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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

It's good they are open sourcing it. That's where it belongs. It's incredible how effective open source adblock software has been for years.

You can't build a business on a hacky work around. And being centralized gives apple an edge in responding.

Some businesses were built on hacks. Airbnb is the prime example where a huge percentage of listings out in the open were illegal, but the adversary there was government so slow to respond. And I think Plaid basically scraped data using user credentials which was obv insecure and against terms of use. But again, banks aren't super agile and the UI isn't exactly a huge value add. Regardless, not a great business model

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It does have some hope yet as open source software. YouTube has been trying to kill yt-dlp for years but the community is always one step ahead.

Seems categorically different though, right?

YouTube doesn't control anything about the endpoint which it is streaming video to, it just has control over how their servers respond to different requests

But Apple does control both ends.

That's an excellent argument for an apple anti trust case

It would be if they had a dominant market position. Just controlling the endpoints doesn't mean that much by itself.

https://www.axios.com/2021/10/14/teen-iphone-use-spending-ha... Seems pretty dominant to me.

American teens are not Americans are not the rest of the world

Apple is an American company accountable to American laws and critiques

Also, the relevant market doesn't have to be "Americans." It's completely reasonable for it to be "teens in San Francisco" or the like, if that's the group of people you need a messaging app in order to interact with.

you don't necessarily need a monopoly to have a "dominant marketing position". being one of the two major OS's and losing access to 30-50% of a nigh-universal market because the its not in the interest of the platform's profits would definitely count as an anti-competitor move utilizing the company's weight. AKA anti-trust.

not as antitrust laws are written, no. not a sherman section ii monopolization of trade or commerce, not a section i restraint of trade, not a clayton tying. as with most antitrust cases, it comes down to market definition. the reasonable market is phone messaging or some such; the only way to win would be basically defining the market as imessage itself which no court would suffer since whatsapp and similar are free with equal or greater features.

you can argue antitrust statute should be expanded or changed, but there's no reasonable case as things stand.

It's not just the way they are written, it's also the way they are interpreted. Antitrust used to have a lot more teeth pre-Bork, among other things, because it was much more proactive in terms of anticipating negative effects on the market even before the company would become a glaringly obvious monopoly.

Here's a case from 1962: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/. Note in particular the basis under which it was determined that the company in question is in a market-dominant position.

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