Companies shouldn't be allowed to fire customers that blatantly break rules the customer agreed to?
Imagine if Microsoft "fired" Adobe and as a result nobody could install Photoshop on Windows anymore.
I’m not sure how this shows a monopoly. On the contrary, I think it will be hard for Epic to prove that Apple has a “monopolistic power” on Fortnite distribution when they got billionaires through it even before it was ported to iOS.
EDIT: downvotes on HN for stating an opinion?
However, I see the argument to be made that in selling a Mac or an iPhone, you're being sold a general-purpose computing device with explicit value added by third-party software vendors. Also, on macOS, you were sold the explicit ability to run whatever software you want. It's purpose is to run software from third-parties.
When you bought a Tesla, that wasn't how the car was represented to you. It's purpose is to drive, and yeah it's got a sweet big screen that happens to run apps, but that's ancillary.
Legally, I think that matters. From a free-software perspective, I agree, I would also like to run whatever I want on my car.
I agree with that, and I think there would be a much stronger argument if Apple changed MacOS to remove this ability when it is a very well-established ability of the Mac platform. Of course, Apple almost certainly will not remove this ability, not because they want to be nice or they want to dodge antitrust allegations, but because they know that doing so would lose them customers.
But with iPhone, my argument is that this is absolutely not the expectation fostered by Apple's marketing or held by the vast majority of iPhone owners. Apple has always been very proud of its App Store and its (supposedly) strict vetting process to protect iPhone owners from malware, privacy violations, and other junk. Now, I personally think Apple should be much more restrictive about what apps it allows in the store, because there is a vast wasteland of abandoned apps and junk apps. If anything, the iPhone seems to have gotten less and less restrictive over time (the first iPhone didn't even support any third-party software, after all). I have a lot of trouble buying the argument that any significant number of iPhone owners expected to be able to run any third-party software they want to.
While I agree with the overwhelming majority of your reply, I'd suggest that the significant majority of iPhone owners expect to be able to run "any third-party software they want" because they expect substantially any third-party software they would want to be available in the App Store. Removing Epic is violating that implicit understanding.
They later removed that feature, causing a class action lawsuit, which they settled.
However, in order to get a key that works with their DRM or console OSs, you do need a license.
Yes, it does.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/monopoly-power-and-market-power-...
Apple unambiguously has this with their app store.
However, several of the claims Epic made in their lawsuit do require proving that Apple has monopoly power, which is going to be a difficult argument with their current 46% market share.
In either case, the standard legal approach is to throw the kitchen sink of claims, to see which ones stick. Most claims get rejected by the courts, but if you have a few that work, it's enough.
It also helps settle. If I have a dozen $10 million dollar claims, with a 5% chance of success each, a rational opponent will throw me $6 million to go away. If the parties settle, the kitchen sink approach is not a bad one to get a better settlement.
I don't think Epic cares to settle here though, they have more than enough money to keep this suit going for the next decade.
Instead of picking one sentence out of context, why not quote the entire thing? Does it still support your claim?
Here is your sentence in context for those who care about truth:
"the Supreme Court, in other cases, seems to have articulated standards for 'monopoly power' and 'market power' that, at least linguistically, are incompatible. In NCAA v. Board of Regents, [FN33] the Court defined 'market power' as 'the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market.' [FN34] By contrast, the Supreme Court has consistently defined 'monopoly power,' at least for section two cases, in accordance with the definition articulated in United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. [FN35]-i.e., as 'the power to control prices or exclude competition.' [FN36] Strictly construed, the Court's language appears to require a higher burden of proof to establish 'market power' than to demonstrate 'monopoly power,' because proof of a defendant's ability to exclude competition would not suffice to demonstrate the existence of 'market power.' Moreover, even the price portion of the du Pont monopoly power definition is broader than the NCAA market power standard because the latter ignores the ability to prevent price decreases."
Did you ignore what is current case practice? Did you ignore that the article cited more cases supporting my position than yours? Your out of context quoting is intellectually dishonest.
Some more quotes you ignored - go ahead and post them in context if you like.
"Most antitrust rules require the plaintiff to show that the defendant has or is likely to obtain 'market power' or 'monopoly power.' The offense of monopolization requires, of course, proof that the defendant has monopoly power."
"According to the Supreme Court's latest formulation, a tying arrangement is not illegal unless the seller has 'market power' in the tying product."
> Seriously. It clearly states what I said,
Yes, indeed. It's so clearly stated you removed the context that clearly states the opposite of what you said.
I guess I should have found a clearer explanation, since you quote things out of context.
Here's an easier read [1], and here's some legal standards applied from there with case citations:
Under cartels and collusion: "if the enterprise (as an economic entity) has not acquired a monopoly position, or has significant market power, then no harm is done."
Two questions:
1) Why did you remove the context of your quote?
