The DOJ wasn’t going to split Microsoft because it was a “gatekeeper.” There is no legal basis in US Law to do that.
It was very close to splitting Microsoft because Microsoft was held to have monopolistic market share and was abusing its monopolistic position in operating systems to illegally and anticompetitively push their web browser. Violation of antitrust law.
Legally in the United States you wouldn’t be able to do this with Apple today when applying that law because Apple does not have monopolistic market share. I don’t know what the iPhone’s market share in America is today but Microsoft had over 95 percent market share back then. Apple isn’t close to that today.
In Europe the laws may be different.
(Also for what it’s worth I’m not making an argument for whether Apple or Google or anybody shouldn’t or should be broken up. I’m just saying your interpretation of the DOJ’s position back then is not correct)
The MSFT vs DOJ did in fact use their monopoly power in operating systems to enter a new commercial market, price anticompetitively (price a competitors commercial product at zero), bundle with their new product with monopoly product in a mandatory and exclusionary way, etc. The actions were willful and planned, had no other commercial consideration other than harming competition. Even so the action came many years too late and Microsoft had successfully destroyed Netscape and it took until Chrome before any competition surfaced.
Apple or Google would have to be doing something similar, like using their dominance in one market (operating systems) to gain an advantage in a seperate market - for example, music streaming services (Apple Music, Youtube Premium) or web browsers (Chrome, as pushed heavily by the world's most prominent OS, Android)
To be clear: Android is not the entire reason Chrome is ubiquitous. My arugument is that Android is, pretty clearly IMO, a competitive advantage when pushing a web browser.
It’s like claiming Amazon Kindle not hosting Nook bookstores is anticompetitive or Krogers not letting Whole Foods sell in their store or Peleton for not opening their bike to other fitness products. They built the platform and the distribution channels, are they obligated to host everything in any channel?
While side loading is a feature of general purpose operating systems not all operating systems offer it, and it’s only really coming to be an issue here because of the ubiquity of their product. But the lack of side loading isn’t new, and has never been offered. To that extent it’s more along the lines of market dominance alone, not using dominance to distort adjacent markets or willful anticompetitive behavior.
I suspect Apple and Google will not be forced to open their products in the US as it’s not clear their strategy runs afoul traditional interpretations of law.
I'm sorry, is your point that "Music streaming service" is not a market? Apple allows signups via every way one could access the application - mobile, web, and desktop. Tidal then has a choice: they can have the same advantage as Apple (a smooth flow with signup prompts available everywhere), or they can have the same pricing model as Apple (by not paying the 30% App Store cut). Tidal cannot have both.
How is this not Apple using their market dominance in app distribution (either due to OS dominance or Apple's exclusive app distribution channel, take your pick) to gain an advantage in the Music Streaming marketplace?
How is that not anticompetitive?
Going so far as to not even release a client leaves them with a relatively safe defence of only pushing for deep system integration with their own products, as opposed to market dominance in web browsers (as they're likely to be accused of).
Hell, the most dominant companies on the planet today, including the literal trillion dollar ones, do not have that kind of market penetration. Google search, the closest I can think of, is still <92% [1]. And it's not that I think holding 92% of a market is good. Nor do I think Apple should get away with only allowing re-skins instead of real browser engines. But percentages are room to quibble, and re-skins can be spun as integration or security.
Whenever Apple's gilded cage comes up, there's backlash, whataboutism, and apologists - so as we start to force interop, openness, and more pro-consumer behavior, I stick to the unimpeachable arguments. Even if it's just till we break the inertia and get the ball rolling. I think you're right, and you make an excellent point. But first I want to convince even the Apple die-hards that this level of control is fucked up, because then we can all agree that something has to change.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/12/13/microsof...
(Wait for someone to comment that that feature XYZ does not work on Safari and therefor it sucks - yes but that is the nature of the web and browsers. Every Single Browser out there has something missing or added. That has not prevented anyone from building great websites that work in all of them. )
ok, so, if you don’t like the sysadmin’s choices then use a different system? Seems like an obviously self-inflicted pain.
By the way, I say this respectfully, not as a dig towards you.
From a US antitrust perspective, almost all commerce has anticompetitive characteristics. Think about it: very few businesses will act in a manner beneficial to their competitors. Most will actively act against the interest of their competitors, but almost all will not go out of their way to facilitate their competitors (passive anticompetitive behavior, if you will).
Straightforward concepts to understand what I’m trying to say here are things such as Pizza Place A not selling stuff made by Pizza Place B. Closer to home, another example would be a device manufacturer, like a smart thermostat, not allowing their competitors to create software and apps that replace their software.
Behavior like this can be found all across commerce, from small businesses and startups to big corporations.
