Why do we act like there is a "mobile game market" when there are clearly two distinct major private markets, both monopolized by definition of private control over basic aspects like pricing and content, including mandating a private tax rate?
A judge can't simply mandate a private tax rate and probably wouldn't want to anyway. Antitrust judgments typically try to remedy root causes limiting competition so the market can work out the rest, rather than try to guess some arbitrary "fair" rate that wouldn't be constant anyway.
The duopoly of mobile app stores would not be nearly as problematic if it wasn’t also tied to a duopoly in phone OS vendors, one of which also tied to a monopoly in phone vendors, which is tied to a monopoly (quasi-monopoly? not sure what to call iMessage in the US) in instant messaging platforms etc.
Which is exactly what RMS and like minded individuals have been warning about. Meanwhile Microsoft is working very hard to retro-fit this onto the remains of the PC market.
Which is not illegal per se and, in most cases, such as Apple’s, not even subject to antitrust scrutiny.
Horizontal integration as a result of mergers is immediately subject to legal scrutiny.
Vertical integration by virtue of mergers can be subject to legal scrutiny.
Vertical integrations as a result of organic expansion are not subject to legal scrutiny.
From a US antitrust perspective, Apple is wholly in the clear as long as they don’t actively abuse their market power after they’ve gained their market dominance.
This means that Apple can be as restrictive and aggressive as it wants before it gains market dominance in the relevant market and maintains that stance as long as they don’t restrict after it gains market dominance.
This makes sense; in the US, they don’t want to punish success, and you are allowed to have an “innocent” monopoly. This also makes sense from the perspective of market-wide ramifications.
If you’d punish vertical integration or single-brand markets in general, then every start-up that automatically has a monopoly over its own products would be subject to punishment. If I develop a new smartphone tomorrow with its own OS and adopt Apple’s approach to the walled garden, I’d be immediately in trouble.
The fact that Apple became successful doesn’t change anything as long as that success isn’t gained by illegal means, like throwing my newly gained market dominance around.
The EU has a different approach to this, mainly through carving legislation that aims to target specific companies. Still, it remains to be seen if that can withstand adjudication by the courts because the EU courts aren’t very eager to condone targeting at this level and retroactively making things illegal.
In a general sense, it’s baffling to see how many people have trouble wrapping their heads around the simple premise that success isn’t punishable in and of itself and that you actively need to abuse your market dominance after you’ve gained it.
The rule of thumb is that if something is perfectly legal to do when you’re small, it’s also perfectly legal to maintain that behavior once you’re big, with very few exceptions.
This is precisely why Apple is always so restrictive when introducing something (e.g., App Store, no carrier bloatware, Apple Pay, commission rate, etc.) because they can always be more flexible. Still, they can never tighten the reigns once they’re successful.
Google tried this the other way around. Relatively open and permissive ecosystem. Now, they’re trying to close it up and bully other parties into doing what benefits Google; this got them in trouble.
Similarly, people really seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that “the iPhone” is just not the relevant market definition.
Courts almost never go with a single-brand market definition, because it almost never is a relevant definition and would open the door to ramifications across commerce, if only because pretty much every manufacturer has a single brand market and monopoly over it.
When determining the relevant market you want to include substitute products, both on the demand side and supply side.
Switching costs are a factor in determining the competitive pressure, but switching cost doesn’t mean that you can therefore exclude substitutions from the market definition, if only because there’s almost always a switching cost involved. Often times even very high switching costs exist, like a cancellation fee and switching cost can also be non-monetary like the time it takes to learn a product.
A lot of companies try to significantly increase switching cost to lock customers in. This doesn’t mean they don’t have competition in their market or that their acts are illegal.
The court has found that Google/Android is a suitable substitution both on the demand side as well as the supply side. People can switch to Android if Apple (indirectly) increases the costs of apps and developers can also switch if the cost of making apps becomes too high.
Keep in mind that the courts don’t care if an average consumer or supplier would do so, only if a marginal consumer/supplier would. In other words, if a small but significant amount of people would do so, typically 5-10%.