2) Can you cite a successful anti-trust case where monopoly power was not shown in the proceedings?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Now you speak of "platforms" that charge a tax in return for preventing users from installing software -- on their own devices they actually literally own, mind.
Can you imagine if your car would only operate on roads approved by Ford?
I also believe in choice and experimentation when it comes to business models. If I want to buy some systems with trade offs and benefits that don’t always include being able to root and run Linux on them, who are you to prevent me?
Believing that all systems must be maximally flexible is a scarcity mindset that felt more reasonable when families had to save to be able to afford a desktop computer that would be in use for several years.
This is a good insight and it's entirely possible that general purpose computing was a historical aberration.
You say you want to be able to choose between a real computer and a restricted appliance, but how long will the market allow you to make that choice?
Selling locked-down terminals with access to a pay-to-play "platform" is obviously very profitable. How much longer will MacOS and Windows allow you to install unverified software?
PCs can be self-assembled without buying them as an appliance from a specific vendor, and you can at the very least install Linux on them. If you care about Windows, Microsoft is adopting open source more and more, you can have install Ubuntu within Windows right now, I doubt they will change course on software installation.
I do have a Linux box in my home and successfully use it for many tasks. This doesn't mean that I feel that all devices that have a CPU in my home must absolutely run unsigned binaries compiled by me.
I'm not saying manufacturers need to expend money and effort to support tinkers and hobbyists, but why deliberately go out of their way to block them?
For now.
Every year, integrated SoCs become cheaper and more powerful. Self-building a PC is more and more niche.
I mean, per-car roads probably aren't a good business model, but if it's a privately owned road you can probably make up your own rules, and there would be nothing to stop you doing that, right? And nothing to stop car owners using different roads.
And even if you do think that, let's see some evidence of you arguing that case as passionately as you argue this one.
Begging the question. Why should the manufacturer have any say at all over what software I run on hardware I own?
To paraphrase your question: Let's hear your argument why General Electric should allow me to heat any food in their microwave?
I don't understand why you keep bringing up video game consoles in this discussion.
1. You seem to believe people actually agree with the way console stores work. This is not the case.
2. The fact that the situation is also terrible somewhere else doesn't absolve Apple of anything. That's not how justice works.
In fact, I see much much less vitriol aimed towards game console store policy than iOS App Store policy. That's why I mention it.
That this is often not possible is stupid but also incredibly dangerous. Not by the standards of the evil Apple just did, but what even more malicious actors can do to you is they can run code on your device & you can't do anything about it.
It could be state actors pressuring the company making the think & or exploiting vulnerabilities in the closed source firmware running on it.
Pointedly, my argument is simple: the modern concept of plateform, as has been pushed by management consulting firms for the past two decades and successfully been exploited by hightech companies, is a blatant attack against anti competition laws and I believe the whole thing only started because the US government decided it would only meekly enforce them. Rebranding barriers to entry moats shouldn't make artificially building them more acceptable.
As you rightfully pointed, plateforms seem to be popping everywhere nowadays from game consoles to cars. I don't find that surprising: reducing competition is like crack cocaine to companies. It both means less need to innovate and differentiate and a larger share of customers surplus (theorically all customer surplus but it might be too blatant then). Customers are the ones losing there.
As the whole thing strongly goes against one of the core tenant of modern capitalism, it seems obvious to me it is going to end with more regulations as soon as the political zeitgeist regarding economy will lean less towards extrem laissez-faire. Unless of course, we decide to go full-bore towards nineteenth century style capitalism...
Not that it matters, but the Amazon app store has the worst policies IME.
https://it.nmu.edu/docs/allowing-third-party-applications-in...
Amazingly it then lets me run all the open source I want that I download from the internet but am too lazy to build myself.
1. Try to open the application. Get a window that says "APPLICATION can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.", and below that, in a smaller and non-bold font, "Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the App Store and identified developers." The window only has an "OK" button. (There is also a small "?" button in the lower left, which is present in lots of notification windows and presumably points to a generic help page.)
2. Open Security & Privacy in System Preferences. There is now, magically, a line in it saying "APPLICATION was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer", and an "Open Anyway" button.
I only discovered that workaround by accident. Before that, I believed that Mac OS had completely removed the option to run such applications. (As I recall, back when "Allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere" existed, if you did choose it, it would show some kind of warning and also revert itself after 30 days; it seemed obvious they wanted to remove the option entirely.)
I'm tempted to bring out the word "gaslighting" to describe this. Because that line about "Your security preferences allow ..." is in a context where it should be an explanation of why "APPLICATION can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer", yet your security preferences about apps have only two choices and neither one would permit opening the application; and because a System Preferences pane now shows different options depending on what unrelated user applications you've opened recently, which is insane.
... Turns out there is a second, faster workaround. Right-click (or control-click) on the application, and click "Open". Then, instead of getting the liar window with only the "OK" button, you get a window that has an "Open Anyway" button. This workaround is, in fact, documented in the generic help page that the liar window's "?" button points to. This is also insane because it makes "Open" in its different forms (double-click, command-O, command-line "open", and the right-click "Open" option) no longer a single, uniform operation.
