Court rejects $1.2B EU antitrust fine against Intel
reuters.com
reuters.com
The FB case in US seems a bit stupid as what exactly do they have a monopoly on. They don't own a paltform as such. An upcomer like Tiktok can upstage them and create its own space out of nowhere in a couple of years.
While look at Apple. They have more than 50% share of mobile devices in US and their devices are actual platforms. They own it from bare silicon to device to OS to apps to services to accessories. Their own products get first class support while others can't integrate as well. Their web browser has no real competition on mobile, so mobile web for more than 50% of users is at their mercy. They get unfair advantage for their music streaming services etc. The list is quite long.
90% marketshare that you don't utilize anticompetitively? Sounds great. 50% marketshare that you utilize anticompetitively particularly across other domains? That's an antitrust issue.
It's not. 50% market share is more than enough to have significant market power. Especially when the rest of the market is only a single company and barriers to entry are enormous. (Remember that Microsoft -- the company with 95% desktop market share -- tried and failed to enter this market.)
If they had any chutzpah, they would have continued plowing their billions in profit into improving their device, and coming out with innovations similar to Apple’s own chips.
Obviously, Microsoft’s C suite does not think their org can do better than collect the rent from Excel licenses and Azure.
Users don't want a phone with no apps, developers don't make apps for a phone with no users.
In some kind of theoretical sense it should be possible to overcome this with enough money. They could have given away a hundred million phones for nothing while making cash payments to app developers. It's an open question whether this would have cost them tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.
What is not in question is that it is a crazy huge amount of money that maybe a half dozen companies in the world even have to throw around like that, one of them was Microsoft, and two of the others are Apple and Google. Apparently no one else is even interested in making the attempt.
There's also a significant question about what you do with that control when you have it.
For all their faults, Google and Apple haven't tried anything equivalent to that.
Google's repeatedly pushed Chrome-specific web “features” as the new way to do everything web. Sometimes they're also implemented in Firefox. Not equivalent, but similar.
I think what Microsoft was doing was objectionable in itself.
I think what Google is doing is objectionable to the extent that they try to use that control to prevent people doing things they dislike (eg, their recent work to undermine ad-blockers).
Chrome only runs on Windows, some Linuxs, and some BSDs. It includes DRM that only works on some processors… It looks like Google is trying to prevent the "web platform" from continuing to exist as a competitor to Chrome, and I don't see how that's any different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I'm wondering whether the cause was more "a new head of the relevant department had a different attitude towards antitrust enforcement" (or possibly even "a different attitude towards Microsoft") than "the prosecution realized how shaky the argumentation had been".
The EU decision actually had more teeth though.
As a side not, that Wikipedia article is far from neutral: > … Microsoft responded that the company would offer manufacturers a choice: one version of Windows that was obsolete, or another that did not work properly.
> Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others.[5] Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[17] Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[18]
The government may have agreed to a settlement on appeal but Microsoft lost the initial suit.
> "Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows"
is false.
However, when most people discuss the result of a lawsuit you can generally infer they are referring to the ultimate decision after all appeals are exhausted (as opposed to any particular intermediate decision which could get reversed and then reversed again).
Since the appeals court overturned that particular claim, one could reasonably argue that the district judge ruled incorrectly, and in the eyes of the legal system Microsoft, did not, actually lose.
(Note that I am speaking here only in regards to the tying claim, as the appeals court did affirm that Microsoft lost on several of the other claims related to Windows licensing for OEMs.)
Suppose B was accused of murder, initially convicted, then exonerated on appeal.
“B is a convicted murderer; true or false?”
“B was convicted of murder; true or false?”
If your answers are “false to the first but true to the second”, I’d wager you are frequently misunderstood by other people in conversations.
"X was convicted for doing Y, but Z was not convicted for doing >>Y" is an interesting comparison, even if (or especially if) X later won an appeal.
Microsoft did lose the suit in 1999. They then appealed and settled with the DOJ a few years later.
The real point is to demonstrate the ability to penalize them. Then if they do what the government wants, i.e. censor the people the government wants censored, their problems will go away. A slap on the wrist instead of a breakup.
Apple on the other hand is generally well-liked. Even though, like you said, they engage in a lot of anti-competitive practices. By all accounts, Apple is a key player in making computing platforms more locked down and tightly controlled, fighting against the right to repair, using weird proprietary screws everywhere. Things that should make everyone on Hacker News frown... But no, Apple products are expensive status symbols, the Prada of computing, and Steve Jobs was the messiah of the modern computer age, even though he routinely threw fits and treated everyone like shit. Apple can do no wrong.
There, fixed that for you.
I don't recall the last time I answered a survey.
I have better things to do, like hanging around here.
> Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.93 billion on average for September 2021, an increase of 6% year-over-year.
> Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.91 billion as of September 30, 2021, an increase of 6% year-over-year.
> Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.81 billion on average for September 2021, an increase of 11% year-over-year.
> Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.58 billion as of September 30, 2021, an increase of 12% year-over-year.
[1] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
The survey measured Americans (who have mostly had the longest exposure to Facebook from a global perspective), the reports (presumably) measure globally, including communities that haven't had Facebook as a pervasive part of their social discourse for the last decade+.
The punchline for DAU/MAU seems to be that it has ~flatlined in US/Canada since 2019. But certainly not the drop that would be implied by commentary here and elsewhere in the tech echo chamber.
My original reply was intended as a general warning about not assuming that your worldview is the same as everyone else's worldview.
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q3...
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multi...
What does this mean? That they really don't know what the percentages are? There's a really big chasm of those numbers. Maybe I should have taken more statistics classes, but this makes no sense to me
I actually thought that was the point of antitrust action. The thing that FB monopolizes is the social graph, in any incarnation. (It is a remarkable innovation, to realize that this is a defensible moat; I personally would not have guessed that. But yes, it's a politically meaningful position and so will inevitably be either attacked or (worse) coopted by government)
But if Facebook is sufficiently compliant, the lack of meaningful consequences will increase in probability.
None of this is perfectly immutable. If the public wanted Facebook broken up really bad, it might happen. But there's a strong chance it goes the same way as Microsoft, i.e. people want something done, so there is a case filed against them, people assume something is being done, and then years later they settle the case without addressing anything and the company is now ten times bigger than they were when they were already too big.
It's not that public pressure doesn't matter, it's that there isn't currently enough of it to make change. Especially when the targets control the discourse.
Who wants to make odds that social media algorithms are deprioritizing criticism or critics of social media market power?
If anything Apple is definitely more non compliant and has publicly opposed FBI requests for data even in cases with poor optics and pushed publicly more for e2e encryption and user privacy over law enforcement needs.
Maybe they are. The case is the Sword of Damocles. If they're compliant, it hangs over them to keep them that way, to be settled for a nominal fee some years from now. You'll know non-compliance if the sword comes down and chops off their arms and legs.
> If anything Apple is definitely more non compliant and has publicly opposed FBI requests for data even in cases with poor optics and pushed publicly more for e2e encryption and user privacy over law enforcement needs.
That's a different fight. Unelected officials trying to score PR points in favor of increased spying powers, as opposed to elected officials who have different means and goals.
I do not see any difference between types of agencies and actions for either company.
Apple makes distinct public steps towards making life harder for the government and do not invite retribution/reaction from the government. Facebook does not publicly do much to oppose government policy and they need a sword hanging over them ?
To me this does not hold water.
Both of these companies illegally collude and have even been caught doing it.
Apple owns 50%+ of modern American consumer computing. They tax all of it. You can't repair your stuff and have to buy into an expensive ecosystem. You can't run a non-Apple browser or your own software. The 1984 dream of trusted computing that we bought hook, line, and sinker and are now paying the protection racket price for.
As much as I hate ads, their tight control and singular policy changes have repeatedly caused multi-billion dollar ripples in the industry. Facebook is having to build a new market. That's a sign of a monopoly.
Google controls the web. They control search. The browser. Slowly the web is turning into Google hosted AMP, sites bearing adsense, and sites that only run in Chrome.
Both of them sell movies and music and are morphing into studios. They're both trying to get into payments and dominate fintech. This is too broad to compete with.
Both of them need a hard regulatory shaking.
Yeah, it might be good for the user but a company making a change that shakes the industry like this is worrying. Worse bit is, it helps them as well as they have an ads product which might do well when others can't do better personalised advertising.
> Both of them sell movies and music and are morphing into studios. They're both trying to get into payments and dominate fintech. This is too broad to compete with.
Agreed. There is no way other companies can meaningfully compete with them. Look at Apple and Airpods. The revenue just Airpod makes for Appple is multiples of revenue of Sennheiser and Bose combined.
Because Facebook is big and robust enough to take a few on the chin in order to make it look like "something is being done", which ultimately protects the industry from actual oversight and regulation.
We got popular interest in antitrust. Unfortunately, that's drawn Spitzer types in both the U.S. and EU. Khan and Vestager have a penchant for bringing inchoate cases with headline potential. (The "FTC’s inability to offer [a federal court] any indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook’s market share" being Exhibit A for their breathtaking incompetence [1].)
Hopefully this combination of sustained popular interest and transatlantic executive incompetence spurs legislatures into redrawing 20th century antitrust rules.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224...
So why is facebook a monopoly? For the simple reason that having access to your friends on facebook and having access to your friends on tiktok is not a zero sum game. There is a limited amount of tradeoff between the two, but it is expected for consumers to want both, creating intrinsic opportunities for the two companies to cooperate, instead of compete.
The problem is that competition is measured more or less as how anti-correlated demand for two products is, or approximately, How much less price sensitive my demand for the "sum" of the products is than for just one of them. If this is your measure, then you see that facebook and Tiktok don't compete all that much.