Then Apple can produce their OS, Google can produce their OS, and handset makers can be free to choose what OSes and app stores to support on their phone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
Well, it's bad regardless of the concept of monopolies. Private markets are not a good sign.
This just means private market. There's nothing special about the term "platform" that changes the feudal nature of this. The tenants compete but the operator has coerced exclusion on collecting its tax. This private market has a single operator offer access on non-negotiable terms against which no other entity is able to make a competing offer. If that's not a monopoly, it's certainly far worse to everyone but the owner of the market.
I chose to buy a device, it's mine. What on earth are you doing meddling with what i do with it, apple? Your taste in apps sucks ass and you charge the poor app developers 10x the value you provide. Being forced to use the appstore actively lowers the value of my phone.
I don't appreciate this attempt by large corps to just rewrite the meaning of ownership and markets without giving us any of the benefits of a world without property or a centralized marketplace. The people here who defend it disgust me.
How is this not straightforwardly a vertically owned market with full price controls to which we can only rent space at exorbitant cost and little return compared to an public market?
We all know the reason: it drives profits and our index funds. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose, even if that represents us all getting collectively sold up river. Which should remind you of about a thousand other problems this country faces.
Hate this useless state for real
The only ones who would really benefit are other large corporations like Epic.
This is completely irrelevant if they are a monopoly and subject to anti trust laws.
> I don't see why they owe it to other companies
That owe it to the countries that they are based in to follow the law, or move their entire company else where, if that's what they choose.
No legal precedent supports the idea that the Android or iOS app stores are monopolies under US law. We are in a thread discussing a final verdict against that proposition which is now binding in CA9.
“This is completely irrelevant if [this decidedly false fact]” is not really a useful statement. Wishcasting that courts will misinterpret the law is not the way forward, the way forward is new laws.
Gotcha. Unrelated to my point though.
My point was that someone saying "well it's their platform, they can do what they want!" Is making a bad argument.
If someone wants to make a good argument, instead of a bad one, then you would have to start talking about what a monopoly is.
But whoever built the platform is simply an argument that is unrelated.
> is not really a useful statement.
It absolutely is useful, because it focuses on the question that matters.
No matter if you think that Apple is a monopoly or not, of which there are reasonable arguments to be made on all sides, the fact that Apple built it just doesn't matter.
Talk about the things that matter, not unrelated points.
> a final verdict against that proposition which is now binding in CA9.
If you meant to imply that this is a final verdict on if Apple is a monopoly or not, then I would recommend that you re-read the original ruling of the California judge.
The California judge was very clear that the verdict only shows that Epic failed in their arguments, not that Apple is decidedly not a monopoly.
Now that SCOTUS has denied cert this constitutes a final judgement. Its rulings on law are binding throughout the 9th circuit. While “possession of monopoly power is a fact question”, this denial is likely to be the final say for quite some time on questions of whether Apple possesses monopoly power in markets related to app stores, which it obviously does not because of the existence of Android.
Epic attempted to argue that Apple has monopoly power in “iOS games” which was rejected since you can’t just arbitrarily narrow your market definition until you find a monopoly.
You still don't understand. This is in reference to epic's case. It not about other people's cases. The final judgement is on Epic. It is not on the upcoming US government case, for example.
Do you understand the difference?
Do a control F on the document for "Epic failed". Notice how the words "epic failed" are completely different from "everyone in the world has failed"?
This case is about epic's case, not others. Mostly because Epic did not provide enough evidence and failed on the fact finding portion of the original trial.
But that has nothing to do with if other groups provide evidence that Epic missed.
> Epic attempted to argue
Epic attempted to argue it. And epic's, and only epic's argument has failed.
> which it obviously does not because of the existence of Android.
I don't think you understand what a monopoly is, according to anti trust law.
A monopoly is not a single firm. Instead it is about durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
From the FTC:
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."
If you want another source, for future lawsuits, you can simply research the US government's upcoming case against apple.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/doj-to-file-antitrust-case-a...
