If you get cited in someone else's anti-trust Apple deactivate developer account
twitter.com
twitter.com
Right now nobody at Google or Apple has any incentive whatsoever to care about collateral damage when a user's entire account is locked. That will obviously have to change. The change doesn't have to come by way of government mandate, but that seems to be how they want to play it. They will have no one to blame but themselves when they're on the receiving end of the collateral damage that will accompany such legislation.
eg support for users, reasonable conflict resolution, etc.
* https://www.rankscience.com/blog/why-google-should-be-regula...
There were plenty of articles about it online at the time. The above is just one I found in a quick search now.
Unfortunately, the legislation didn't pass. And now, Google (etc) are further emboldened...
Hearing about Google similarly shutting down people's Google accounts for iffy reasons is what got me to stop using gmail as a primary personal email address and start using my own domain (with hosting at fastmail for now, but easy enough to change this should I ever need to).
Even a hypothetical blockchain-based DNS solution wouldn't solve the problem completely, it would place responsibility solely in your own hands, but failing to secure your private keys appropriately would have similar (if not worse) consequences.
> Sure, right now Google does such things a lot more often than registrars do
This is the only factor that matters in why I moved away from gmail to my own domain. It isn't about completely eliminating the risks (which is impossible), rather just minimizing them as much as I practically can.
The other threats you list are still there even if you use a hosted email platform.
Let's say a friend was fired from Apple for years ago and if you get an offer from Apple today, your offer letter may specifically mention him by name, stating you are explicitly not allowed to share any information with that person.
Friend hadn't told anyone that he had left Apple not on good terms. An interesting and fun conversation had followed when this newly hired friend contacted the old friend and said you wouldn't believe what my Apple offer letter says.
This is called "refusal to deal" in antitrust law.[1] FTC: "For instance, if the monopolist refuses to sell a product or service to a competitor that it makes available to others, or if the monopolist has done business with the competitor and then stops, the monopolist needs a legitimate business reason for its policies."
It also raises the question of whether Apple is abusing their monopoly power to interfere with legal proceedings. Definitely lawyer time.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
On the other hand, when it's cryptocurrency nonsense suffering, the world is actually benefiting. Monopolies aren't intrinsically evil, just strongly encouraged to be so.
There is no such thing as "the iPhone market" for anti-trust purposes -- there is the mobile phone market. And competition in that market is inarguably healthy. Customers have plenty of choices that aren't iPhones, and largely they seem fine with them. You might as well argue that Chevrolet has a monopoly on the Corvette market.
Microsoft got into trouble because they were found to have a monopoly on the personal computer operating system market and then they deployed that monopoly to shut out competition in a separate market -- web browsers.
No one said that Microsoft had a monopoly on the "Windows market" because that's a tautology.
The fact that they were successful enough to obtain a monopoly in the PC OS market wasn't itself illegal. Their usage of their position in the OS market to gain an advantage in the web browser market is what was found to be illegal.
The fact that either of two tech companies are able to effectively gatekeep whether a given mobile app can for all intents and purposes exist in the market is a problem.
The law and practices need to react to the state of the world, and this situation was simply not a practical concern until recent times. Hell, the courts have historically been on consumers' side in adjacent ways, such as enshrining the right to reverse engineer & various provisions explicitly permitting doing so for interoperability, the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act, and other decisions that protect consumers from getting screwed by the company they chose to buy a product from regardless of their official status as 'monopoly'.
There’s a link to a class action complaint (https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zdpxrbjyrpx/...)
That’s 58 pages of legalese, though, so a link to where that’s claimed would be useful.
It also can mean, and I think that’s the normal way to interpret such a statement, that they rejected their app.
I also don’t see an argument there that being cited in an anti trust case is a factor there.
This claim may well be true, and it may be hard to prove, but they should at least try, and this doesn’t do that for me.
You seem to be a bit confused. The lawsuit wasn't about deactivating the developer account. The link just shows that Zeus was cited in someone else's anti-trust lawsuit. You complained about "58 pages of legalese", so I pointed out the exact page number where Zeus was cited. The deactivation of the developer account occurred after the lawsuit.
If you're not convinced about the reason for the account deactivation, that's fine, but the "58 pages of legalese" complaint is kind of irrelevant.
However, I don’t see any argument for a causation chain between the two. I know there may not be much of a paper trail, but they could at least have stated things such as
- whether they received mail from Apple about account deactivation and if so, what it said.
- timeline: when was the app rejected, and when did they discover their account was gone?