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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

The point of the anti-trust regulations is that some of these kinds of contract terms become illegal as market power increases - particularly contract terms around using dominance in one market to unfairly gain dominance in another market.

Otherwise for instance you could have a dominant employer in your town (eg. A factory town) write into your employment contract that you can only buy household groceries from their own supermarket etc. These kinds of things actually happened at one point in history before the anti-trust regulations.

A lot obviously depends on definition of the "markets" which is what anti-trust cases in practice largely revolve around.

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That's not what Apple is doing here, the rules are: 1) don't portray our fees in a negative light if you want to do business with us, 2) don't actively try to subvert us in our own garden where you are a guest.

Where is the monopoly here?

The service Apple has, is appealing to customers because they're aggressively protecting what is important to them, and using their fees to ensure they've got the resources to actually vet software, prevent abuses of customers, and make payment seamless.

If you don't like that, you're free to find software in many other forms.

But you don't want that, you want to have someone provide you all that, but without having to you know, pay for it.

Which is why the internet is an ad supported shit hole, and this is one place that is actually pretty great for customer experience.

The part which will i think likely be found anti competitive will be not allowing app publishers to advertise or provide alternative payment mechanisms for in-app good & services being provided by them while being the only way to distribute apps for the iPhone.

This very easily can and will be be argued as using dominance in one market (distribution of apps) to extract value out othet (in-app services, books, gaming, movies, sheet music...). There's easily demonstrable consumer harm because buying the exactly same sheet music on a iPad is a few dollars more expensive than buying it on the same app on web and using it in the iPad.

Of course Apple can and probably will make the argument of "movie theater concession stand" (ie. your "in our garden" comment) and will probably make the "safety and security" argument just like concession stand owners will.

However, that analogy is very weak legally i think because iPhones are not really Apple's property (unlike concession stands on theatre property) since they're clearly sold as hardware and is off their books (EULAs not-withstanding - they're not enforceable).

So I think what will happen is Apple will lose this case and will be forced to stop preventing advertising and offering of alternative payment mechanisms by Apps - maybe with some terms and conditions for safety certification by neutral third parties.

I don't really think the remedies will stretch beyond that - but payments is what this fight is about.

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