So the legislators (to a lesser degree) and the courts, understanding that laws need to be applied equally regardless of who the parties are, recognized that if they’d purely penalized anticompetitive behavior in a general sense, it would severely impact commerce in general. Even prevent competition to a degree by preventing new market entrants from making their products work exclusively for their own benefit.
Analogous to this is the idea of penalizing all monopolies. The issue with that would be that so-called “organic monopolies,” sometimes also called “innocent monopolies” (i.e., companies that gained a dominant market share by merely being successful), would be punished for their success alone.
Instead of banning all anti-competitive behavior, and analogous to this, banning all monopolies, they came up with the idea that only those that leverage their market dominance to protect or increase their market dominance should be penalized.
There are a bunch of nuances to be had, but in a nutshell, this means that imposing something onerous is okay while you don’t have dominant market power, but doing it while you have dominance would be a no-go.
Subsequently, this also means retroactively penalizing particular behavior initiated before gaining market dominance is generally not done because it indirectly punishes success.
Circling back to the example of Safari (or WebKit, to be exact), when Apple imposed this rule, it had an insignificant market share and little leverage. Because they maintained this rule from the beginning, this would not be deemed an antitrust issue.
Had Apple not imposed this from the start, but instead, had they started imposing this after they gained market dominance, then it could be an antitrust issue because now you’re leveraging your market dominance against parties who may not be able to withstand this pressure due to a variety of reasons such as being dependent on the ecosystem.
Apple is very conscious of this, which is why it generally starts with a very restrictive set of conditions, and sometimes, along the way, it loosens the reigns because doing the opposite way is not an option for them from an antitrust perspective.
Two clear examples of this come to mind.
First is the App Store, and it's often derided commission. Apple started with a simple 30% commission fee.
Later, they provided a 15 percent point discount on recurring subscriptions after the first year, followed by the same discount for streaming services in the Apple Video Partner Program, followed later by the same discount for developers in the Small Business Program.
Had they done this the other way around, say they started with 15%, learned after gaining market dominance that the 15% wasn’t sustainable, and then tried to increase it to 30%, they would be opening themselves up to antitrust penalties.
Related to this are their guidelines that prescribe what kind of apps are needed to implement IAPs. It started with all apps that provide products and services that weren’t consumed outside the app (i.e., physical). Then they added the so-called “Reader exception,” later, they exempted free apps that are a companion to specific online tools such as email and cloud storage.
Now that they allow game streaming services, they need to offer IAPs for services sold outside the app, at least for now, because they can always loosen the requirements but never tighten them.
The other example is their relationship with carriers. When Apple launched the first iPhone, and they were insignificant on the mobile phone market, they were only willing to partner with carriers that accepted their prohibition of installing bloatware on the iPhone.
A couple of years later, when they had gained a significant market share, Apple decided to implement Hotspot functionality, FaceTime, and FaceTime audio.
It stands to reason that Apple wanted all carriers to support this functionality on their terms (i.e., without impediments for users), but taking the same stand on this as they took on bloatware, something that would’ve been way easier now that iPhones were a hot commodity, could be seen as levering their market position.
The result is that carriers could do as they wanted with these functions by carrier profiles. In the beginning, a lot of carriers would turn off the hotspot functionality on some plans and would disable FaceTime use on the cellular network; later on, the carriers relaxed with FaceTime usage on their network, but many now put a data cap of sorts on hotspot usage.
Clearly, Apple felt it might lead to antitrust issues if they told carriers to fully support these functions or not expect to be supplied any iPhones for them to sell.
Chrome is a web browser using the Blink engine, and it doesn't run on iOS devices.
Spotify is a music player that uses the Electron framework and it doesn't run on iOS.
Outlook is a email client that uses the WinUI engine and it doesn't run on iOS.
Netflix is an applet that runs on the Microsoft Silverlight engine, and that doesn't run on iOS.
There is something that feels wrong about Apple's restrictions for browsers but different platform necessitating different, often fundamentally different, implementations isn't quite it.
Chrome's distinguishing feature is "not being Safari or Firefox". It has this distinguishing feature on all other platforms like Linux, Mac, Android and Windows. Only on one platform is this feature missing, and that is why it is emphasized so much.
You're just restating the premise. I think Outlook could make a case for just being a wrapper for Apple Mail. Valve could make the case that Steam's distinguishing feature is lacking on iOS. Again, there is some signal here but I've never heard anyone be able to really explain it.
that said, this thread of reasoning has started wrong, there is no market for web browsers on iOS just like there’s no market for phone diallers on your in-car stereo system.. What you get is what you get, and that’s always been the case and Apple products are the only devices that can run Safari…
if you keep thinking of apple devices as computers instead of like consoles or appliances, then you are going to get upset.
Once Chrome can ship on iOS you will see everyone’s market share crumble and Chrome becoming the only browser.
