Australian court finds Apple, Google guilty of being anticompetitive
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You should probably be thinking that the only places they can be won is outside the US.
The implied corruption is likely not from these other countries that start making these cases now, but is a persistent feature of US governance.
1 - Regardless of what you think of tariffs, his base largely considers them wins.
Trump collects wins for himself and his base flip-flops along with him and his every whim.
It's not about smart or not, he doesn't care beyond what he can get from it. He doesn't care about any retaliations and he knows he has his base eating outta the palm of his hand. Smart doesn't play into any of it, it's not needed. The Project state takes care of the smarts part of the administration
It's as if they have some insider knowledge or something, and also a lot of skin in the game to protect these monopolies.
Also I didn't see any info on whether the fund manager can beat hft et al to the punch once disclosure happens.
No, you won’t. That ETF is a trailing indicator, and it’s trailing so far back it won’t even show up in the rearview mirror.
That, and if you load a comparison chart with .SPX, they look almost identical. No upside, and greater risk.
I don't like the way this is phrased because it nearly implies that doing this is an advantage to the US population.
"Preventing foreign dominance in tech" is plausibly a legitimate goal. Preventing a foreign tech monopoly is a good thing. But the assumption that this can only be achieved by a domestic one is the fallacy. A domestic monopoly is still a disadvantage compared to a competitive market with a multitude of domestic companies.
Unless you're an authoritarian that wants to leverage the monopoly for the purposes of e.g. censorship. But then you're an enemy whose goal is to harm even the domestic population.
Its to prop up American businesses, and as a form of corporate welfare.
We see this a lot in various vertical industries. The USG could pay and make it free, but they would rather prop up proprietary software as long as its US based.
Not even being a monopolist matters.
You say that like it's an actual policy goal. You don't think it's because those companies donate to the campaigns of the politicians doing it? It's corruption.
I do. There's reasons for that from previous employment that would indicate that as a policy goal.
Red Hat is also technically accepted by US Gov. Technically. But you need to use? They're bypassing all sorts of security shit with ongoing POAMs and doing their own thing.
And yes, I would agree that its corruption as well.
It's a matter of whether it would happen even if nobody was writing a check, and it still seems like the answer is no.
AC-2 : Kerberos/LDAP/DNS/Shibboleth CAN suffice, but auditors will absolutely look for Active Directory. Most auditors don't even know how to prove Linux this way.
CM-6 : this is just a roundabout way of saying 'do you support GPOs? '. Sure, Puppet can work, as can on-login bash scripts stored on a Windows AD server. But why use Linux clients when you're already using Windows AD?
Now, nowhere in NIST actually says 'MS Windows'. Its just that the control is worded in such a way that proving it on Windows is easy, and Linux is very hard to impossible to prove.
There was a single exception to vendor agnoticism, and that was the requirement of McAfee security software. I can't find the control offhand, but now its called Trellix.
Look at the state of the industry vertically. There's exactly 1 company that can produce the cutting-edge chip fabs, ASML. TSMC utterly dominates using the fabs to actually produce the chips. That's already 2 foreign-controlled horizontal monopolies on which the rest of the industry relies.
If you want any sort of control in the industry (and not be bullied for access like we do to China), you need to be the biggest buyer / operator of those chips. And so we encourage US mega-tech companies buying up all the GPUs, so those other monopolies aren't used to cripple us (or at least they'd cripple the whole chain if they tried).
It isn't in any way guaranteed, and you just listed an example of it failing. Intel used to be the world leader in fabs and now it's TSMC, because that's what happens if you let the domestic market consolidate until the incumbents feel they can rest on their laurels and then a foreign competitor throws down the gauntlet.
> If you want any sort of control in the industry (and not be bullied for access like we do to China), you need to be the biggest buyer / operator of those chips.
Or you need an actual diverse competitive market so that that sort of bullying doesn't work for anyone.
Suppose the GPU market had a dozen or more companies with significant market share and four of them were in the US. Then it doesn't matter where the other ones are, nobody can deprive the US of GPUs because the US can always get them from the US vendors or have them increase production.
It would mean that the US can't do the bullying anymore because then others could buy from the non-US vendors, but what is the rest of the world doing not causing that to happen on purpose?
