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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

This should be an antitrust violation solvable by Apple cash and stock and a third party valuation.

I really don't see an antitrust violation in "we added the ability to more easily search your Mac, in a similar fashion to an existing app". Even the original Watson seems based largely off Google's "what if the search UI was just a single text field?" approach.

that's not the antitrust violation and that's not what Apple is doing, the violation would be

"come into our walled garden where you pay to agree to these onerous and arbitrarily applied terms, we analyze every possible app to see every app and idea per version, and then copy the ones that take off allowing it to function outside the constraints of our walled garden while continuing to apply these arbitrarily enforced terms to you debilitating your business in unnecessary ways"

the regulator and existing antitrust statutes can override the clauses that someone agreed to that perpetuates this, and they should. with the alternate route for Apple being to pay the developer beginning at an independent third party's valuation.

Thus far, the courts haven't been a big fan of this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple

It's analogous to the MS/IE/Netscape situation 20 years ago. They would lose/have to settle on similar grounds, I suppose.

They'd have to have a Microsoft-esque monopoly first.

Apple doesn't currently have one in computers, mobile devices, or VR.

The Microsoft decision was based on dominance of a particular portion of the computing industry, x86 CPU-based PCs, not "computers, mobile devices, or VR". The equivalent here is passthrough-capable spatial computing devices running on ARM chips. That's a market that's in its infancy. It's hard to say what it looks like in 5-10 years. Because the AVP is currently singular in its capabilities (and priced as such), it can be argued that it's the only product available in the space it occupies. If they Sherlock any of the applying apps or platforms in that environment, it would seem to be an antitrust violation, as they'd be the only game in town for substantially similar hardware platforms.

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