That is anti competitive and not even addressed in any kind of way by the DMA.
On the contrary, it is the end game for the OWA, which is largely a front for “let’s make sure Chromium will dominate the web so that Google can push project Fugu down everyone’s throats.”
There I said it.
I find this difficult to reconcile with the case against Microsoft, which I understood to be about pushing IE on Windows.
Are you saying that the case against Microsoft wasn't based on anticompetitive attempts to dominate the market for web browsers, that the law has changed since then, or that Windows is somehow different from iOS legally?
That the US has been waging an economic wars and used unconventional warfare techniques, corporate espionage, corruption, and weaponized the US dollar.
That US businesses have been lobbying and interfering with politics in the EU to provide themselves with competitive edges.
Lobbying is itself illegal in many EU nations hence done undercover, thus is plain bribery and corruption of government officials
EU has started retaliating, that's all. At least in using the justice system the way the US has instrumented its own to serve US businesses, helping them win certain markets, and fine competing foreign to the US businesses, fortunes, and ruining them whenever possible.
Still, not letting side loads, imposing to be an intermediary and payment gateway between all publishers and their audience, taking an outrageous commission rate, plus a fixed developer licensing fee, plus forcing all developers to build the published binaries exclusively on Apple made hardware, plus disallowing third parties to repair, plus circumventing the right to repair bill, altogether is without doubt abusing a position of dominance and deploying anti competition tactics.
Saying these are measures to keep users safe is a fallacy and an insult to educated consumers, all it says really is a reveal of how Apple considers its consumers at large.
In comp.sys.*.advocacy groups back in the day, it was a point of nerd pride how well your platform could handle a Netscape crash.
Microsoft got into trouble because they forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses for all of their computers sold whether or not they had Windows installed and they didn’t allow OEMs to install Netscape.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with entering new markets using the resources you have from your existing markets. Should Netflix never have entered the streaming business?
And it wasn’t Chrome, Firefox started chipping away at IEs dominance before Chrome.
Netscape made a product that ran on over 20 operating systems and promised a future where the operating system was a detail for how to launch a web browser. Microsoft saw this as an existential threat and crushed Netscape under a mount of money that was spent to ensure the only meaningful browser was a feature of their operating system.
After their Pyrrhic victory, IE decayed with very little investment. As you would expect in something that was developed only to destroy.
Netscape did run on a lot of platforms - and it sucked on all of them.
What Microsoft did was much more nuanced than spend money to get into other markets - it involve pressuring OEMs not to work with competitors among other things. BTW, this is the same thing that Google has been fined for repeatedly.
The snag is for companies with monopoly power- they are prohibited from abusing their monopoly via anticompetitive behavior.
See "Loss leading as an exploitative practice": http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/2012/lossle...
Apple has excluded all other browsers on iOS, requires you to buy more apple hardware to produce software for iOS, and has all of their rules around IAP and not allowing you to even link to an alternate store in many cases.
If iOS had a 90% market share in the US, I bet they'd have a lot more legal troubles
I don’t remember what the current net neutrality status is in the United States but if the FCC is currently requiring net neutrality then things like zero rating would be illegal.
Ackchyually you don't need to be a monopoly to warp the whole market in your favor.
Windows was a monopoly back in the day with ~95% market share, but users could easily install any other apps and any other browser besides IE. The issue was many users stuck with IE because it was the default, but Microsoft wasn't blocking them from installing other browsers than IE or other apps not sold through their channels.
Meanwhile, Apple might have only 57%-60% market share instead of ~95%, but unlike Microsoft, it's actively blocking users form installing any other browser that's not Safari based and any app that's not on the AppStore, therefore doing even more damage than Microsoft was doing back in the days.
And speaking of iPhone market share, despite being it 57%-60% of the US right now, it's also the most wealthy and influential of the market, and looking at the demographics, it's at 87% amongst US teens, so it's safe to assume those teens will stick to iPhone when they grow up due to inertia and network effects, and then iOS market share will be close to 90%, therefore a guaranteed monopoly.
Okay so like: humor me. What is the damage incurred by the user's inability to install, for example, a true Firefox on iOS that uses their Quantum engine? I'll fully cosign that iOS' Safari has quirks that make it kind of annoying, very occasionally, like once every few months I'll find something that it does in a bizarre way that others don't. But I swear every time the topic of iOS' dominance comes up, there is a detachment of users out there who are simply furious that they can't install a web browser that doesn't use Apple's WebKit on an iOS device and I just... I do not get it. At the absolute worst I have never given even 10% of the shit required to where I would upend all my stored passwords and whatnot for the ability to even use a different WebKit based browser.
Now, granted, if this was the situation on the Mac, oh hell yes, I would absolutely be right there with everyone else and grabbing my own pitchfork. But on my phone? On my tablet? I dunno, am I weird for just not really caring?