Lina Khan's FTC brought cases again Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Mastercard, and more. They also prevented mergers (consolidations) in a lot of different industries. Could they have accomplished more? Certainly, but they did certainly did display a willingness to bring antitrust cases.
unfortunately a lot of these things are on an election cycle.
> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.
> Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, ...
It was passed in the era of robber barons and meant to be a strong hammer against anti-competitive practices. But because it was so broad, the courts kept chipping away at it over time through reinterpretation because by its terms it would prohibit a lot of things the courts didn't really want to get involved in policing, or they just made bad calls in years when the Court's majority wasn't that smart.
Meanwhile monopolists generally have a lot of money to pay expensive lawyers, so they structure their activities to fit within the loopholes the courts have carved out over the years and that makes it hard for an administration to hold them to account even when they have the will to do it.
Hyper-partisanship also makes this worse, because if everyone is convinced the other side is pure evil then they're going to try to undo anything the other party was trying to do without even considering what it is, which isn't compatible with long-term prosecutions that would have to span administrations.
If they aren't, it means they're not pushing the boundaries of their authority hard enough.
I disagree.
As to the former, the case is what the case is: obviously everyone would like to construct the strongest possible case.
As to the latter, the joke about career prosecutors only bringing cases they know they can win to pad their record comes to mind. In a regulatory role, IMHO prosecutors should be as aggressive as the law allows them to be, especially against the largest companies. It's difficult to claim that Google can't afford to mount a vigorous defense for itself.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/g-s1-28919/supreme-court-judg...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/judg...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/27/judge-shopping-expl...
Which is part of the reason why the Netherlands is not a superpower.
Can you name any country that has ever been a superpower where judges (of the national judiciary if it has separate judiciaries for constituent parts from the national one) were predominantly democratically elected?
Especially with the rise and seeming power of BRICS there is surely a sense that the pressure is a bit off from the USA, America will be unwilling to add on to pressure against Australia that is close to core BRICS, etc.
Do not discount the rising awareness of the real weakness the “American” empire finds itself in suddenly.
Australia is also in the process of regulating platforms and I'd expect it to end up a little closer to Europe/Japan in the next couple of years anyway. They will watch to see what loopholes Apple/Google exploit and try to deal with that in the regulations upfront.
Important context for anyone not aware is that Australia is one of the few countries that US runs a large trade surplus with.
Amazing. You can install third-party app stores on Android, just not via Google's own Play Store. Meanwhile, in iOS you can't even install third party browsers. Let alone third-party app stores. Or any apps outside Apple's App Store.
The iOS case is far more egregious. It seems the US courts are heavily biased in favor of Apple.
- DOJ antitrust case going to trial soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2024)
- 2021 Epic injunction that Apple defied followed by 2025 Epic injunction that recently forced Apple to allow links to competing payment options: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possi...
- Open Markets Act from 2020 has some new life: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/06/25/bipartisan-open-a...
- App Store Freedom Act from 2025: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3209...
- 2011 class action on excessive fees going to trial next year: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4178894/in-re-apple-iph...
- 2025 class action on excessive fees: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70356851/korean-publish...
- 2025 class action for monopolizing app distribution: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/gkvlagedmpb/...
- 2025 class action for doing a shit job of monopolizing app distribution: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70526762/shin-v-apple-i...
Nintendo's various platforms, Microsoft's XBox, and Sony's PlayStation have been perfectly legal walled gardens for decades.
However, claiming to introduce an open platform and then using anticompetitive means to retain control of that "open" platform is plainly illegal under existing law, as Google found with Android and Microsoft found with Windows.
They explicitly made the claim that Android was open on many occasions.
Remember when a major Android selling point was that Android was "open source" before they started moving all the updated versions of the developer APIs into the Play Store?
https://medium.com/@coopossum/how-open-source-is-android-8d1...
It’s objectively not despite what you claim.
Apple never promised you an alternative, you got exactly what you paid for. Google promised you an alternative and while you weren’t looking tried to strangle it in its crib.
You need to look past your fan bias.
> You need to look past your fan bias.
That's funny, considering that you are arguing that Android is worse than iOS, despite iOS being far more anti-competitive.
Then they used anticompetitive tactics against companies attempting to take advantage of that supposed openness to retain tight control.
They have been found guilty of doing this many times in many jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's XBox walled garden ecosystem remains perfectly legal.
