> How can the app store promote competition when it is a monopoly on iOS?
The court did not decide that the relevant market was iOS only, as Epic wanted.
> A threshold issue in any antitrust case is defining the “relevant market.” Here, Epic argued that the relevant market is Apple’s iOS system. Apple argued that the relevant market is the market for all digital video games, where it is one of many players. The court disagreed with both sides, and it instead defined the relevant market as “digital mobile gaming transactions.” Under this formulation, the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market. But this was not enough for the court to conclude Apple has monopoly power.
And this should be the first question almost anyone asks themselves in a discussion about an anti-trust/monopoly case - defining "the market" is the lynchpin upon which much of antitrust law works both in Europe and the United States.
Also be wary of comments in this thread that don't weigh this most important element of the entire process well.
All too often these discussions on anti-trust issues become meaningless on this site because everyone involved is using a personal definition for "the marketplace".
Step one of any attempt to claim Apple holds a monopoly will require you to define exactly what the market is, in quite specific terms, and have the court agree. That didn't happen for Epic here.
If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android, since they have a large library of apps on iOS and significant other platform lock-in (messages, photos, subscriptions etc). So according to this test, the relevant product market would be "providing apps for iOS devices", which apple clearly has a monopoly on at the moment. I wonder if this argument came up.
Epic did raise this argument during the original trial however since they failed to establish a single-brand aftermarket they never got to the point where the SSNIP analysis would have been performed.
> If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android
It's actually not that clear and would need to be backed by actual evidence in court.
It's not clear that the SSNIP test would actually meaningfully show any significant distinction between the possible market definitions in this case. It seems likely that none of them would pass this test.
Thank you for your helpful response selectodude! In that case perhaps I should apply there, can I list you as my reference?
That answers my question, thanks for supplying the case reference.
EDIT: Actually I don't understand how this case applies... The key passage seems to be:
"We conclude that cellophane's interchangeability with the other materials mentioned suffices to make it a part of this flexible packaging material market."
My point is that there is no interchangeability between ios apps and android apps. Customers tend to have either ios or android and aren't able to freely choose between the two. What am I missing?
>If apple raised their prices for apps by 5%, clearly most users would not jump ship to android, since they have a large library of apps on iOS and significant other platform lock-in
It's not just that; most Apple users actively dislike Android, or think that only Apple makes smartphones (really, I've met people who said this).
Apple could easily raise their prices for apps by 100% and not have a significant number of users jump to Android. Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.
Or maybe we just like the OS, build quality, or available iOS only applications? Maybe we like the battery life or the quality or the apple ecosystem. Maybe we like prompt, regular, and long term supported security updates.
No *durable* (i.e. doesn't expire in a week and need to be refreshed) sideloading is the no.2 thing keeping me off iOS. The no.1 thing is that I find the entire user experience frustrating, inflexible, and frankly condescending. 3 would be that I can get 2-3 decent Android devices for the cost of an iPhone, so my phone-having-time per € works out about same-- plus I still get to upgrade every couple of years.
I get that people like their iPhones. My wife is one of them. I'm not. People are different. Choice is good. Some folks choose to cede control in favor of simplicity. Go off.
Yeah righty, that’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hands. You know that 99.999% of users will have several applications or gadgets forcing them — and eventually you, if you want to remain socially functional — to install an unrestricted alt-store.
Eg: anecdote: mother-on-law was gifted a cheap smartwatch (Samsung I think). Installing its companion software required downloading and registering to a whole new store on her Android smartphone. Weirdly enough I think it was also a Samsung, already had 2 stores (the Samsung and Play ones), yet she (we) had to dump yet another one on that sorry mess.
Problem here is: you can get astonishingly good phones today at the 300$ range or below that are comparable to premium phones (including the iPhone) from just few years ago.
I am a long time multi OS users, and I just don't find Apple phones priced in any way to merit that plus in price.
E.g. The cheaper Google Pixel 6a offers more or less what the iPhone 12 Pro or 13 base offers in terms of battery life, performance, screen, camera, so it all comes down to what? OS?
Why would I spend such crazy $ for a brand new iPhone 14, even the base one, when I can get a comparatively as good phone for less than half the price and change it again next year or two when I will get at similar prices a phone much better than the iPhone (not that it matters, I honestly believe all this tech and GHz on phones have no use in most people's lives and how I see them using their devices).
May I just say that despite the Apple hype it's an ecosystem full of problems and cons as well, especially for more tech-inclined people?
It certainly doesn't offer the performance, and Android phones never have. If I look at the 6a, it offers marginally better performance than the iPhone X, and that came out in 2018.
> I am a long time multi OS users, and I just don't find Apple phones priced in any way to merit that plus in price. E.g. The cheaper Google Pixel 6a offers more or less what the iPhone 12 Pro or 13 base offers in terms of battery life, performance, screen, camera, so it all comes down to what? OS?
Depends on what you care about. For instance, I am paying the premium simply to make sure Google didn't have its fat fingers inside my phone.
Simple, really. Google is an ad company, while Apple isn't. I have no idea how Google analyses behavioural patterns etc, but it pleases me to think that perhaps I somewhat reduce the number of times I become a data point for them (same reason why I don't use their search).
c) Why don't you de-google an Android phone, plenty of OSs to choose from?
My bank app and national e-id won't work, or so I heard. Plus, I do enough tinkering with my xmonad config, emacs init file, and all that. Simply no energy or interest left to spend on mobile, which to me is relatively unimportant.
> Why would I spend such crazy $ for a brand new iPhone
Some people care about getting software support after the sale.
The $399 OG iPhone SE from back in 2016 just got another security update a few weeks ago. The OG Google Pixel was also released in 2016 and has been completely abandoned for several years now.