Why should you, the user, care? For the same reason users care when Micros ft was a monopoly on desktop.
And to be totally honest with you, a lot of Safari iOS's quirks are unambiguously good, pro-privacy practices that frustrate the shit out of surveillance marketing firms and I quite hope Apple keeps it up.
So do I.
The fact that you don't see a problem with that is the issue because you seem to assume that Apple is and will always be on your side and looking after your best interest.
You're making it sound like they're Lamborghinis or Patek watches. Maybe in developing countries iPhone is a luxury brand, but in no way is it in any western developed countries, especially the US, the wealthiest of them all.
Yes they're expensive as in that's a lot of money compared to a 600 Euro Pixel 8 or a 350 Euro Samsung A54 which do more or less the same shit as an iPhone does, but they're not unaffordably expensive in order to be a luxury good.
>But their own money in their 20s I doubt it.
Credit, installments and carrier plans, make it that anyone can afford an iPhone. I live in a central EU country where average income is less than the US, and even the pizza delivery courier here can get an iPhone.
Let's do some napkin math: The iPhone 15 Pro is ~1200 Euros with tax here. A full time supermarket "wagie" with no education takes home nearly 1800 Euros per month after taxes. Subtract 600 Euros rent, 400 for eating, 200 for utilities and bills, and you're left with about 600 a month to spend as you please.
So you can buy the latest iPhone after saving for 2 months, or instantly by walking in to any carrier shop and signing a 3 year contract for a plan which you need anyway.
How is that "luxury"? Yes I know, this lifestyle is probably luxury compared to how average people live in some nations from Africa, Asia, LATAM and Middle East, but definitely not in the developed west. Otherwise Apple wouldn't be selling them by the boatlaod.
That's not actually true. Every business is competitive, but not every business engages in anti-competitive behavior.
Still not a monopoly though.
In the US, Apple is a minority player. I have no clue why Wall Street values them as a $1T company, when all they do anymore is make a bunch of phones that are under-competitive and over-expensive.
The only time in the past few years that iPhones out sold Android phones in the US (the only market which Apple is a major player in; any of the global markets, they're virtually a nobody) was a glitch in 2021, most likely due to being pandemic-inspired. Never before nor since have they broken the 50% barrier.
Although I 100% agree with what the EU is doing to Apple (and I hope they keep going), I don't understand why they're bothering with such a relative small fry, when Google doing the exact same thing on the Google Play Store is right there, and Google has far more capability of paying fines than Apple does.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/apple-hits-all-time-...
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...
The overall Google ecosystem is obviously more popular worldwide – but the idea that Apple only "makes a bunch of under-competitive phones", are "virtually a nobody" in the global market, or are a "small fry" is low-effort trolling.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...
That depends on how you define a market. Apple has a monopoly on app distribution to iOS devices. The argument for defining it like is is persuasive because in the Microsoft case you could at least install an OS from another vendor. You can't do that with an iPhone. Your only relief is to buy a new phone from a different manufacturer.
Web Apps do not work right (especially when compared to the other major mobile platform) and Apple is making little effort to improve the viability of this potential channel, instead choosing to delete web push tokens every week or so amongst other sabotage of web applications, while these same web applications work just fine on the other platforms that support web apps.
Not sure where you are getting 70% from, that seems way too high. They do, however, make around 80-90% if the profits in the market.
This was overturned on appeal and subsequently settled out of court so it was never actually determined whether bundling IE with Windows would have been illegal under US antitrust law.
Other aspects of the case were upheld on appeal (mostly related to shady dealings with OEMs) but the appeals panel concluded that the district judge incorrectly analyzed the browser issue. They also overturned the original court ordered split for the same reason.
Being a gatekeeper is not illegal in the EU either and it's not what the parent comment claimed. Abusing a gatekeeper position for anticompetitive purposes is illegal, which is similar to the U.S situation even if the vocabulary is slightly different.
What else are they gonna do to earn $? It's not like the world is lining up to buy their ultra reliable and high quality cars and planes.
Sorry for the tongue in cheek.
No no, you see, that is called “innovation”. And whenever the EU does anything to try to curtail those abuses of power, what they are doing is stifling innovation. Because as we all know, the one thing that matters in life is growth growth growth, particularly company growth, and there’s nothing more innovative than coming up with ways to exploit people’s privacy and attention for profit. And if you can get the ones exploited to rally in your favour, you’ve hit the jackpot. All hail corporate America, let’s raise a glass to the obscenely rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else, that is working out great.
But wait, there's more! The only reason growth is pushed for so hard is because most of the investors are retired or retiring soon and don't want to work any more. If the companies stop growing then their stock prices might go down. They gambled hard when they removed pensions from US companies and they can't lose the game before they die!
Defined benefit pensions and 401k get invested in the same thing.
