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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the entire world has forgotten what a monopoly is. Apparently both Apple and Google are monopolies despite being competitors of one another. Programmers clearly talk about developing apps for one platform or another and sometimes give up on developing for one because the approval process was annoying or arbitrary. Consumers have a choice in the phones they buy and whether to even use a phone app for that service to begin with. Maybe this isn't a healthy ecosystem, but it seems we've completely lost the thread on what a monopoly is.

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Apple has a monopoly for apps stores on iOS devices.

> A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Commodity: Apps sales on iOS. Only supplier: Apple.

Apple use their monopolistic market position to enforce a 30% levy on third parties. It has nothing at all to do with Google, since Google cannot compete with Apple to provide app stores on iOS.

Even bringing Google up is an attempt to shift the conversation from the app store situation on iOS to something off-topic and irrelevant (handset market share). That's not what we're discussing.

Let's go through the markers of a monopoly:

- Profit maximizer: Maximizes profits.

Yes.

- Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.

Yes.

- Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output. Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

Yes, Apple is the exclusive provider.

- Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product.

Yes.

So the Appe Store on iOS checks all the markers of a monopoly. But people want to pretend the monopoly designation can only apply to traditional market segments without justification.

iOS App Stores is not an industry though any more than Tesla car operating systems or Ikea screws are.

They are intrinsic parts of the objects and have never existed independently of them.

See United States v. Microsoft Corp. That was a landmark decision that essentially says that things like the App Store are in fact eligible to be declared monopolies for the purposes of anti-trust.

There is no market in those two examples. No one buys Tesla operating systems, and no one buys IKEA screws. In both cases, those are building blocks of the whole.

You must have a market before you can abuse it. In addition, you must have a firm and durable market power. If IKEA had a strong screw market across multiple segments, and then abused that position through exclusionary practices, you could argue a potential illegal monopoly. Likewise, if Tesla operating systems were closer to 90’s Microsoft, you could have an argument there.

Notice no one is arguing an iOS monopoly. The App Store fits the legal definition of a market. Apple has a firm and durable market power (over 50% in multiple countries, including the US, which is their highest revenue). Apple excludes some from this app market. Apple can and does prevent certain firms from succeeding in their marketplace. It is not unheard of to have Apple reject or pull apps once they decide that they want to add that app’s feature to iOS. Once the app is pulled into iOS, it gains functionality not available to other apps. Their monopoly was gained not by innovation, but by the fact that they set the rules of this market - you simply cannot make a competing App Store.

These are red flags and should be investigated.

>- Price maker: Decides the price of the good or product to be sold, but does so by determining the quantity in order to demand the price desired by the firm.

>Yes.

We are talking the app store here, right? How does Apple set the prices of the apps? The devs release their apps at the price they want. Free, Freemium, Paid, In App Purchases, etc.

>- Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product.

>Yes.

Again, how is Apple changing the prices of apps on the app store?

>So the Appe Store on iOS checks all the markers of a monopoly. But people want to pretend the monopoly designation can only apply to traditional market segments without justification.

Clearly, I'm disagreeing with this summation.

> We are talking the app store here, right? How does Apple set the prices of the apps?

Yes we're talking about the app STORE not the apps. Apple exclusively sets the price for the store the apps are sold on (and any services the apps sell): 30% (+- first $1M).

> The devs release their apps at the price they want.

We're talking about what Apple charges developers, not what developers charge customers.

This argument falls apart when you consider anybody is the sole provider of anything. I’m the sole provider of my approval, therefore I’m a monopoly? So then you have to decide at what scale this argument makes sense and nobody is going to agree on that.

> Apple has a monopoly for apps stores on iOS devices.

I spent a summer interning for the CA DOJ's antitrust division. The first thing I learned is that the determination of the relevant market is extremely important, and often outcome-determinative. If the relevant market is drawn broadly, then it's much less likely that a company will be considered to have a monopoly; if the the relevant market is drawn narrowly, it will be much more likely.

The question for Apple/Google is: is the 'relevant market' the market for distributing apps on their own platform, or for smartphones in general? There's no way to know in advance how a court would come down on this question, and it would have a huge impact on the outcome of the trial.

You're right. It's a duopoly, a cartel.

A system controlled by two players who move in coordination with one another.

techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/google-play-drops-commissions-to-15-from-30-following-apples-move-last-year

Good thing that they all cross into each other's primary fields so that there's never a monopoly. Google makes phones. Windows is a search company.

Apple has a search engine. Apple sells advertising. Apple has a maps app.

So does Yahoo, Naver, Yandex, Baidu etc. It's all very far from a cartel.

Sure chose a bad example... that's Google being forced to drop fees by their competitor.

Those are commissions the stores take not what the developers take. Sure sounds like competition.

And yet again wrong. Google and Apple have exhibited very little cartel like behaviour at all. If they had there would have been a clear anti trust case by now.

The problem is that everyone seems to have collectively forgot that it's not monopolies in and of themselves that we have to protected against but rather anti trust behaviour.

You could potentially argue that app stores do exhibit anti trust behaviour but in that case one should do so and not throw around words clearly aimed at invoking an emotional response.

You need to be careful as words matter.

Apple and Google are not a cartel by any definition and they do not in anyway coordinate with each other. Either of these are criminal.

Google reducing their margins to better compete with Apple is no different to how every market works.

Apple and Google’s action is no more than a cartel than Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile in the late 90s and early 2000s. They just don’t compete against each other.

OR maybe that's just how markets work

>Apparently both Apple and Google are monopolies despite being competitors of one another.

It is called Duopoly.

>but it seems we've completely lost the thread on what a monopoly is.

monopoly | məˈnɒp(ə)li |

• a company or group having exclusive control over a commodity or service:

Monopoly is anything that does something that I don’t like.

People bitch about Android vs iPhone and ignore the actual local monopolies present in the phone network itself.

Those are called natural monopolies.

It's very difficult to put up network infrastructure.

So why are they not municipal

Or should we have water and electric monopolies

> I feel like the entire world has forgotten what a monopoly is [...] we've completely lost the thread on what a monopoly is.

Perhaps what “a monopoly is” deserves to be redefined from time to time.

I agree with you, legally and based purely on prior case law precedence, maybe it doesn’t count as a monopoly as currently defined by law.

But the legal system is designed to be fluid, to adapt to an evolving society. There are no absolutes in any legal system and everything is up for debate, which is the beauty of the system.

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