One easy way to fix some of these problems is by requiring something like XMPP. Peering between IM providers would make these things a lot more fungible. Google abandoned XMPP, hwich was very popular, for their inferior chat application, for a reason, and the only reason that I own any Apple products is because of iMessage.
Why require XMPP, if XMPP is a superior product people will find it and use it.
You may need food and water but you don't need a certain brand of tuna because everyone else is using it.
It sounds like facebook purchased a new big screen tv invited everyone over for free. All of your friends went over tonight and you want to shutdown the party so everyone will go somewhere else you approve of.
None of what you have described in this paragraph is an antitrust violation, not by a mile:
"While look at Apple. They have more than 50% share of mobile devices in US and their devices are actual platforms. They own it from bare silicon to device to OS to apps to services to accessories. Their own products get first class support while others can't integrate as well. Their web browser has no real competition on mobile, so mobile web for more than 50% of users is at their mercy."
To the extent that the following sentence relates to the fees they set on their app store, it might allege an antitrust violation:
"They get unfair advantage for their music streaming services etc."
But the optimal regulation of platforms is very much an unsettled area of thinking.
The reason regulators have not focused on the behavior of Apple which you complain about is really simple: none of it is an antitrust violation.
In particular, there are two separate app markets. A phone customer can choose Android or iOS. An app developer can't choose which store to use to distribute their apps. They have to use the one their customer uses. If they have customers on both, they have to use both, and have no choice.
The analogy would be two huge landlords that together own all the real estate in a city and also own the only two shipping companies in the city. A "real estate customer" has a choice in where to live. An online retailer doesn't get to choose where their customers live. The two shipping companies each only ship to the customers who live in that company's apartments.
The online retailer, who is the customer of the shipping company, has no choice in what shipping company to use. If their own customer lives in one company's apartments, they must use that shipping company. It's a shipping monopoly. There is a significant identifiable set of destinations for which no other provider of shipping services exists, and none can exist because the same company prohibits anyone else from delivering to them. Either that's an antitrust violation or we need new antitrust laws.
> But the optimal regulation of platforms is very much an unsettled area of thinking.
Isn't this the thing that gets settled in court by prosecuting a case against them?
I have no idea what this measures, but Googling "Facebook markert share" shows lots of results over 50%: https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats
> An upcomer like Tiktok can upstage them and create its own space out of nowhere in a couple of years.
Is it a requirement of a monopoly that no competitor could possibly come and grab part of the market? Like as soon as one manages to do that, there's no longer a monopoly, despite the relative market shares?
Also, I'm not sure I'd see them as direct competitors per se - in some spaces yes, but not in every space. TikTok is great for people who want to post videos, but not everyone is into posting videos. (Not sure why YouTube is listed on that page either, for the same reason.)
Also, unlike someone using an iOS phone or Android phone the same people are on several different apps. So how is it counting the users to be exclusive to a particular product. Like a lot of Tiktok audience is on Instagram as well. A lot of Twitter users use Instagram as well .
No product can lock you in like a platform can. I can use HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal without any one product interfering my usage of the other one.
[EDIT] reference to the Microsoft case https://www.cnet.com/news/eu-resolves-microsoft-ie-antitrust...
I am not saying this is good or bad, but that's the intuition behind the reversal I think.
EDIT: Please don't shoot the messenger, I am just offering a conjecture, I am not even European or American.
Yeah it sounds like it. My understanding from the summaries is that the commission failed to quantify the damage with enough accuracy and certainty. It sucks.
There's no theoretical reason for this. Nobody makes them because they won't be able to sell them, apparently, but they could make them.
You used to be able to, but Intel cut off the rights to use their chipsets' interconnect. Before that point 'integrated on the chipset' was a valid way to do integrated graphics.
But this is false. The reason Intel had to pay laptop OEMs to not use AMD's chips in the first place, was because in the time window in question (2003-2006, before the core2* family), AMD's chips were superior.
If they are in fact using the reasoning you think they are, then they are even bigger idiots than I had previously thought.
The more you learn about the actual workings of justice systems, the more you see how unjust it. Especially wealthy vs poor people.
Hopefully, somebody with more legal knowledge will step in and enlighten a bit more.
See e.g.: http://dukeundergraduatelawmagazine.org/2018/12/06/scotlands...
I have the impression it's mostly there to protect against wrongful convictions, which seems very different from the "it doesnt matter what actually happened, but what lawyers can prove" what the comment I replied to said.
The EU ruling here isn't a criminal trail with a jury system anyway, so quite different in any case.
So even though you know what happened you can't technically prove it as your proof cannot be taken into account.
From the court's summary:
>The commission did not consider properly the criterion relating to the share of the market covered by the contested practice and also did not analyse correctly the duration of the rebates.
>It follows, therefore, from all of the foregoing considerations that the analysis carried out by the commission is incomplete and, in any event, does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or were likely to have, anticompetitive effects, which is why the General Court annuls the decision.
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...