Hence why the government repeatedly provides a backstop whenever things start to take a downturn.
Where are you getting this? Baby Boomers are smoothly transitioning their share of stock ownership to younger generations [1].
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
When the silent generation had 55% of the "total wealth" (and declining), boomers had 40% of the remainder, but now boomers have 55% (and climbing, instead of declining), and the younger generations only have 26% (combined).
It looks like they are still hoarding (for lack of a better term) wealth than relinquishing it.
One, stock ownership, not total wealth.
Two, boomer share is declining after peaking around 2020. It’s flat-ish as they begin retiring. Gen X got screwed, but the pick-up among Millenials looks like a return to the norm. (Look at the Boomer/Silent share in the 1990s.)
Three, the generation on the precipice of dying, the Silents, are not the chief stockholders. Boomers still have decades to live. They’re not looking to eke out another year or two of growth at the long-term expense of anything, they need that decades-on value to bank on.
OTH Gen X got a chance to lose their savings during the latter stages of dot.com and then again in 2009.
This is the problem, there really isn’t a coherent threshold between switch and iPhone or a reason console vendors shouldn’t be equally considered general purpose devices other than marketing. You could plug in some usb peripherals and run office suites on a PlayStation just fine.
No, nobody buys a nintendo to do banking on them. I bought a phone since I needed it to do banking. This is a real difference, not just a marketing distinction.
> it’s purely a result of gatekeeper decisions on the part of Nintendo
Yes, and that gatekeeper power ensures Nintendo isn't a general purpose device. If they allowed it to be a general purpose device like Apple did with phones then things would be different.
Controlling such a major share of general purpose devices like Apple does is a serious issue. Controlling a share of gaming computing like Nintendo doesn't matter nearly as much, so therefore lawmakers aren't going after them to the same degree. It doesn't matter if technically they are the same, in practice one doesn't cause issues for society while the other one does.
I'm also much more sane about how retail works, and realize that MSRP vs retail pricing is how the world works. Expecting to earn full retail pricing while selling your wares through someone else's store is just farcical. Developing a product that can only work on someone else's product and then complains about the rules of that other product's maker puts in place is also just hubris.
(I'm not suggesting a 9/11 conspiracy, by the way.)
The point was that there wasn't a "change of heart" about the Microsoft monopoly between 1999 and 2001, merely a change of power, and one that didn't necesssarily reflect the will of the people, who indisputably voted more for Gore than Bush, regardless of the Electoral College numbers.
It appears that the original comment by FirmwareBurner that I was replying to was edited substantially afterward to change the meaning, perhaps in reponse to my reply, which unfortunately removed some context that made sense of my reply.
Personally, I think there were shenanigans going on and we should be investigating them but I also feel like the hanging chads was a far bigger issue than the shenanigans that happened in 2020.
I don't believe the election was stolen but I also don't believe it's everyone's imagination that some shady shit was going on in places. I suspect that kind of crap happens every election.
2020 was special because the sitting president (who has accused others of election and voter fraud against him in AFAIR every election he's been part of) has primed his emotionally invested base to expect fraud everywhere. They saw a bunch of things they thought were shady, part of which were caused by unrealistic expectations (e.g. "I can just show up and be Poll Watcher without registering beforehand"). If you are aware of shady going-ons that have not been investigated I'm open to hear them, but all the occurrences I've seen have been investigated and explained - but since many people aren't open to normal explanations, the fraud idea keeps and keeps on festering.
If every election has some shady things happen then it's not possible for every bit of shadiness to be explained as anything other than shadiness.
So was there shadiness or wasn't there?
A lot of it can be explained away, which is why I said the hanging chad issue was a bigger problem. but ALL of it? I don't think so, even at the time there were a few things that gave me pause.
> If every election has some shady things happen then it's not possible for every bit of shadiness to be explained as anything other than shadiness.
> So was there shadiness or wasn't there?
I didn't say that there was absolutely no shadiness, but I haven't seen evidence that there was more shadiness than in any other election. The "evidence" brought forth for Trumps position that I've seen hasn't held up to scrutiny.
> A lot of it can be explained away, which is why I said the hanging chad issue was a bigger problem. but ALL of it? I don't think so, even at the time there were a few things that gave me pause.
You're free to share them if you'd like. All I'm saying is that I'm not aware of evidence brought forward that holds up to scrutiny, which leads me to believe that there was no significant deviation from the norm - the simpler explanation is that being primed for months by somebody with a lot of sway, combined with the strong distrust in non-partisan media, has led to these heaps of non-evidence (again, as far as I've seen, I'm happy to be proven wrong).
We are solid in a gray zone where we have to decide where are priorities are. Fair market vs tech dominance in US is a great example. Another one is carbon neutrality vs strong industry in EU. I’m sure there are so many others.