This is because walled gardens are not illegal. Anticompetitive conduct in open markets is.
If you want walled gardens to be illegal, you have to do what the EU did and change the law.
You like Google, we get it.
Apple wasn't a monopoly because they didn't share their platform with anyone
The judge in the Google case said that Android couldn't be compared to iOS because iOS is only available to Apple products.
So while I can kind of squint and see this, the obvious signal the court is sending is
"If you don't want to be monopolistic, don't open your platform to anyone".
Which is even stranger because Samsung, by far the largest Android phone distributor, ships their phones with the galaxy app store on them.
From the point of defence of the dictionary definition, Android is huge in Australia, and outside the US generally.
Apple did malicious compliance and only technically complied with the requirements in a specifically geo-restricted area (the EU) without allowing anyone else to benefit. (Although I think it was later ruled that they didn't actually manage to comply thanks to all the malice.)
Unless customers are coerced or misled, or returns/refunds are difficult, I don't see the need for government intervention. Apple's software restrictions hurt the iPhone's market share. The same goes for charging high fees for app purchases. Customers and developers can (and often do) choose other devices for being less restrictive about what software can be run on them. If an informed adult chooses a locked down platform because they prioritize other features, why should the government stop them?
I can see an argument for requiring labeling (similar to warnings on cigarettes), but a total ban seems like overreach.
Well no, there's only two operating system with very similar policies and pricing. If there's any competition there, it's not obvious where.
The only pricing change ever made was made as a reaction of an antitrust lawsuit... Just that fact alone should be enough to raise some eyebrows.
If you're talking about policies and pricing for developers, then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo? Those are much more restrictive than anything in the smartphone world. Heck, even Steam takes a 30% cut.
Sure I'm open to the idea that there's fierce competition on the hardware, on the software though, there's absolutely zero signs of it.
> then why not apply that argument to app stores owned by Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo?
We do have signs that there's competition in the console world, if you want to make that parallel, when was the last time Google or Apple paid for an app exclusive similarly to game exclusives?
I'm unaware of a single contract where Google or Apple paid some money to a company to keep the exclusivity like what happens on console.
1. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insight/post-insight-re...
I don't agree with the outcome, but that's the twist of logic that allows the more open ecosystem to be the one being attacked as a monopoly.
Man, it just doesn’t work outside GIF form, but the point is the same. Anyone with two brain cells could understand how vertical monopolies are still monopolies, and the walled gardens created by Big Tech are just company towns customers pay into and can’t leave without enormous disruption. All of that came through rubber-stamped M&As that depleted the market of competition and, now that ZIRP is over and AI is riding high, depleted the market of well-paying jobs in the process.
Competition is efficient, in that it creates more jobs and more opportunities for money to flow between customers and businesses. When your goal is to have all the money, though, competition is bad and must be destroyed.
At least with tech we can force change through code instead of armed law enforcement like monopolies of old.
You can disagree with whether or not that statement is a "real issue", in that you can buy a completely different phone and install apps provided by other vendors, but it doesn't take away any truthiness from the initial statement.
From my perspective, though, that monopoly is a real issue. Some 55% of the adult US population own an iPhone. A monopoly in a market made up of the majority of the US populace should be thoroughly examined.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly on distributing software on Windows.
Hell, Apple itself does not have a monopoly on distributing software on MacOS.
Really, you could say the same about, AFAICT, every single major operating system that has ever existed, other than iOS.
> Microsoft does not have a monopoly on distributing software on Windows.
It's a different degree but both control who can effectively distribute software on their platforms to some extend. Google does at lot to make outside the app store a miserable experience and Microsoft has a nice protection racket where if you don't play by their rules and pay the fees your software might just get deleted from your customers systems.
The monopoly that Apple controls is not Apple's goods, it's the control of the sale of goods of other vendors to consumers who have no comparable choice but to transact via Apple. The consumers are the people who would have to spend $1,000 to switch to a different market, and then have to re-purchase every good they'd purchased from the previous market.
It's not like Walmart, where the consumer can walk across the road to Target and buy the exact same thing at a similar price. Imagine if every time you wanted to switch which big-box store you shopped at they charged you a $500 entry fee and you had to re-buy all of your household electronics.
I would also, in a general sense, suggest that in the only obvious direct competitor market, Google does not exert monopoly power, because you can install F-Droid as an alternate marketplace. They are anti-competitive in other ways, though, to your earlier point.
