Antitrust law is about much more than just monopoly. Apple doesn't have one, nor do they need one to be prosecuted for anticompetitive behavior and abuse of market position. If you're not familiar with the difference between the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, this is a good primer: https://www.britannica.com/event/Clayton-Antitrust-Act
Apple is about to get bitten hard, not for being a monopoly, but for anticompetitive business practices.
You need to have some significant market power (yes, vague) such that your elasticity of demand is steep and elasticity of supply of competitors is steep.
The law is (purposefully?) vague, as the key arguments come down to:
1) Market definition
2) Definition and analysis of price impacts on demand
3) Ease of entry into the market by competitors
Textbook example: Bing promoting Microsoft products when it was created (2009?) is not as problematic (read: won't get scrutinized by the US government) as Google promoting G Suite products.
- Games are platform specific, games developed for Xbox cannot substitute for games designed for Nintendo.
- Users face substantial switching costs when switching platforms. They have to buy a new console and then replace all their games.
- Each company controls the distribution of games on their respective platform.
When you look at video games are they three separate markets of "games for Xbox", "games for Playstation", and "games for Nintendo"? Or are they three separate competitors competing in the global market of "video games" despite the above constraints?
I think Epic is going to have a difficult time convincing a court with this argument.
Game studios and console manufacturers have historically negotiated on relatively equal footing. It's as important to console makers that game studios make games as it is for game studios to have access. So studios are courted and get a relatively fair shake. Apple/Google don't care if you don't make an app for their system. They're not giving any discounts or incentives to app makers.
Console makers also are in a more competitive market. There were usually three makers plus near competitors like PC, web, and arcade gaming. Plus, not owning a console was an option.
On the other hand Apple/Google barely compete with each other. Pretty much everyone is going to buy a smart phone and they're the two options. They're a cushy duopoly with no incentive to rock the boat.
That is not a requirement for antitrust law. That is just some silly threshold the Justice Department set for itself so that it wouldn't have to do its job.
Until the [EDIT: Clinton] administration, businesses were successfully charged with antitrust violations even though in many cases they were minor market participants on the basis of their actions resulting in anti-competitive effects. (Usually as a result of price-fixing agreements between smaller participants.) After the Microsoft case, the DOJ decided to bring "economic analysis" into the mix to "improve" their antitrust practice, and it resulted in the DOJ not pursuing any meaningful antitrust cases at all, on the grounds that basically everything was kosher if you looked at it from a sufficiently macroeconomic perspective. (This also overlapped with the Dubya administration, and there was strong political pressure not to go after American companies.)
Interestingly enough, Apple was the last major antitrust case that the DOJ successfully pursued. (That case involved Apple arranging a price-fixing arrangement for ebooks.)
From your own link:
>the Clayton Act defined as illegal certain business practices that are conducive to the formation of monopolies or that result from them.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly so the latter does not apply. Are you legitimately suggesting that Apple’s behavior is conducive toward the creation of a monopoly?? I would really like to hear some legal arguments that support this position. Apple’s market is shrinking, not growing. It will be a supremely tough court battle to prove that Apple’s behavior will lead to market consolidation in Apple’s favor.
It's so tightly controlled that it's literally impossible for there to be any competitor iPhone app stores that consumers could move to.
And not only that, but Apple is also stopping the implementation of browser features (WebPush, Service Workers, etc) that would appear to allow browser apps to compete with those downloaded from the App Store [0].
[0] https://twitter.com/HenrikJoreteg/status/1071611165946470400
If you don’t like Apple, do you have alternative options? Yes. Unequivocally, yes.
If there is a monopoly in the smartphone market, it’s Google.
Due to historical naming conventions, the modified legislation is still referred to by its original name.
And thank God for that! I don't want websites in Safari to have the APIs available to a native app!
Nope, not at all. You want 3rd party app stores because:
1) you don't believe Apple's walled garden is worth a 30% cut
2) you dislike Apple's lack of transparency in their app review procedures
3) you're unable to sideload an app onto your "customer's" devices
One or more of those are why you "need" third party app stores. And, I think you've got a valid argument for any of them. But none of those have anything to do with what APIs are available to websites in Safari.
ummm Safari stops you given it is a terrible browser, and is non-compatible with many modern features
Section III is the missing piece of the legal puzzle for me. I have in the past been convinced that the presence of Android is sufficient to prevent a lawsuit like this from succeeding against Apple. But now I'm not so sure.
III. Competition in the Sale of Mobile Devices Cannot Discipline Apple’s Conduct in the iOS App Distribution or iOS In-App Payment Processing Markets. 156. Competition in the sale of mobile devices cannot constrain Apple’s anti-competitive conduct described in Parts I and II. 157. First, Apple’s power in the relevant markets described above is not disciplined by competition in the sale of mobile devices because Apple mobile device customers face significant switching costs and customer lock-in to Apple’s iOS ecosystem.
How many news articles have we seen about the power of iMessage to keep people in the Apple ecosystem? It's gonna be hard for Apple to argue that they don't try to engender consumer lock in given their plain reluctance to interoperate and all the news articles talking about how strong this effect is.
I think Epic has a chance here. Certainly it's a gamble I'd love to see them win. IANAL.
If Apple is forced to allow third-party stores, it should also be forced to allow third-party push notifications.
Especially ones like push notifications which in many cases are harmful to consumers.
Every push notification goes through Apple servers only.
They’d have to build a feature into iOS to allow it to maintain persistent connections to other notification services.
Apple does not allow non-Apple apps...
There are a multitude of cases where Apple apps have different rules, access to different APIs than you or I.
The "correctness" of this (morally/ethically/legally) is a separate debate I'm not entering into, but there is a distinction.
The larger issue though is that Apple will probably break those apps frequently as private API has no guarantees.
"The WebRTC APIs have not yet been exposed to iOS browsers using WKWebView . In practice, this means that your web-based WebRTC application will only work in Safari on iOS, and not in any other browser the user may have installed (Chrome, for example), nor in an 'in-app' version of Safari.Sep 7, 2018"
Im sure there are more examples.