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Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

>Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

I'm not sure if current U.S. antitrust law condemns this behavior from Apple. In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors. It can be anticompetitive to worsen access for competitors from a prior baseline without a procompetitive justification, but it's generally not anticompetitive to never offer access at parity with your own products (self preferencing) in the first place.

While these are reasonable complaints, it might take new legislation from Congress to remedy. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.

Still, this article is helpful in that is tells us what areas are the focus of the government's case (notably: nothing about the App Store).

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Statutory antitrust law in the US is extremely broad, to the point that it relies on the courts to interpret it to not prohibit anyone from so much as entering into a 30 day purchasing contract because it would restrain the buyer from patronizing a competitor for 30 days. By its terms that would nominally be a violation.

As a result most of what you have to look at is case law. But antitrust cases are rare to begin with and ones dealing with this kind of "huge conglomerate that ties its products and services together with computer code" -- try to name one dealing with a company of that nature other than Microsoft. Maybe AT&T? It's not a lot of precedent until you're looking at cases of much smaller companies doing much narrower things, which leaves plenty of room for the judge to "distinguish" them (i.e. do whatever they want in this case).

> In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors.

It seems like a major difference here isn't just that they won't deal with competitors, it's that they don't allow their customers to deal with competitors. This is quite stark when you're looking at their products -- someone who owns an iPhone can't reasonably modify or replace the system software to integrate a competing payments system (or, for that matter, app store) because Apple doesn't allow it even on a piece of hardware they sold and is now owned by someone else.

You could make that argument for services, i.e. iMessage, but there are at least two other ways to get at that. First, iMessage is tied to their other offerings and so then you get them for the tying. Second, maybe routing something with a network effect through a centralized service is a different kind of thing than refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you don't have a monopoly on delivery service. Maybe it's more like refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you do have a monopoly on delivery service.

> I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.

Congress pretty much authorized the courts to do whatever they want on this. The real question is what they want to do. You have to go back to Congress if they do something dumb.

> to the point that it relies on the courts to interpret it

The courts have been used to chip away at the very simple and straight forward anti trust laws that were established in this country after years of having grappled with the problem in it's unchecked form.

> But antitrust cases are rare to begin with

This is a feature of _recent_ history and does not at all fairly represent the large body of jurisprudence that has been issued on this subject. People really seem to misattribute much of our modern system of commerce to modernity and ignore the laws and decisions that were laid down nearly a century ago.

> try to name one dealing with a company of that nature other than Microsoft.

Iqvia holdings.

> Maybe it's more like refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service

They have a monopoly on the device and the app store. So, they create their own monopoly over the delivery service. They're not competing with "delivery" in general, but with "apps that are allowed to use these special features on the iphone and are directly approved by apple's own internal process."

This seems exceptionally clear cut.

> Congress pretty much authorized the courts to do whatever they want on this.

No, they have not. Congress has ignored the courts interference int he law and has made no effort to clarify their statues. This is not the same as "authorizing" the courts to "do whatever they want."

> The courts have been used to chip away at the very simple and straight forward anti trust laws that were established in this country after years of having grappled with the problem in it's unchecked form.

The problem with simple and straight forward is that it's a law prohibiting something.

If you buy the output of some factory which is the input to your own product, is that in restraint of trade? Does it matter if it's 10% or 50% or 90% or 100% of the industry's production capacity for that input? What if it's only 10% but it's the last 10% and the other 90% is already locked up in contracts with companies in other industries?

There's nothing in the statute to answer questions like that so the courts have to make something up. There's a pretty good argument that they've narrowed the antitrust laws too much over time but it's hard to claim that Congress didn't leave things open to interpretation.

> This is a feature of _recent_ history and does not at all fairly represent the large body of jurisprudence that has been issued on this subject. People really seem to misattribute much of our modern system of commerce to modernity and ignore the laws and decisions that were laid down nearly a century ago.

A century ago there wasn't an internet-connected computer chip in everything that allows the vendor to exercise control over a product even after they've sold it.

> Iqvia holdings.

This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies. Which part of it are you implying is relevant to what Apple is doing?

> They have a monopoly on the device and the app store. So, they create their own monopoly over the delivery service. They're not competing with "delivery" in general, but with "apps that are allowed to use these special features on the iphone and are directly approved by apple's own internal process."

They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.

> Congress has ignored the courts interference int he law and has made no effort to clarify their statues. This is not the same as "authorizing" the courts to "do whatever they want."