I probably shouldn't have used the term. It's still a very negative sign about our future that's worth fighting.
The right way to look at it is "US law is not written in a way to recognize and break up these monopolies". By any common sense or economic definition, these are monopolies. That the legal definition is out of whack is a problem which will hopefully be corrected.
It's up to us to make them give us better tools for us. This isn't a natural thing that just happens. I don't give a damn which company succeeds in the end so long as the consumer is fairly represented.
They paid lawmakers to keep the laws the way they want them to be.
Just so we're clear, if we were talking about some other country it would be called bribery.
No, they did not and no we would not.
If you have evidence of Apple or Google cutting a cheque to any lawmaker, personally, I'll commit here and now to paying you six figures for it, because it's worth ten times that much in the open.
https://www.opensecrets.org/search?order=desc&q=apple&sort=A...
$140,000 to a John Harris Whitmire. Apparently he's "an American attorney and politician who is the 63rd mayor of Houston, Texas" according to Wikipedia.
I'm not arguing it doesn't buy influence. It does, though not in the form popularly conceived. But it's not bribery. Cheapening bribery by conflating it with campaign finance, or worse, lobbying in general isn't intellectually honest.
A personal election campaign is presumably something in your personal interest, and money is fungible.
> I'm not arguing it doesn't buy influence. It does, though not in the form popularly conceived. But it's not bribery. Cheapening bribery by conflating it with campaign finance, or worse, lobbying in general isn't intellectually honest.
On the contrary, giving in to the sophistry that says that this particular system of organised and regulated bribery is somehow not bribery is intellectual dishonesty. Yes there are some relevant differences between this and other forms of bribery, but the similarities are stronger.
> If you have evidence of Apple or Google cutting a cheque to any lawmaker
And then
> That's a campaign donation
Use newspeak and call it whatever you want, it is VERY clear MONEY WAS PAID TO A LAWMAKER, which is EXACTLY what you wanted evidence of. This very clearly means you need to cut me a 6 figure cheque.
Again, other countries very clearly call this bribery, the US just invented a new word for it.
You absolutely can. You can loan money to your campaign and charge interest on that and then have donors donate to your campaign to repay your debt. Brought to you by the conservative wing of the supreme court in FEC v Cruz.
The law is arbitrary and highly path-dependent. But in the absence of the law, there's no "market" period, not as a government-protected legal construct. Without the law, Apple could just tell Epic to pound sand because they have the right-of-might to rotate encryption keys, release future versions of the iPhone that scan for Epic software using hardware-based solutions and brick the phone if they're detected, and drop OS updates that retroactively delete Epic games from user phones if they wanted.
I'm glad for the law that prevents that, even if it's the same framework that makes me act like there's a "mobile game market."
That said, the arguable App Store monopoly (legal) is being challenged in the EU and it sounds like Apple is getting ready to relinquish a bit of that stronghold (apparently by giving the EU a different model of software or something. Still have yet to read the rumors in detail).
If Apple has monopoly here then Best Buy has a monopoly too. Everything you buy in Best Buy is priced according to Best Buy. You can't walk into a Best Buy and say "Oh, I already paid for it on Sony's website, so I'm just here to pick up the TV".
Even then, if we focus on stores: Google with multiple stores still does have a play store monopoly (formal, arguably legal given current lawsuits) on Android OS. And on top of that, the EU rulings with Apple mean your metaphor may not be as farfetched as you make it seem.
These aren't based on my opinions so much the fact that both OS are under legal fire. So I wouldn't dismiss this so easily.
The EU realized that and just passed a huge new law/regulatory framework to address it, and presumably the US will be closely watching this space.
It seems like the "iPhone experience" is paying a ton more than you should have to, including the 30% price hike for in-app purchases. Since Apple is already a status symbol brand that might not hurt their image much, but at least this case helped to raise awareness about what people are buying into or have already signed up for with the iphone.
0: https://www.fortnite.com/news/announcing-epic-direct-payment...
Are you talking about the App Stores?