Hacker News Reader

Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive

That's just stupid, because being anti-competitive is an emergent outcome, rather than anything specific.

Apple is definitely anti-competitive, but they exploited such a ruling so that they can skirt it. Owning a platform that no other entrants are allowed is anti-competitive - whether you're small or large. It's only when you're large that you should become a target to purge via anti-competitive laws. This allows small players to grow, but always face the threat of purging - this makes them wary of trying to take advantage too much, which results in better consumer outcomes.

View on HN

That's like Karcher opening a megamall to sell all their offering, vacuums, pressure washers, floor washers, you name it .. and then you, Bosch, complaining you can't sell your vacuum in Karcher's megamall where all the people go.

What are you even saying?

Whereas google was letting Bosch sell vacuums in their megamall, but only if it uses Google dust filters and people buy only Google made dust filters and Bosch isn't allowed to sell their own dust filters in the megamall.

It's like a company buying all the land within a 100 mile radius and then nominally "selling" plots to people but with terms of service attached that restrict what you can do with the land you bought and that allow the company to change the terms at any time. And then, after people have moved in, most of them having not even read the terms or realized it wasn't an ordinary sale, they start enforcing the terms against competitors. Which most people don't notice because they aren't competitors, and because the terms also prohibited anyone in the city from telling people what's going on[1]. Then people eventually notice and start to ask whether terms locking out competitors like that are an antitrust violation, and someone says that they're not because the people there agreed to them.

[1] https://som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-01/DTH-Apple-n...

But how is an agreement prohibiting people from patronizing competitors not an antitrust violation? It's not a matter of who agreed to it, it's matter of what they're requiring you to agree to.

> nominally "selling" plots to people but with terms of service attached that restrict what you can do with the land you bought and that allow the company to change the terms at any time.

So, a lease.

That's, to begin with, not even how a lease generally works. A lease isn't where you pay once up front to take permanent possession of something.

Moreover, did people buying iPhones on "day 1" think they were buying them or leasing them? Did Apple call it a sale or a rental agreement?

> Karcher opening a megamall to sell all their offering

And their mall is monopolistic if it is only for Karcher products. However, because a competitor can easily open a mall next door, it means this Karcher mall is small, and so the enforcers should leave it be. Until the day Karcher buys up all the mall space, in which case, they (regulators) start purging their mall monopoly.

The threat of being purged because you've acquired a large enough monopoly should _always_ be there. It's part of doing business in a fair environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com