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Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

mcintyre1994

I suspect the biggest concern Apple has is that it’s a big part of their services revenue, which is what’s holding their earnings up currently. They want Services to be seen as a big interesting business, but it’s mostly Google and App Store games. It’d be a big problem for them to report a drop in services revenue, and they’re not going to find anything to replace it quickly enough.

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From a legal perspective, Apple's biggest concern, by far, is that this case could set a precedent for using courts to sanction Apple without letting Apple in court. Next to that, revenue is meaningless. Because they can take your revenue from whatever source via judgement, without giving you so much as an opportunity to file a brief in front of the court.

This is one time where there is much more on the line than money. At least for Apple. Maybe for everyone if the Supremes were to say this is OK. (Unlikely in the extreme, but still.)

This is an underrated comment and should be WAY higher. Like a lot of things Apple does, this isn't about the thing itself, but about the next ten to twenty years of related things.

Also consider that a good portion of Apple's services revenue is from services running on GCP, which would be prohibited. They could go all-in with AWS and Azure, but that's a significant tech change and reduces their negotiating power with those alternatives.

And how does that help? You’re going from the 3rd largest cloud provider to the first and second?

Apple already runs some of its workloads on AWS. It was an open secret inside AWS before. But they brought an Apple person on stage at the last reinvent

I think GP point, is that the proposed remedy: “contract between Google and Apple in which there would be anything exchanged of value.” would force Apple ditch all Google services, including GCP. Given paying Google for GCP services would require a contract exchanging something of value.

I know, I’m saying that it is a dumb remedy to “we don’t like BigTech colluding so we are going to force Apple to leave the third largest cloud provider (an also ran) for the first and second largest provider”

It’s a dumb remedy in general, seemingly created without any understanding of the industry.

It makes a lot more sense if you view it as "we're really gonna stick it to Google" and not "we're going to make a more competitive marketplace".

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