I suspect there are corporate users who have policies that forbid running non-notarized software. That probably shouldn't apply to a game like Fortnite—most companies wouldn't consider it important, or perhaps even a positive, for their employees to be able to run Fortnite on their company laptops—but it would apply to other apps.
Surely this comes down to what reasonable expectations are held by the customer. There are microcontrollers you can buy that require a soldering iron and USB breakout board in order to run your own software on them. I think that's pretty reasonable, but it would be a ridiculous requirement for a desktop PC purchased at Best Buy.
The question becomes: what are the reasonable expectations for installing third-party software on an iPhone. Personally, I think the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners expect and even highly value the fact that Apple (supposedly [0]) vets all third-party software on the iPhone, and it's generally more difficult to accidentally install malware or break your device than it is on other computing platforms.
[0] As I've said before, I think Apple actually needs to be more restrictive, because a lot of useless/broken/scammy stuff makes it into the App Store.
Apple changed behavior on that at least twice. (I skipped several Mac OS versions, so I may have missed intermediate changes.) First, it switched to requiring you to choose, in security preferences, an option to allow apps from anywhere—which, I think, would show a scary warning, and would also revert itself to the default after 30 days. Later, it switched to removing that "Anywhere" option, and instead shows a misleading "you can't open this because of your preferences" error, and provides a couple of insane hidden workarounds. I consider the first change reasonable, if unnecessarily annoying; I consider the second change unreasonable.
https://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/ ->
> In a landmark ruling against Tengen in March of 1991, Judge Fern Smith stated that Nintendo had the right to “exclude others” from the NES if they so chose, thus providing the legal soil on which many more walled gardens would be tilled in the years to come.
All walled gardens suck.
In the same way people love Apple.
The rights and legal limitations of Apple (regarding App Store) and Microsoft (regarding Xbox) are exactly the same no matter if iPhone or Xbox is considered "central to modern life" or not; and whether the hardware was sold at a loss. These aspects are simply not relevant for the antitrust case, they should not and would not change the decision.
If different rules should be applied to companies that are essential to modern life, such as classifying them as essential services, that should be a new law that’s explicit about the qualifications, gets debated, and has to reconcile the tradeoffs inherent in that classification. It should definitely not be something defined by a court of law (and it’s unlikely to be in this case).
This would mean that there's only two app stores: Apple's and Google's.
Google doesn't do that because that would be an abuse of their market position and they would get rinsed in the courts. Since the same laws apply to Google as Apple, and Apple clearly has significant market power in smartphone and tablet computers, it stands to reason that Apple should be prohibited from doing the same thing.
Are you sure that Google doesn't do that because the Android platform is an extremely viable and lucrative alternative to iPhones, and that people who value the ability to sideload software on their smartphones flock to Android for precisely this reason?
As far as I can see, what distinguishes Apple from Google is status quo. Apple never did allow app distribution other than through the Apple App Store. i.e. "We've always been doing it"
That's what I'm getting at. Is it anticompetitive to deliberately make your product worse by removing a key differentiator between your product and its closest competitor?
Or come at it from another angle: would it be "anticompetitive" for Apple to (in new iPhones) completely remove the App Store and thus all reasonable expectation to be able to run third-party software? Is it anticompetitive to sell a handheld computer than can do email, play music and videos, etc., but not run third-party software?
Is F-Droid in Google Play ?
It is not.
For every update, times every app you have to click through a stupid screen "Are you sure you want to install this update? It requires no special permissions."
With auto updates this was quite a wakeup call...
Another nice thing is F-Droid listing multiple versions, another thing sorely lacking in Google Play.
That is the key here, Epic and some others are trying to change how Apple has implemented their device. iOS and the hardware are part and parcel. You don't get to choose which OS you run as it was never designed to support such action.
iOS was never an open OS, you cannot legally install it on other devices either.
That is true, but I think it is debatable whether that is a reasonable way to define "market".
It would be as if a vendor wanted to sell their goods in a grocery store. The grocery store says no for some reason. The vendor disagrees and sues them, saying they have a monopoly on all grocery store sales on that particular corner.
"Wait, but there is a grocery store across the street?"
Well, in their law suite they defined market to be just that corner---they excluded the other corner where the Android grocery store is selling things.
[1] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
But once you have dominance different rules apply.
Ideally, I'd prefer that this kind of back-and-forth between developers and Apple would happen strictly through negotiation, rather than invoking the court system, but I realize that not all markets are functioning well enough for this to be practical.
It certainly can be argued that they have a dominant position in a particular narrow market, and the court will look at these arguments and determine whether they do or not.
Not sure what's the business model behind Apple Arcade, but it looks Apple is in a way also competing on the gaming market. From this point of view their 30% cut from competitors' sales looks a bit worse.