Let's put it this way: If the courts want to find Apple in violation, it would be difficult to argue that this is outside the scope of what Congress intended based on the wording of the laws Congress passed.

> If you buy the output of some factory which is the input to your own product, is that in restraint of trade?

No. Why would you think it is? It's a restraint of trade if there's an illegal agreement between the two companies that unfairly disadvantages other purchasers. Or it's a restraint of trade if you've bought up all the other suppliers so there is only one. These concepts are enshrined in laws that are pretty simple to read, you're inventing conflict where there hasn't been any.

> This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies.

That's not what it is. It's a digital healthcare advertising company. Software is at the heart of the case.

> They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.

Does that have platform parity with apps from the app store? If not, it's a flawed argument.

> If the courts want to find Apple in violation

The court doesn't _want_ anything. Other than for the parties to settle their disputes outside of court. When they can't, they rule, and often pretty carefully because they don't want to get overturned on appeal.

This isn't something that's happening to Apple, it's a strategy they've employed, in defiance of the law, in the hopes that they were going to be able to get away with it. That was a good short term gamble, because they almost got two decades out of it, but the courts have caught up to the market, and they're about to get the law applied to them.

If this bothers anyone that much, familiarize yourself with the laws, and then advocate against them. I think if you actually prepare to do this, you'll immediately understand that almost every consumer in America will be against you.

I think you’re misunderstanding tying by getting it backwards. If you want to buy Windows, you have to install Internet Explorer and agree not to install Netscape Navigator. The issue is the economic interest in the product being sold. The equivalent would be if you want to buy an iPhone, you have to use iMessage. Which is not the case.

Walled gardens aren’t antitrust violations.

> If you want to buy Windows, you have to install Internet Explorer and agree not to install Netscape Navigator.

If you want to buy iMessage, you have to use iOS/macOS.

You might be confused because it actually works in both directions. iMessage achieves a large network by being bundled with iPhones, then the large network creates market power and iMessage is tied to Apple devices which pressures other people to buy those devices, even when they'd have preferred not to, in order to avoid the green bubble.

This is one of the reasons this kind of tying is prohibited. Leveraging a dominant position in market A increases your share of market B and leveraging a dominant position in market B increases your share of market A, repeat until the market is concentrated into an oligopoly of vertically integrated conglomerates or a monopoly.

> Walled gardens aren’t antitrust violations.

Why not? Anti-competitive practices don't become otherwise just because you say "it's for your own good" as you lock the door.

The exception makes the rule.

> While these are reasonable complaints, it might take new legislation from Congress to remedy. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.

I would not be surprised if they are trying to push the envelope of the current law is fine and I think that's fine. If you're unwilling to try to enforce unless you're 100% sure no judge would ever disagree with you, you're going to let people get away with a LOT of stuff by default that could very well be found to be covered by existing statute.

And the failures could galvanize additional legislation more than doing nothing.

>investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands

This is such a misleading way to phrase it. The Apple Watch only works with the iPhone (unfortunately. I would buy one if it worked on Android. Android watches are universally hopeless)

If you don't have it paired to an iPhone, an Apple Watch won't even tell you the time.

The big issue is Apple air tags. They work so well because people own lots of iPhones, and there is nothing really equivalent that uses all Android phones to do the same. Air tags pretty much lock you into the Apple ecosystem given how useful they are, and the lack of an alternative from the competition.

Why is this Apple's fault that they've built their devices from the ground up to work seamlessly together and other companies haven't? A competitor is free to make their own version of air tags that work with Android phones.

It is not really Apple's fault, but intentional or not, it locks people into their ecosystem. You don't have to be "at fault" to be subject to antitrust, just being really successful counts also.

The only reason AirTags work is because every iPhone runs code that tracks them. There are thousands of different models of Android phones, 99% of them have software that will never see another update again. How exactly do you add code that detects "their own version of air tags that work with Android phones"? The answer is you don't. AirTags took off because Apple had the ability to retroactively make every existing iPhone start to track them. No other company can pull that off.

hm, they are BLE devices right? google can push out google play services updates to a lot of those phones anytime. it doesn't seem inconceivable. (recent nothing os update has some feature related to this, I have no idea if it's from stock android or not though.)

