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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why people keep saying this. They had standing because they were a party to the Developer Program License Agreement. They would have had standing even if they weren't because they allege they're being denied use of an "essential facility".

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Prefacing this with that I'm just a layman so this is just an interesting discussion for me.

Looking at the Wikipedia page and the requirements for standing the way Epic is doing this looks at least for me much more in line with the given requirements.

Though I guess the Wikipedia page is a simplification of the reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)

They might have had standing for some of their claims, but many others would have had a reasonable chance of being dismissed for lack of standing. Better to make it explicit.

They had standing yeah. I think it's about showing reduction in consumer welfare - Apple delisted an app that lowered prices for consumers.

Their stunt doesn't actually demonstrate that Apple's commission harms consumer welfare. If it did any retailer with a margin over the price of a manufacturer's goods would also be harming consumer welfare.

Yes, I agree, margin over the price of a manufactured good does harm consumer welfare. I didn't write the legal opinions, but it's much more interesting to talk about them this way!

The consumer welfare thing is just one factor of many to make a status-quo antitrust law case a real battle. There hasn't been antitrust victories for consumers in a very, very long time.

Then we're in agreement that Epic's breach of the developer agreement wasn't actually required to have standing or to bolster their antitrust claims.

Then it should be obvious that, Apple could write whatever it wants in its god damned agreements, it doesn't actually matter w.r.t. anti-trust claims.

Epic had to get Apple to go do an anti-trust thing - in their opinion. So it's definitely required to bolster the claim.

When I refer to consumer welfare I'm referring to the "consumer welfare standard" that is relevant to antitrust cases. Epic's breach doesn't actually aid them in demonstrating that Apple has harmed consumer welfare. The same holds true for Spotify when they charged more on iOS to cover Apple's commission.

It will be interesting to see how consumer welfare standard will evolve to accommodate people paying more for IAP because of app store fees. It's likely that it will.

Probably 100% of congress uses an iPhone. 100% of judges. Every lawyer. It's right in their face. 100% of them use Google, 0% use Bing. I don't think I know a single non-engineering professional, English as a first language adult who uses an Android device.

It's not some abstract situation the consumer welfare standard didn't anticipate; it's the now. Nobody is going to sympathize with arguments about choice because that hasn't been true for a while - nobody makes the choice, not among these people, for alternatives, so is there really a choice?

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