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Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to start a flame war, I'm asking this earnestly. Where does this command over hardware (USB-C mandate), software (sideloading/AppStore), and prices (recent 2bn decision) end?

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It ends when Apple learns to balance the interests of their shareholders and the interests of their customers better. I would go as far as saying that the way Apple banned even any mention of alternative payment methods for in-app services was clearly abusive and faudulent.

> It ends when Apple learns to balance the interests of their shareholders and the interests of their customers better.

The interests of their shareholders are literally the interests of their customers.

Apple makes incredible products, that billions of people pay significant money for, with many competitors that are much cheaper. Their shareholders reap the rewards of this.

If Apple customers hated Apple, they would not be Apple customers, and Apple would not be one of the most valuable businesses in human history.

> The interests of their shareholders are literally the interests of their customers.

There would be no need hide information from customers if that was true. Their censorship, the fact that Apple desperately wants to hide what they are doing, is very revealing and incriminating.

What information are they hiding/censoring?

Per Apple’s rules, app developers are not allowed to explain the App Store rules and pricing models within their apps, leaving customers in the dark - a form of censorship, to be sure.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems like it ends and begins at wanting to sell in the european market. It doesn't seem that different from mandating that cars obey certain emission standards, contain digital radios etc. Or how food packaging contain nutritional information. Mandating 2-year guarantees for sold goods. There's quite a lot of legislation on specific requirements on sold goods.

One can argue whether this specific legislation is wise, but legally i don't think there's any limit to what the EU can mandate for goods sold in their market.

Where does the command over minimum wages, minimum maternity leave and minimum consumer warranty end?

Where democracy decides it ends.

Apple is in the wrong here, at least in my opinion, but equating the ability to have a 2nd app store on your iPhone and the end of democracy is... wow.

Edit: Misread the comment, sorry.

He didn't say anything about the end of democracy. Apparently the media zeitgeist is so strong with this now that even just saying "Democracy" triggers the thought.

All he said is that it's the democratically elected officals that decide what laws companies have to obey. Just as they decide everything else about what what laws people have to obey.

>He didn't say anything about the end of democracy.

You're right! I misread.

>Apparently the media zeitgeist is so strong with this now that even just saying "Democracy" triggers the thought.

Or I just misread the comment.

The USB-C mandate is nothing to do with Apple. It’s ensure interoperability and reduce waste.

Setting standards is one of the oldest forms of regulation, ever since weights and measures were standardized to ensure people could trade more easily, ensuring that when you bought a pound of flour from one vendor it would be the same pound as the vendor across the street.

Not where, when. And the answer is never, because the EU regulates what companies themselves either can't regulate themselves because no one's willing to adopt the other's standard, or there's a position of dominance that doesn't even require collaborating with anyone else. And they do that for a pretty simple reason: to ensure that businesses do right by the EU citizenship.

And they do that across _all_ sectors of industry, you only noticed the tech one because it's in the news you pay attention to, but everything from farming to textiles to tech to pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated so that the people that live in the EU can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.

Why would it end? Governance is a continuing process.

In Europe unlike in America the government makes regulations that benefit the general public. That's it.

That's probably to generalised since the EU is still a political entity with lots of lobbying from different sides.

But in this case benefiting the general public is easy because it does not hit a European company ( production in China, development in America) that is working hard to extract money which it sends abroad while avoiding paying taxes here (probably legally).

A good opportunity to reign Apple and friends in and score some "greater good" points in particular since the US government is also sceptical and mostly concerned with internal affairs at the moment.

Different sides there being Microsoft.

You want to sell in their house, you gotta play by their rules. It’s that simple.

If only it were that simple!! Isn't the central problem that you're not allowed to sell in anybody elses house. I mean, if you're prepared to accept that you are leasing the device and that the lease will dictate what you can add can't do with the device, then I think your position holds, otherwise, it's a little tenuous.

I interpreted the parent comment as referring to the EU's house and rules?

Their house is in part in the EU so they have to play by the rules of the EU there, or remove that part of the house.

It's not their house. Someone bought an iPhone (not leased, bought, they own it now). Someone else made an app that that person wants to install on their iPhone (solely thanks to app developer's own marketing efforts). But Apple thinks it's appropriate to have their finger in the pie too.

Now there are fewer (or none) apple followers defending the old argument: Apple is entitled to profit for their platform. Thank EU for Striking some sense on that.

Nobody bought the Apple SDKs or OS though and every app depends on them.

I get people are use to free, but plenty of companies license software for royalties that does a lot less.

> Nobody bought the Apple SDKs

That's what the $99/year fee is for. Apple set that price themselves. It can also be argued that some of the cost of the SDKs is included into the price of the Mac that any iOS developer has to have.

> or OS

That's included into the price of every iPhone because you can't even buy an iPhone without an OS or install your own, like you can do with PCs.

