pro-consumer. And it affects people who don't even buy GM cars, because it influences what 3rd party business are viable. I think that's a key difference between companies with enormous market share engaging in anti-competitive behavior and companies with minority market share (like BMW) doing it.
As another example, I think it would have been unfortunate if home internet service providers (of which many people have a choice of only one or two, and it's a big hassle to change) became a bottleneck for other types of services such as online streaming (perhaps by charging exorbitant bandwidth costs to competitors). Luckily I think that ship has mostly sailed, and even in the absence of regulation abuses are probably somewhat kept in check by the very real possibility that regulation will happen if things go too far.
I think there's an argument to be made that it would be bad for a duopoly in the mobile OS market (Apple/Google) to lead to a reduced level of competition in app stores, payment processing, and possibly computer software in general (because of the approval process). And even though Apple may not have an absolute majority on market share, the percent of software revenue is probably more important and Apple's share of that is probably quite high.
There's probably reasonable ways to address this too. Maybe by allowing other app stores (that follow the same sandboxing / security rules), which seems to work out fine on platforms like Windows with options like Steam. And maybe they could let Apple continue to require support for a common payment method, but not let them prohibit other payment methods or require that those other payment methods are the same price (when the fees on the other payment methods may be much less than 30%).