It is just important to keep that in mind when building your business because we can easily slide from one side of this gray zone to the other.
The modern republican party does not support anti-trust enforcement, or indeed, most executive enforcement of anti-corporate regulations. So when they are in office, there isnt any.
There's been some increasing bipartisan support for anti-tech anti-trust because republicans perceive them to be (largely accurately) biased towards the cultural left.
The MAGA GOP is unsettled on antitrust. Its defining elements, however, are loyalty and a strong executive, so presumably there would be support for antitrust action against those deemed disloyal.
What actually works for the right is free markets. Turns out if they just leave YouTube alone they get Rumble. If they ignore Twitter they get X. If Amazon makes a habit of booting right-wing sites, there will be a right wing version of Amazon. There are more than enough right wing media consumers for a free market to reward right-leaning content. Anti-trust will eventually lead to overregulation and lock in of companies hostile to the right in general and republicans in particular.
There is a much better argument for anti-trust to try and defuse the risk of a vast an hasty flash-mob forming and doing something stupid, but as a political response it just isn't going to be effective.
Conservatives always lose cultural battles in the end, that is why they are called conservatives they are the past the future is always progressive. Conservatives have short term victories but long term the conservatives become todays progressives, it is in the definition of the words.
Just because progressives want to change things and change is technically inevitable doesn't mean we can't push the bad ideas out beyond the life of anyone breathing right now.
Have this "free market" thing ever been tried?
Take a look at e.g semiconductor industry.
Microsoft controlled 95% of the personal computer market, and they abused that position to put a competitor out of business because that competitor was a threat to their monopoly.
How does that compare to Apple Music?
The "bundling" issue is about where the similarities to Microsoft begin and end (I can't recall if "bundling" was part of the problem with IE in the US too, or only in Europe, where it was definitely an issue and led to the "browser choice" screen).
Find an average (non tech) IOS user, and try to get them to switch to these apps.
Im guessing that there is a large intersection of "apple users" who also take their cars back to the dealership for oil changes and service. It's not stupidity, it's about creating an air of trust. Apple goes out of its way to keep customers trust (as do car dealers to an extent) because the money is in keeping a customer.
As an aside, the source of this complaint being Spotify is interesting. I would love to know from artist who pays better between the two (because I dont think its spottify)
> Compared to Spotify, Apple Music pays a higher rate per stream. The exact amount varies from $0.006 to $0.008 per stream.
> Tidal, a high-fidelity music streaming service, pays artists one of the highest rates per stream, ranging from $0.0125 to $0.015 per stream.
Source: https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/
> Tidal also says its HiFi Plus tier pays significantly higher royalties per stream than its rivals, "at least 50% or more vs the regular rate across the four largest streaming services,”
Source: https://www.loudersound.com/features/which-music-streaming-s...
Also: https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya...
> Let’s start with the elephant in the room. On average, Tidal pays $0.01 per stream, which is way above the $0.003/0.005 offered by Spotify.
> Though Tidal’s service being more profitable for artists is worth praising, the remuneration itself is not the biggest issue here, as it’s the way the revenue streams are distributed among artists.
> Spotify pays artists pro-rata, meaning they calculate the total streams within the platform and estimate the proportion each artist should receive.
> This model greatly favors prominent artists, often leaving independent musicians with mere cents even when they have a loyal and active fanbase.
You do know that Spotify has 600 million users? And that it got those users without practices like pushing its app in phone setup, account setup, settings, home screen, default music app, default music app in carplay etc.?
> As an aside, the source of this complaint being Spotify is interesting. I would love to know from artist who pays better between the two (because I dont think its spottify)
Neither pays artists directly. They pay money to rights holders. Why no one ever questions the rights holders is beyond my comprehension at this point.
I imagine most people either don’t care or don’t know this.
If I were to switch streaming services, Spotify would be dead last on my list, because they’re hypocritical — they pushed out third party devs building alternative players for paying users by deprecating libspotify, refuse to support interop with anything that’s not a Spotify Connect device (HomePod for example supports third party streaming, yet Spotify won’t use the APIs), have treated their users terribly with incessant AB tests and pushing content unrelated to music in their faces, and have spent a ridiculous amount of money trying to lock up and monetize what was previously the most democratic and available medium (podcasts).
At least Apple Music allows third party players and tries to support other ecosystems (Android + Chromecast).
> Find an average (non tech) IOS user, and try to get them to switch to these apps.
Interesting take :)
- the average user doesn’t even use Signal anywhere, let alone an average non-tech iOS user
- As for Spotify, you must mention geography (I guess that’s USA you meant) - because in some geographies Apple Music might not even be the third music app on an iPhone
Spotify has never paid this. You signed up online and then logged into the app.