Does apple having designed, developed, and manufactured the phone as well as having built, maintained, and serviced the App store mean nothing?

The App store is a highly trusted place to download things on your phone, and that's a value that apple provides and that costs money to maintain. Pretending that it's as isolated as you pretend feels very disingenuous.

I'm an Android developer myself, but the app store is commonly seen by my iOS colleagues just as a stupid hurdle they must clear to get their app out to the world. Not as the godsend that Apple portrays it.

If the app store is truly as immensely useful as Apple wants everyone to believe, why not enable full-on Android-style sideloading on iOS and let the app store compete with that on its own merits? Surely everyone would still prefer it if it's so great?

This argument is trotted out frequently and it misses the point. These are NOT Apple’s customers. Yes they bought the phone from Apple but they are Epic’s customers. No one wants Apple inserting themselves in the middle of the transaction. It is not necessary.

If it were really that simple, we'd all be leasing AT&T cell phones. The only reason Apple can sell iPhones and run an app store is because AT&T got broken up 40 years ago for similar issues.

It probably ends with happy consumers :) At least, I'm very happy that the EU is trying to avert the worst anticompetitive behaviour and restoring my control over the hardware that I purchased.

When devices aren't sold in the EU. If it's sold in the EU, the EU can regulate that model.

Why should it end? So far it's awesome.

If enough shareholders vote in favour of Apple leaving the EU and its overbearing regulations, that's when it would end.

They won't because they know Apple exiting would simply hand the market to those that can bear the harsh yoke of consumer regulation.

I think tech, particularly the digital landscape, is one of the few industry that are not regulated. Everything else from transport to food has strict regulation. It's not like anyone can build housing whenever and however he wants in the US.

It won't end, Apple is too big now, the alternatives are:

  1. Split Apple into smaller companies
  2. Operate Apple like an utility company

They did this to themselves, and it's only downhill from this point.

> They did this to themselves

What...by being successful?

No, by being anti-competitive. Most countries have laws against monopolies, and it was naive to expect that countries would wait until you destroy the competition to enforce those laws.

> Most countries have laws against monopolies

They have less than 25% smartphone marketshare. What monopoly do they have?

They don't.

That's why the regulation targets "gatekeepers" with revenue in the billions and at least 45Million European users.

The EU decided that this is large enough to be limited in what they can do.

It is curious that there are no European gatekeepers either.

They do. That’s why the EC had to create a new class named “gatekeeper”: because Apple isn’t a monopolist.

That's what I meant. Sorry if it was unclear

Yes. It's the reality of capitalistic end game. You start with a great product, innovate for 30 years and then when you think you got it and can endlessly extract the rent from the market, while adding another megapixel and megaherz and buying out or bulling competitors, then the government knocks on your door and gives you the award of the biggest asshat in the town and asks to retire.

Congrats, you won, now let somebody else play the game and become a boring public utility. And by the way, your research lab is now a public university. And the taxes is what government does, not you.

> And the taxes is what government does, not you.

Because the role of the government (in theory) is to use these taxes for public utility services and projects. Companies only care about their owners and shareholders, a very small subset of the population. If you're not contributing to society, but just profiteering, you should retire. Especially if your position lead you to have a say to what succeed or not in the economy.

> Split Apple into smaller companies

Curious, how would you split them up? A lot of their stuff is very intertwined, I guess Beats, Shazam are easy to split into their own, but the rest?

My expectation is that a government would do an investigation first, but I believe that a split would look like this:

  - The computing hardware company
  - The accessory hardware company
  - The operating system company
  - The software company
  - The cloud services company
  - The app store company
  - The music & video company
  - The messaging company

So yeah, a split looks scary.

For starters, it's Apple the phone making company, Apple the software making company and Apple the (software) distribution company. The cloud, the payment processing, the bank whatever else is there.

They can still be quite integrated, they just have to a allow a different distribution company compete without using the phone company's monopoly as a leverage against them and not use distribution company as a leverage to compete with other software developers i.e. pay the same 30% fee, bid for promotion in the store and use fair ranking in the search.

It's not the first time a huge corp gets split up once they reach end game and can't innovate in their own field anymore.

Ideally, as a consumer, in a market where commodity computer hardware is not arbitrarily restricted to extract the maximum attainable profit from consumers? It has been shown time and again that both volunteers and competitors can quickly and easily build and ship software, including entire OS's that run on the hardware, the only thing preventing them from doing so is anti-consumer and anti-competitive controls.

It's asinine that I, as a consumer, can pay over $1000 for a device and not be able to choose which software I can run on it because the developer of that device locks out access. It's even worse that the company I bought it from can arbitrarily disable the device, features, and services that I have paid for, and I have little to no recourse.

Personally, I've like to get the old audio jack socket added back to iPhones and laptops.

Maybe that's just me though. ;)

It shouldn't end, we shouldn't let them do whatever they want.

Where smartphones end effectively being a public utility, is my guess.

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