Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpttsn | Hacker News Reader

Can you think of any situation where bundling would be acceptable?

Should e.g. a restaurant have to provide an open market for silverware providers?

Restaurants doesn't sell silverware. And even if they did they wouldn't have 10% of EU as customers. EU puts their anti trust laws for marketplaces at 10% instead of defining it as a monopoly, at that size you have to play fair.

Restaurants sell a bundled experience. The use of their silverware is part of what I buy.

You could argue that the restaurant shouldn’t be a gatekeeper. Other parties could let me enjoy a cheaper meal, competing to offer the most discounted silverware. My $10 burger could be $9 if I could rent a paper plate from a third party and eat on the floor. After all, the restaurant shouldn’t abuse it’s monopoly, right?

It doesn't have a monopoly. Now if one restaurant chain controlled 50% of the market, suddenly you've got good reason to treat them as a platform and regulate them accordingly.

Once I’m in he restaurant, it has a monopoly. The same way Apple has a monopoly once I’m in the App Store.

Apple is the only seller of apps on my Apple phone.

Burger King is the only seller/provider of plates and cutlery at my local Burger King.

The difference is, if you don't like it you can leave the restaurant and choose any other. You have no lock in. Once you've bought an iOS device, you can't buy apps anywhere else.

Even if you forget the sunk cost you just have two providers to choose from.

I can always get my next phone from Samsung, just as I can always get my next meal from McDonalds.

But this meal is locked in. If I don’t like the pickles on my whopper, they don’t provide McDonald’s pickles, do they? The don’t allow me to get a McFlurry with my Chicken Sandwich?

Bundling is allowed in every other instance and is key to many great products. Apple can do it too.

This comparison of situation in restaraunts and mobiles is laughable. It reads as either disingenuous or daft.

You are significantly more locked in to your phone than your meal. There are also more choices for where to eat that what phone OS you want to have. Your phone OS is also a gateway to many different industries. Transactions made on a smart phone make up an ever expanding portion of economic activity, whereas eating-at-restaurant generally remains a constant portion of consumer spend.

You can use webapp with almost any modern device, without Apple or Google's app stores

But Apple phone is not your only choice

Does this restaurants operation constitute more than 10% of the silverware market? If not, there is your answer.

Also whoever came with this ridiculous analogy probably goes to a restaurant and then eats there their every meal for the next 2 or 3 years, thinks restaurants have popular multi billion marketplaces of silverware where they charge 30% to providers, which is a significant part of their revenue, and at the same time their own silverware factory which doesn't get the fee, lives in a world where 2 restaurant chains own 99.9% of the market...

People who choose to do business by selling a phone or opening a restaurant choose to do so within the context of the rules and regulations that society imposes on businesses of their sort. If they or society don't like the current rules they are free to lobby congress.

There isn't any inherently correct answer just a variety of possible answers with various outlooks for many parties.

I don't think anyone regards a restaurant as a market for silverware and plates where different vendors compete but Apple explicitly clearly runs a market for apps which is a notably different situation from selling burgers.

There is everyone reason to suppose that burgers ought to be regulated differently from software and regulators, lawmakers, and courts aren't robots required to interpret law like code. Reasonable results require both the literal text of the law and common sense.

A lawsuit attempting to force Burgerville to allow third party plate rental would run into the common sense conclusion that the Burgerville isn't presenting plates inc an opportunity to do business with customers they are simply offering them an opportunity to sell n plates to Burgerville for usage in their business.

Well put.

Apple runs a store, not a market. This is the key distinction to my mind. In a store I expect curation and payola. On a market I expect independent hagglers.

I imagine if Plateify, a hot startup from the EU, wanted to get into the American Burger King “plate market”, they could get all sort of different attention from lawmakers.

Anyway, where’s the line to a “sub market”? If it’s the soda brand that goes with your burger? Should consumers always be able to get Pepsi cheaper than Coke? The whole reasoning is complex and arbitrary. I’d much rather just let companies decide what they want to bundle and unbundle.

What are you talking about. A restaurant doesn’t have the power to steer an economy of billions of dollars worldwide (the phone app market) . Apple and google do. Do you understand the risk for countries to allow one single private company to have complete control over the life/jobs of hundreds of thousands of citizens (app developers) that could be just destroyed by the whim of one of these two companies? It’s the price of creating a multi billion dollar business. You have to take responsibilities that go beyond your own revenue as you have worldwide power.

I don’t feel entitled to controlling any company unless I own stock.

If I build my career on a supplier company I don’t control, that’s my problem.

EU politicians seem to disagree. Mostly (I bet) to protect their own.

Good thing your feelings aren't relevant to... Pretty much anything under discussion here, then.

Well that’s not how it works. When a company controls a very important piece of something society starts to rely on (oil, information, communication ... etc), regulation is not just preferable . It is NECESSARY.

Couldn't the society adopt alternatives on their own if they feel it unfair?

When you are the only two Restaurant in town that offers dinning services and somehow these restaurant has a high barrier of entry so other restaurant cant compete, then yes. How much and what silverware you use could then be a problem.

And I could force you to buy silverware made in X.

If the "app developer" doesn't feel fair to work for apple app store / google play store, they could work for other android app store or, they could work for the web.

Even there are many Apple App developer on the world doesn't mean they cannot choose to left.

I go to a restaurant for food and drinks, not silverware.

I'm not smart enough to make an argument about food pricing but some restaurants let you bring your own bottle of wine as long as you pay a 'corkage fee'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com