To the degree Apple has behaved anti-competitively, Apple Music v Spotify is the clearest case. But it’s not because of payment processing, but that Apple can see Spotify’s data and strategy and then use it against them from a superior marketing position.
The device might be able to see “Spotify’s data”, but the closest thing Apple-the-company has to “Spotify’s data [on iOS/macOS]” is likely to be device/customer profiles on who downloads the app from the App Store.
And I’m sure the amount of data that Apple has on Spotify and their business and marketing strategies from non-device sources is both vastly superior and vastly more than what they would get from device-based information.
This is absolutely not true at all, exclusivity agreements are incredibly widespread in supply chains.
https://www.kevingrier.com/uploads/userfiles/files/opinion-p...
> Both retailers and manufacturers assert that over the past decade this practice has increased materially. In some retail outlets or corporations, the activity is now found in virtually every category. Based on reliable industry benchmarks from the late 1990's it is likely that as of 2001, at least half of major Canadian manufacturers are involved in some form of exclusivity arrangement with Canadian distributors.
“With some exceptions” doing some heavy lifting I guess, considering we’re talking about basically whole industries and product sectors.
I never signed an exclusivity deal to only shop from a single grocery store, I don't think that exists anywhere in the world. But buying an iPhone is effectively an exclusivity deal where you agree to only buy from Apples store. This makes it fundamentally different from other exclusivity deals that are business to business, this is exclusivity on individual customers.
I think the Apple store is the biggest such exclusivity deal on customers in history for a general marketplace. I can't think of anything else, except slavery or where a company owns the whole town and thus all the markets, but a company town is still way smaller scope than the Apple store.
Yes, individual customers who choose to buy an iPhone. It’s not like Apple is the only phone manufacturer in the world, and the iPhone is only barely dominant in the United States. There is plenty of competition for the iPhone. If you don’t like the iPhone and its singular App Store, go buy an Android phone.
What you want is an iPhone on your terms. Sorry, that’s not how the market works.
If you want to stick to the "store" analogy, they Apple also needs to handle support, return cases and a lot more financial risk – A store stocks their own inventories and does not just facilitate transactions between two parties.
The fact is that Apple store is not a store, it is a marketplace. And on a marketplace you can not censor people as easily.
Stores don't necessarily own all their inventories (stock consignment) and some products are extremely low risk (e.g. phone cards, gift cards, digital goods, etc.)
Calling it a marketplace seems odd considering unlike in traditional marketplaces, there are no competing merchants selling the same goods. There are no other merchants at all.
If that makes sense to you ... then I guess there isn't much to discuss here.
The relevant market isn’t the specific Apple device users, but all users and all their competing devices. This is typically how US antitrust law works as it is based on consumer harm. And that’s broad, not the specific consumers who choose to use a particular tool or be in a particular system.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/253...
> The District Court determined that Microsoft had maintained a monopoly in the market for Intel compatible PC operating systems in violation
Change "Intel compatible" to "A series compatible" and it's Apple. Change it to "ARM compatible" and it's still Apple given they have 60% market share in the USA. Only countries enforce anti-trust, there is no world government to look at market share it the world.
So people are so enamored with apple devices that they cannot stop using them, but don't want to pay the rent the company charges them... just go play somewhere else. Or create your own park. That's what Hawuei did, that's what Android did.
Consumer are locked into ecosystems so you cannot just say "they can switch to a competing device". Can they move all apps and content from the old device to the new device at no cost? Do they need significant time to setup.
Walmart should be forced to sell competitors products because they control the whole market for Walmart customers.
Meanwhile, she's moved twice in my lifetime. I actually suspect most people move more often than they switch operating systems, and do so more times in their life, too.
I hate this rhetoric that old people are stupid and are intrinsically incapable of understanding modern technology.
Computers and cell phones didn't pop into existence overnight. The first home computers entered the market in the late 70's and became commonplace in the 80's. If your grandma is in her 80's now, she was in her 40's back then.
None of us had to learn these things overnight and tech was much simpler back then. All she had to do was keep up with what was happening in society. If anything, all this is more complicated for kids as they weren't eased into it like us older folks were.
Same goes for cellphones. They got common in the 90's and it took decades for them to get to the point that they are basically supercomputers you can put in your pocket.
This is nothing like asking your grandma to start using a new language she doesn't understand. This is more like your grandma stubbornly refusing to learn the meaning of new words introduced into the English language since the 80s. This is about being wilfully disconnected from society. This is not about an inability to learn but an unwillingness.
This is not an age thing, to get to the point where switching cellphone OSes is an impossible task you had to have checked out decades ago. It has nothing to do with age and everything with apathy and laziness.
Further, when you get to your 40s and some "new tech" comes out (like these VR headsets), you have to take a gamble. Is this yet another fad, like the last time ... or is this going to stick around. You have far less time than some teenager to go figure out how things work, on top of that.
