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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

> In a judgment that spanned 2000 pages, Australian Federal Court Justice Jonathan Beach, ruled that Apple had a substantial degree of market power. The Judge said both Apple and Google had breached Section 46 of Australia’s Competition Act. The companies had abused their market power to stifle the competition. But, it wasn't all in favor of Epic Games. Beach rejected the claim that Apple and Google had breached consumer law, he also said that the companies had not engaged in unconscionable conduct.

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.

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While courts take years and write multiple volumes to justify any kind of measure at all, the corporations move fast and keep changing the way they extract value from society.

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?

> 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.

Can you explain the obviousness? Other than a lot of money being involved, what makes it "obvious" that the way corporations break the rules is more complex than the way natural persons break the rules?

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.

The more irrational the law, the more words must be said about it.

Same for religious philosophies.

Not really? The court likes having as much salient evidence as it can get.

If length of ones writing is a measure of irrationality, everyone who's ever written a thesis must be absolutely unhinged.

They might be the first to agree with you.

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