I don't think it would be totally impossible for Google to try this, but even the percentage of phones that have functioning GMS (i.e. on a recent enough Android version, receiving updates, and even having GMS installed in the first place) is far lower than the percentage of iPhones that are still receiving updates.

Sure, most phones you can buy in the US will have GMS, but part of the benefit of AirTags is being able to track things through, say, China, and you could be somewhat hard-pressed to find a chinese Android with GMS.

Meanwhile, all sorts of people all around the world want the latest iPhone, and every single latest iPhone in the world gets the latest updates.

Hm, strange. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I would assume more Androids are sold and in use with GMS than iPhones. But you might be completed right!

Also it's a very interesting point about China and AirTags. How come it's not forbidden by the CCP?

> I would assume more Androids are sold and in use with GMS than iPhones.

As of 2023, Android has approximately a 70% global market share (iPhone has almost 60% in the US), but we don't know exactly how many of those run GMS. There's a list of supported devices [0], but it'd take forever to sort through it, and we don't know:

- how many devices there are not on that list

- how many devices have hacked/"pirated" GMS anyway

If Google were to pursue something like AirTag, it could probably work okay enough, except:

- It'd likely have worse/coarser coverage than Apple AirTags, simply due to the variety of Android phones out there, and the fact that most of them will never be fully updated

- It'd likely take a while to introduce because of the need to wait until enough phones are updated for the tags will work properly

- It'd likely not have the same quality of user experience, and Google is not particularly known for privacy

Re coarser coverage, there are also likely to be huge dead zones where e.g. the dominant phone manufacturer is Huawei, which is hated by Google and no longer allowed to manufacture phones running GMS. Xiaomi doesn't have Google Play, but they still have GMS.

[0]: https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices...

> Also it's a very interesting point about China and AirTags. How come it's not forbidden by the CCP?

Probably because it's invisible. Consumers have no visibility or say in how their iPhone tracks nearby AirTags.

I mean the CCP is stubborn and irrational, but not blind, if millions of iPhones serve as a dragnet data exfiltration platform, how come they don't try to block it? (Or since AirTags are easy to detect they are simply so low-risk?)

I think it is kind of funny that one arm of the government is saying Apple can't sell its watches, while another arm is saying the watches are furthering their monopoly position.

And I don't think these two things contradict each other.

Apple can't sell its watches because of intellectual property theft. So not only did they take features from a smaller potential competitor, but they lock their Watch buyers into the iPhone ecosystem.

What?

I remember microsoft getting into huge shit over mandating preinstalling internet explorer on their OS.

This feels 100x worse because you can't install any alternative sms application afaik.

I think the only mismatch is that lawmakers always 20 years behind the times, so it's taken them this long to realize that sms/imessage/whatever is just as fundamental as a browser for modern interconnectivity.

Microsoft got in trouble for tying its monopoly in operating systems to OEMs preinstalling Internet Explorer. Essentially, they told OEMs that they would not sell them Windows unless they agreed to help Microsoft kill Netscape. That's a very different kind of antitrust complaint than what the article describes, which is Apple building seamless connections between its hardware and services while offering second-tier connections for competitors.

Also, Microsoft won that case on appeal and then settled with a much friendlier administration.

Of course, this is all being filtered to us from rumors told to journalists who are not subject matter experts. We can better assess any similarities when the actual complaint is filed.

I feel like you really didn't address what I said at all.

These are two cases of OS dictating which software comes on their platform. To make it worse, the microsoft case was just about defaults, you could still install whatever the heck you wanted. Whereas in IOS you can't, period.

So just imagine if microsoft windows never allowed you to install any other web-browsers without breaking the OS.

Not even remotely the same with the biggest difference being that MS was telling other business to shut out competitors or lose access to Windows, which at the time was pretty much required for computing. If MS had its own hardware, they would have been free to do what they wanted with it.

In fact, Apple will like argue (and has successfully already in the Epic case) that it's the entire ecosystem that the courts have to look at and not any single feature. And at an ecosystem level there is a huge competitor in Android. Apple forcing webkit for example is Apple's choice as they control the entire platform. If they licensed iOS, then it would become harder to make that claim.

You're talking past the issue.

When Microsoft tells OEMs -- someone not Microsoft, "we won't license you Windows unless you include and set as default Internet Explorer" that's anticompetitive.

It's the act of using your pull of needing to buy Windows get another business to do something unrelated.

MS could absolutely not allow you to have any other browser without it being anticompetitive, to wit this is what happens on Xbox.

