Judge tells Google: Play Store shakeup coming; punishment for running a monopoly
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Apple should have antitrust action taken as well, and hopefully will in time. They sure are in for a rude awakening in Europe with their malicious noncompliance to EU laws...
Apple never allowed side loading, from the beginning, even when they had 0.0% market share. This means it’s basically impossible to show that they have illegally acted to maintain a monopoly - when they didn’t change anything. Having a monopoly is not illegal - changing things to keep a monopoly, is.
This came up during Apple vs Epic. Did Apple change the rate to 50% when they had a monopoly? No. Did Apple retroactively ban a major app category? No. Did Apple add various fees and fines that weren’t there from the beginning? No. Did Apple force IAP, when this wasn’t initially required? No.
Android, on the other hand, had a time before the Play Store and before the heavier restrictions on sideloading…
The fact is these were two different lawsuits with different judges with disagreeing outcomes. It's a real shame it happened this way - I feel no sympathy whatsoever for Google but it's unfair that Apple is free to continue their anticompetitive practices while their only potential competitor is going to be hamstrung. At least in USA.
The cases are fundamentally different, and rest on the actions the two companies took.
Google actively harmed other stores. Apple has no other store to harm.
In the Google case, epic was able to prove anticompetitive behaviour. In the Apple case they could not prove anything outside of anti steering.
The judge doesn’t even need to factor in to the case at the point that Epic failed in the Apple case. They would have failed with any judge because their case was weakened by the lack of anti competition actions
B. You’re assuming the facts are similar for Google, as to Apple, in regards to their legal standing. They are not.
https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
A lot of our justice system isn't really deterministic, and judge shopping is totally a thing :( It's unfair, and I wish we had a better system than that.
Here's one article... https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...
> "Nothing in the Apple case is directly relevant to the Google case — in fact, the judge barred both sides from even bringing it up. Google’s lawyers never got to argue to the jury that Apple won."
The main use case for doing this is probably revanced, especially for patches like reddit that don't change the app id.
The issue is not monopoly and this is where people get hung up. It’s about anticompetitive behaviour enabled by a monopoly (or any level of market dominance)
Google was found to be anticompetitive because even though they allow other stores and side loading, they were pushing OEMs to exclude other stores and making sweetheart deals to prevent apps going to other stores.
Hence they were using their market position to harm their competing stores.
Link to the findings https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
Apple has no competitor in the App Store for its platform outside of the EU, and therefore can’t be found anticompetitive on the same grounds that Google was.
They maybe found anticompetitive if they used their store to harm competition at the application level but that hasn’t been proven yet either. The closest has been in the EU (and to a lesser degree CA) where they were found in violation of anti-steering but those are distinct.
Again, it’s not about simply having a monopoly position.
Epic couldn’t prove that Apple had taken anti competitive measures. Google on the other hand had it in writing that they did. It was a slam dunk case from the get go
Currently (in the US) no alternative stores for iOS exists.
No regulation exists to create multiple stores. In fact, even in the EU, the regulation only states that you have to do so after a certain number of users.
Being a monopoly is completely legal as long as you don’t actively prevent competition.
Apple maintaining the status quo is not anti competitive. Sure, no competition can exist but as long as Apple isn’t actively squashing competition, it is fine.
On the contrary, Apple would have to make effort to allow for competition. And without EU like regulations, there is no legal framework to compel a company to enable competitors.
Apple has been very careful to walk that fine line.
Not quite. There is no need to prove a monopoly in order to prove a violation of US antitrust law. There FTC has a nice summary of the core federal antitrust laws here [1]. Some quotes:
> The Sherman Act outlaws "every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade," and any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize."
...
> The Federal Trade Commission Act bans "unfair methods of competition" and "unfair or deceptive acts or practices."
...
> The Clayton Act addresses specific practices that the Sherman Act does not clearly prohibit, such as mergers and interlocking directorates (that is, the same person making business decisions for competing companies). [...] As amended by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, the Clayton Act also bans certain discriminatory prices, services, and allowances in dealings between merchants.
It's pretty much all about unfair competition and about attempts to create a monopoly.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
To tie this back to Google, just being declared a monopoly will now change how they do business. Deals they made before are no longer on the table and would be deemed unfair because Google is a monopoly.
For example nvidia is in hot water for the way they treat their partners: restrictions on what they can make, bundling of products, etc. Really a lot of the same stuff as intel and AMD did back in the late 90s/early 2010s with locking down their chipsets etc to force third parties out of the market (although this was never really enforced at the time).
Then contrast apple: apple has never sold individual components to partners in the first place. They will not sell you a M1 processor, only a whole MacBook or tablet. And that’s perfectly legal and not anticompetitive at all, actually.
What’s the difference? Intel and Nvidia allowed partners to enter this niche, and then crowded them out later. Apple never allowed anyone to enter this niche in the first place. So there’s no actual harm to partners or market competitiveness - there was never a market in the first place. The former is actually legally much worse than the latter - it’s perfectly legal to just sell a phone and not the chips.
Think of it like “promissary estoppel” for business relationships. If you make a promise (even a verbal one) and someone else incurs an expense based on that promise, and you renege, you are on the hook for damages because of the money they spent based on your promise!
Anticompetiveness is very similar in a sense. If you don’t allow third parties to enter the space, there is no harm to market competitiveness, because there is no market. Once other companies spend billions of dollars to try and enter the market, you can’t just kick them out after the fact. Kicking them out is in fact less fair than never letting them enter in the first place - because letting them enter means they incur R&D expenses etc. That’s a direct harm in a way which “I can’t make a MacBook competitor because they won’t sell me chips!” really isn’t.
(leaving aside the mac clone era, which occurred when apple was so small and frankly almost collapsing that there was no actual argument they construed a monopoly or damaged overall market competitiveness at the time)
The judge in the Apple case also agreed with positioning iOS as part of the larger gaming market where Apple is acting just like game consoles. The judge even said the 30% was fair relative to the market. The anti-steering was a minor finding against Apple.
I think the biggest risk for monopolistic behavior Apple has is with interop. It's one of the reasons I believe they have embraced RCS.
This isn’t to disqualify any of your other points, but because it keeps getting missed I’m going to include the missing context:
The People’s Republic of China requires 5G phones going forward to support what they call “5G Messaging” and what we know as “RCS”. This is one of those it’s easier to comply and do it internationally than to only do it locally things, if you’re going to do it at all, and it costs Apple nothing additional by doing so.
iOS and Android appstores are not distinct markets. They compete for the same users (mobile phone users).
The legal precedent is that each store only services the ecosystem they’re on, and that is the scope of the market.
More so, Apple has argued and legally been accepted by the EU that the store for each of its platforms are scoped by the individual platform. So the iOS store is not the same as the iPadOS store.
If you can prove your case legally, there are companies that will pay you tens of millions of dollars. Till then, opinions to the contrary are just shouting in the wind.
Apple isn’t both the world largest search engine and one of the largest digital markets.
In what should be a surprise to nobody, the courts do seem to eventually be coming around on this whole app store duopoly issue.
Remember, Apple + Google doesn't need to win a legal battle a single time. Instead, they need to win their legal battles every time. Else their duopoly will slowly get chipped away by rulings like this.
Sure, this one only effects Google. But perhaps the precedent could be used for future lawsuits. And if that doesn't work, well there is always the option of writing new laws.
What should be obvious to everyone though, is that the current app store situation is unsustainable and is likely to crack sooner rather than later.
This feels like a Monty Python sketch if they are attacking Google for the Play Store while ignoring the elephant in the room which is Apple.
even though apple was tried earlier though maybe on broad based terms ?