A comparable choice would be to use a telephone from another maker. And they come for much less than $1000.
> Imagine if every time you wanted to switch which big-box store you shopped at they charged you a $500 entry fee and you had to re-buy all of your household electronics.
I'm imagining it, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Apple or Google or their conduct. When I buy a new car, any old accessories I have purchased for the old car will obviously not fit.
> AirBnB may have four times the market cap of Vrbo, but their addressable market, both vendor and consumer, is the same set of people.
Same for Apple. Vendors are free to develop for several platforms and users are free to have cell phones of different marks.
In this particular subject of search engines, Apple and Google have acted in an anticompetitive way with the bribe payments. That doesn't have much to do with monopolies.
But I am a game developer and console app distribution requires laborious requirements to ship anything meaningful, it’s just an ordinary part of playing the game.
Ironically: all our games end up being better* optimised for all platforms because of the requirements and accessibility is not an afterthought. But hell, is it arbitrary sometimes to get a cert pass and it is definitely frustrating.
Per: https://www.comcourts.gov.au/file/Federal/P/NSD1236/2020/act...;
The full judgement with redactions could be requested under https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/services/access-to-files-and-tra... it's just not automatically and immediately created
2000 pages! I can see why the case took something like 5 years.
It sounds like a mixed ruling so Epic didn't get everything they wanted here, but if they're able to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS in Australia that's a pretty big win by itself.
Same for religious philosophies.
I'm not sure the system will ever catch up this way.
Plus, if a regular citizen without deep pockets breaks the law, somehow it never takes years and thousands of pages to convict them. I can easily believe it's not about the complexities of the case, but the depth of the pockets.
If it really was "just a complex situation", you would expect equal percentages of simple and complicated cases for regular joes and huge corporations, no?
Obviously not. Regular joes almost always have relatively simple situations relative to multinational corporations, otherwise they wouldn't be regular joes.
What makes it obvious or inherent that a corporation breaks the law at some edge case of the law that requires a lot of time and detail and multiple lawyers to figure out, and not so for a random guy? I think you are confusing money with complexity.
I don't see how a person modifying their car in their garage is a more complex way of breaking the law than WV making cars so they cheat emissions tests. This is not about the complexity of engineering, or the complexity of logistics. Those things do not matter. What matters is whether the law was broken or not, and what the just penalty is. It is not at all obvious to me the way VW did it is more complex. You just claim it without any supporting evidence or argument.
They can't just go and eliminate a giant revenue stream because it would be morally right to do so. They need a court or a law to force them to do it, otherwise the board will be removed from their position for people who will maintain that revenue stream.
The idea that public corps MUST do everything possible to make a penny is a myth perpetuated by the people who run those large corps and WANT to be evil because it's the most profitable path for them.
They don’t need to provide that service, but now it is evident that they are deliberately restricting their users choice to have that feature - and so they will need to permit a feature equivalent service from other vendors.
That is how it will play out. These walled gardens are being knocked down. They will just kick and scream as much as they can while it happens, harassing their users in the process. I just hope the fines get to their maximum as soon as possible - at least then we will be compensated for their childish behaviour.
There is absolutely no reason sufficiently large companies can't handle their own payment infrastructure. You should be able to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu or Disney+ without paying the Apple Tax.
A 30% cut is somewhat defensible for small companies that have no payments infrastructure or simply don't want to manage that. There are all sorts of compliance issues. There's something to be said for a seamless user experience.
But 30% for a large company becomes a huge incentive for large companies to attack you in the courts (as Epic did or prodding Attorneys-General to file suit) or by lobbying governments.
I've consistently said that courts and/or governments will end up dismantling the app store monopolies because of the payment monopoly and it'll be far, far better for Apple and Google in the long term if that happens on their terms, not the terms set by courts and governments.
Qualify certain providers to handle their own payments and take 0-5% to pay for things like malware scanning, distribution, etc and you've addressed the strongest monopoly argument (ie payments) and reduced the financial incentive for competitors to attack you.
Attacking you could even risk your qualified payments partner status and you could lose that privileged position. It's such an easy win.
> There is absolutely no reason sufficiently large companies can't handle their own payment infrastructure. You should be able to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu or Disney+ without paying the Apple Tax.