Having switched from Apple to Microsoft Phone to Android and back to Apple ... I disagree. In that time, I've moved states and even countries. Moving is far less demanding than switching operating systems. Moving is pretty simple: you pack, move, then unpack; and you even get to keep all your stuff! Switching operating systems requires researching for similar apps, purchasing them again, potentially copying music/photo libraries using sketchy tools, hunting down tutorials for how to do things you don't know how to do, etc.
More generally, moving means leaving friends, forcing kids to change schools, and if moving far, learning new laws and customs. Not to mention that packing and moving all that stuff takes days and/or costs thousands of moneys. Extracting files from Google Drive and iCloud is a pain, but is it _that_ bad?
Moving the goalpost are we? Sure, if you keep moving it far enough, long enough, then yeah, you'll find a set of conditions where this is no longer true (such as having a family, friends, changing schools, etc).
> Extracting files from Google Drive and iCloud is a pain, but is it _that_ bad?
I take it you haven't done it. Put your money where your mouth is and just switch. It's that easy, right?
I've used... six mobile operating systems in the last ten years. Some learnings:
1. There are cross-platform alternatives for file storage. Consider using them for important things. 2. For work things and organized volunteerism you'll use the tools of the company/organization anyway. 3. Backups help when migrating. You need backups anyway, so make use of them. 4. Only migrate things you actually care about. Screenshots from last year or that draft email to the electrician who installed your fridge? Let them burn
We already know the players in the market will conspire to increase prices artificially if given the chance (United States v. Apple Inc., 952 F. Supp. 2d 638 (S.D.N.Y. 2013)). So, no, I don't believe these are actually one market because not even the players think it is one marketplace. They argue this exact illusion to keep anti-trust from applying to them, but behave as if it isn't a single market.
All we need is for lawmakers to change what the definition of a market is, in order to deal with this loophole.
In fact regulators do not allow this to happen. For example, I know the UK competition regulators would not allow the same company to buy more than a quarter (IIRC) of the pubs in an area. Source: I heard the CEO of what was the biggest pub company in the UK at the time say it.
There was a settlement with the DoJ. You don't settle when you win and the other side loses.
Instead I'm going to ask you a question.
Do you suspect that lawyers work for free?
The DoJ and Microsoft settled the case. There was no winner or loser. If Microsoft had won the case, then the notion of settlement doesn't even make sense. And depending on the law and jurisdiction, legal fees can be awarded to the winner of a case. But with a settlement, one party doesn't usually pay the other party's legal expenses as a stipulation; that would be weird. So I really don't know what in the world you're talking about, and maybe you don't either.
The question here is a simple factual one: Did Microsoft win the case? No, they did not. The OP's assertion was wrong. You seem to be contemplating a different question, namely, does it make sense for parties to settle before going to judgement, which is why you think the answer is "extremely obvious". And of course it makes sense to settle, which is precisely what Microsoft and the DoJ did. They settled. Microsoft did not win. When you win, you don't settle. And the issue of legal expenses is irrelevant to the question of whether Microsoft won or not.
Another definition for win is to achieve victory.
The bells got split up, MS settled with the DOJ and got a small slap on the wrist. The other poster considers that a victory (as do most people).
drooopy: "Nearly twenty five years ago, the DoJ nearly split Microsoft into two companies"
whynotminot: "Didn’t Microsoft win that case?"
We all know that Microsoft was not split into two companies. That was even stipulated by "nearly" in the initial post. That was obviously a "win" in the colloquial sense, so if that was the intended meaning, then why would whynotminot have even posed a question in the first place? There was no question. Yes, Microsoft "won", colloquially, and just got a slap on the wrist. That was the very background and context of the initial post by drooopy.
So no, you're mistaken about which sense of "win" was under question.
The question would have been phrased differently if it was meant in the colloquial sense, something like, "Didn't Microsoft win in that settlement?" But really, nobody would even phrase that as a tentative question rather than as a statement, because obviously Microsoft came out very well in the settlement, and besides, that was never in dispute with the original post by drooopy, because drooopy was lamenting the fact that monopolists have faced no consequences. Your interpretation of the conversation makes no sense.
Furthermore, whynotminot specifically said, in reference to the Wikipedia article about US v. Microsoft, "which is why I replied skeptically because it says Microsoft had most of it overturned on appeal." This again points to the legal sense of win.
Apple doesn't even have 50% share in Europe.
Further, the commenter was referring to the U.S.
How did you come up with this?
The only tariff change ever made was made over a threat of an anti-trust lawsuit and copied straight over completely verbatim to the second company.
And it's not like users of one store can try to shop to the other one anyways. Each user is captive of their respective store.
On the hardware side sure, the competition is fierce and visible, on the software side I don't see anything at all.