This is why Apple won and Google lost their case with Epic. Google tried to have an open platform but then used their pull with gapps to force OEMs to privilege the Play store. The mere act of privileging your own products and services on your own platform isn't anticompetitive.

You may have a point with regards to Webkit, however even that is potentially tenuous. The difference that you are missing, and that was addressed is how Microsoft levereged their market postion in the OS market (>85% in the late 1990's) to stop vendors and OEM pre-packaging an alternative browser; USA vs Microsoft was never about IE being bundled - that came later and that was the EU - it was always about how they killed the main competitor to their browser with threats.

* Edited for spelling

They did address it by explaining why it's not only not worse, but different.

Microsoft to OEMs: you can only put our OS on the devices you sell if you make IE the default.

Without Windows, PC makers knew they had no market to sell to because there was no viable alternative OS being demanded by consumers (hence the asserted monopoly position of Microsoft). They were restraining other business from engaging alternatives from competing browser makers.

Apple: we build our messaging product, in our OS, on our devices

There are no other businesses involved between Apple and end users, who can use competing device makers, OS makers and contrary to what you stated, messaging services like Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.

> There are no other businesses involved between Apple and end users, who can use competing device makers, OS makers

How do you install Android or some other OS competitor on an iPhone, or install iOS on a Samsung or Google device?

> and contrary to what you stated, messaging services like Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.

Only with Apple's blessing, which they then deny for competing payment systems, browser engines, app stores etc. And iMessage is still the default.

> How do you install Android or some other OS competitor on an iPhone, or install iOS on a Samsung or Google device?

You don’t, you either choose to buy an Android or an iPhone.

This is like asking why I can’t go to Princeton but have my favorite Stanford professor come teach my class, or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.

Life is full of tradeoffs. You can’t have your cake and eat it too all the time.

> This is like asking why I can’t go to Princeton but have my favorite Stanford professor come teach my class

You can do that. You just convince them to teach the class at Princeton. Professors move from one school to another all the time. You can also go take a class at one school while attending another if you want to do that, and the other school will not only not stand in your way, you'll generally get transfer credit.

> or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.

These are two different games. The example you're looking for is that you can't play Mario Party on a PlayStation. But that's barely even an analogy, it's just the same situation -- why shouldn't you be able to play Mario Party on a PlayStation except for nefarious anticompetitive BS?

This is distinct from technical capability. If you can't play Mario Party on a Sega Genesis because it only has 64KB of RAM, too bad. But if you can't play it on <whatever device> even though you paid for it solely because of some anti-competitive lock-in even if the hardware is capable and you're willing to e.g. create a compatibility layer, that's something else.

Apple owns what they create. Why do you feel entitled to demand things from them?

They sold what they created to someone else. Now the someone else owns it, but Apple still wants to control it.

You either get the money or you keep the stuff. You don't get to take the money and retain ownership control of the stuff.

You didn't buy a full license to their software. You bought a phone that is a complete package. What entitles you to try to install their software on stuff they don't want it on or didn't build it to supprt?

Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?

You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.

For iMessage - they run a service that costs money. Why should they just give it out for free? Sure, they give it to their customers for free, but why does that mean you get it too?

It would be like sneaking into a complimentary hotel breakfast. Sure, you managed to grab someone's keycard - you technically can get past the restrictions. Still eating food someone else paid for. Just because you have friends eating already and you want to join them doesn't make it right.

> You didn't buy a full license to their software.

You bought a copy of their software. Now that copy is yours and not theirs. Why shouldn't you be able to transfer your copy of it to whatever you want or use it however you want? You paid for it.

Licensing is for granting additional rights you don't otherwise get with a copy, e.g. a volume license allows you to reproduce additional copies for multiple devices at once, or the GPL allows you to reproduce and distribute copies to other people under certain terms. Taking away rights via license is inconsistent with the first sale doctrine.

> Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?

Why would it have to be free? You don't get Windows for free. But you can install it on a Dell in addition to a Surface, and so can Dell.

> You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.

Saying "you knew the rules" is not how you establish someone's authority to create rules.

> For iMessage - they run a service that costs money.

This is a fig leaf. Messaging services cost a negligible amount of money to operate and if anybody actually cared about this, no one is demanding for them to operate it themselves anyway rather than using or creating a protocol that supports federation.

Notice that substantially all of the other popular messaging services are just as free to everyone, including the ones not limited to any particular platform.

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