Hacker News Reader

Comment by als0 | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I don't understand. Microsoft had (and still has) a monopoly on desktop computer software. Like 90% of the market. The anti trust concern was that they could abuse their position to gain dominance in another market, such as the browser market. A very genuine concern, given their install base.

Apple doesn't have more than 25% share in mobile or desktop markets. People can switch to Android and get what they want. It's egregious if a monopoly restricts you, but for smaller players where do you draw the line? 25% of the market?

View on HN

If every supermarket in the West half of the country is owned by one company, that is a monopoly even though they only have 50% of the market, as "the relevant market" gets analyzed to mean "the west side of the country". The real question is whether one believes that iPhone vs. Android counts as morally equivalent to West vs. East, due to how: 1) most normal people only have a single phone, and thereby they can't just randomly pop over to Android to buy something the same way they can just pop over to a different supermarket in a market with competing supermarkets; and 2) high switching costs--which are partly born from an active decision by these companies to make purchases be non-transferable--prevents people from even "moving to the other side of the country" (similar to the high switching costs of physically doing literally that) in order to switch markets.

> Apple doesn't have more than 25% share in mobile or desktop market

This is incorrect. In the US, Apple has over 60% of the mobile OS marketshare[1], and 60% of the market is therefore forced to use Safari and only Safari.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

s/is therefore forced/have therefore chosen

There, fixed that for you. They chose to buy an iPhone and I think at this point people know what they’re choosing and why. Nobody forced them to do anything. If I buy a PlayStation, I’m not being ‘forced’ to not be able to play Call of Duty. I do feel some of apple’s App Store rextrications are excessive, although they are being pushed in the right direction, but this sort of frothingly apoplectic language gets really irritating.

No monopoly gets to 100% by simply existing, people chose to go toward that company... until it was so big that no one could compete with them any longer.

The problem really comes when that monopoly position is used to impose unreasonable restrictions, or leverage the company into additional market advantages. That is abuse of a monopoly position, or lets say an advantageous market position. I accept that.

But you can't argue that features and restrictions that people freely chose when the company had a minority market share are somehow imposed unfairly or are leveraging unfair advantages. They had no such advantage, but users were perfectly happy with the tradeoff anyway, so clearly they're not being coerced or 'forced' into anything. They're just choosing it.

You're singling out one particular market and claiming that represents the big picture, when it very much is an exception. Specific niche markets having a small majority of one or the other isn't concerning, someone is going to be on top and 57-43 is basically as equal as it gets even in your cherrypicked example.

Globally, Android has 87% of the market and iOS has 13%. That is far far more concerning than Apple having a small majority in one specific market.

And to be clear it's not over 60%, even your own source says that's false - you're backing a literal browser monoculture with 87% global hardware marketshare and 90% software marketshare by wrapping yourself in the language of antitrust and competitiveness, and you still can't do it without using falsehoods and exaggerations.

I'm in the US, and advocate for regulation in the US. I do not care about marketshare in the rest of the world, and neither does the FTC. The only statistic that matters in this case is that iOS has 60% of the marketshare in the US, and what happens in other countries is irrelevant.

To be clear, the FTC doesn't have a problem with the current situation, so evidently they don't think it matters either.

At this point, I think the chances the US won’t adopt similar stances as the EU in relation to browser engines as close to zero.

The FTC's current priority under Lina Khan is data privacy regulation, which is already a huge topic. One can of worms at a time.

>Globally, Android has 87% of the market and iOS has 13%.

That is not true. Neither in unit shipment or usage. However one wishes to define as market share.

>You're singling out one particular market

And if that market has its own jurisdiction. Then yes, both UK and Japan has over 60% of Smartphone user on Apple's platform.

Substitution and lock-in are also things that the antitrust laws are concerned with as they are relevant to how you define the market in the first place. If the market is for iOS browser engines, Android browsers cannot effectively compete for consumers who are locked-in to the iOS ecosystem due to the switching costs and other barriers that must be surmounted in order for consumers to access those browsers. Almost no one is going to switch from an existing $1000+ phone to a new one solely because of their browser, leading to almost zero cross elasticity of demand between iOS and Android browsers (high cross-elasticity being indicia that products are part of the same market, e.g., mobile browsers).

So one way to answer your question would be to say that Apple has complete control over the relevant market, which is the market for iOS browser engines.

But, nobody pays for browsers (anymore). What are they competing for? It is ALWAYS about money. Are they competing to see who can collect your data to see to third parties? Who can show you ads in their browser? Those are both bad things in my opinion, so Apple blocking them is consumer friendly behavior. But, of course, in a country ruled by corporations, this would be seen as bad.

> The anti trust concern was that they could abuse their position

No. The antitrust concern was that they *did* abuse their position to damage the browser market, which is evidenced by how long IE11 has been around. Luckily the value prop of the web was enough to overcome their strategy.

Being a monopoly is not illegal. A company can perfectly legally have a natural monopoly of 100% of a market without being illegal. The problem only comes when they use that position to prevent other competitors from entering the market, or when they use their position to take over other markets.

Sorry but where did I say that a monopoly is illegal?

Apple has ~57% of smartphone marketshare in the US.

And gaining

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31136586

From your link, iOS is at 25% https://stockapps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/market-domi...

BRIC countries largely dominate the high volume / low end of the range [1], so the share will change drastically per country and region. iOS is at 22% globally [2], but much higher in the US [3].

[1] https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-countries-by-smartp...

[2] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/15/apples-iphone-dom...

So why should users in those countries should just be discarded out of hand as far as marketshare concerns?

Again, globally, an 87/13 split is extremely concerning and the numbers for actual browser share are even more tilted than that. Firefox and Safari are the only holdouts and they collectively make up about 10% of the market, everything else is Chromium in a wig.

The root comment in this thread is about market share in terms of monopoly concerns. Therefore it stands to reason that each local jurisdiction, whether the U.S., E.U., South Korea, etc., will determine monopoly standards based on regional marketshare.

The root comment in this thread is about browser marketshare in terms of monopoly terms. Hardware marketshare is actually a tangent to the actual discussion in the first place.

Browser monoculture is the problem that - if you'll read back to the OP - this comment thread is supposed to be about. Forcing iOS to open up is a short-term benefit for user freedom and a long-term downside for user freedom due to the monoculture that will result when that 87% marketshare becomes 100% and we see a return to "this browser is not supported, please view this page using Chrome" and having captchas that are impossible to bypass unless you're feeding Google your personal information.

Furthermore, even then, we're only at most talking about a 60-40 split even in the most cherrypicked markets... a 60-40 split is not monopoly power really. And in contrast, in the big picture Android already has an 87-13 majority, which is getting into the territory where monopoly is a concern (hence the concern over monoculture and privacy intrusions), and again that's hardware, looking at software the picture is even more bleak and Chrome/Chromium are over 90% marketshare.

Anyway, you may not care about the market as a whole, but you still are affected by it regardless, so it matters, even if a few niches do remain majority (but not monopoly) apple.

In this discussion, browser and hardware are intrinsically linked, because the hardware is the platform that the browser lives on, and iOS as a platform has specific restrictions about what browser engines can be used on it.

Anti-trust doesn't care about monopolies, it cares about market power. Apple does have the market power, as evidenced by the 30% rent they extract from developers.

Apple's mobile marketshare is much higher in the US, which is where an antitrust suit could reasonably happen. It's above 50%

Reply on news.ycombinator.com