I don't think that ordinary non-programmer people care about OS or even understand what it is. And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
> build quality
I don't understand what this means. It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
> over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
Developers can side load apps on IOS that are under development work have a limited distribution.
Also, most developers don’t like or use Linux as their desktop OS.
> It is not like Android smartphones are breaking apart immediately after purchase.
Some of them are that bad, yes.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices.
Back with the incredibly condescending view that Apple users clearly don’t know what they’re doing. In spite of so many comments explaining the reasons: hardware and software design, hardware build quality, accessibility features, handoff features, multi-device ecosystem integration, privacy and security, there is a long list of rational reasons.
> I don't think that ordinary non-programmer people care about OS or even understand what it is.
They might not now what an OS is, but they surely do care about the UI, speed and general handling.
> And programmers probably would prefer Linux over some proprietary OS where you cannot even sideload apps.
Yet most do not. I say this as an mostly exclusive Linux user.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices. And maybe because of a good camera.
Yet this is true. Apple has a very good build quality and, for the most part, great support. It's true that high-quality Android phones do match that, but they are not priced that differently compared to modern iPhones.
Of course there's also some marketing involved, as well as Apple being a status symbol, but it's not like Apple is producing inferior products.
> I think the real reason why people buy Apple is due to belief (artificially created by marketing, not based on real studies) that Apple makes expensive, but high quality devices.
I've always seen the same thing:
user buys some low-mid end Android phone once or twice since the 2010s.
Phones are okay, not exceptional. Build and overall quality, speed, performance, camera, battery on such low-mid end phones 10 years ago was years away the best phones.
Then they see their friends/family iPhone, and they are like "wow, this is so much better" and they instantly see that striking distance.
This won people's minds at the core of the smartphone revolution which Apple vastly led as well and it's here to stick.
It never mattered to anyone when someone produced Android phones better on most aspects that costed 25% less, sales have always been much higher for Apple.
But now? Now in all honesty we can easily compare 300 or even sub 300$ phones to just the previous year's iPhone. The cheaper Pixel 6a is absolutely comparable to the iPhone 13, let alone with the 12 from 2021.
Also, I see more people leaving the Apple ecosystem right now for the inverse reason. Their aging and highly expensive iPhones 8/9/10s they are just so behind even the today's midrange that they are "why would I spend so much again for an iPhone"?
I think the best selling point of modern Apple it's is top of the notch integration between multiple devices. You get one, you kind of snowball in benefits in getting more and staying in the ecosystem.
The previous main daily driver Android I owned was a Nexus 5 which lost OS updates in less than 3 years after purchasing it new. That’s one important aspect of quality Android is seriously missing on and where iPhones are exceptional compared to the competition.
EDIT: Actually it lost OS updates in three years after being introduced as a flagship product, so I guess I bought it and it stopped receiving updates after a year or so, worse than I remembered. Stuff like that ruins the brand reputation, quality-wise.
Yes, this is normal for iPhones. But Apple users either deny it or excuse it. An older iPhone isn't really useful for anything besides very basic functions because of this.
The build quality of Apple software is horrible. Really terrible. That's why I avoid their phones.
Their laptops on the the other hand have a sleep state that works and the battery lasts >8 hrs even when heavily used. Mine is giving the service warning but still lasts longer than any Windows or Linux machine I've ever used (and it doesn't empty itself when the shell is closed).
> Their laptops on the the other hand have a sleep state that works
Mostly & sometimes. I'm unable wake up M1 MBP when docked in clamshell mode to a TB dock, once it blanked the screen, but didn't go to full sleep yet. Either put it into full sleep (=> turn off the monitor, it will notice and go to sleep) and then wake it up, or undock it and wake it up undocked. In both cases, it will lose all peripherals attached to dock (like ethernet) while doing the exercise. Pretty annoying actually, and it didn't happen with Intel Macs.
I've had two Macbooks (2012 MBP, M1 Air) with no issues. I've had Lenovo laptops going back to 2005 with most of those machines running great --almost as great as the Apple machines do.
Got a coffee spill on my 2012 MBP and Apple didn't really want to fix it. I was quoted nearly a new machine. I bought parts myself, fixed it for $150 and some (intense) labor. Apple really doesn't want me doing that. Had it happen again a few years later. Parts were HARD to get, and so... yeah, that one is in a box now.
Lenovo doesn't seem to care. Parts are inexpensive, I've had to do a few more repairs, but they were not hard. I can still get parts for my Lenovo machines.
For a lot of reasons my daily driver remains Lenovo. I do use my Apple a lot more than I used to now however...
Homd[k
Lenovo takes a beating better than Apple does. Apple is very petty
Which Lenovo models / lines? I'd very much like to move away from Apple for my make work horse, I've been waiting for Framework to provide a good AMD option and fix the sleep (so I can close the kid on Friday and continue on Monday with little battery loss).
I've also repaired my MBA - it's an Apple so obviously something is designed to break after 18 months. In this case it's the USB-C adapter. Thankfully they're cheap and easy to replace. The experience is shocking though.
Similar, my MBP 14 takes a long time to wake up when connected to a studio display and I need it to wake up quickly, then wakes up every time I just walk past the desk when I want it to stay off.
My work HP Chromebook also takes a long time to wake up in the morning, so they all feel very familiar to me, I'm no different.
I am blind. I use Apple. Because Google slacks off with Android accessibility since they decided to play copy-cat with what Apple did. Even after 15 years of trying to catch up, the Android accessibility is still subpar compared to what iOS does.
You can argue that Apple users are just Apple users because of the logo and the coolness and the hype and whatever, but I can tell you that users like me have a real reason for staying with Apple: quality!
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see.
Or maybe they just don’t like paying for an Android device that actively spies on literally every moment of their life so other companies can buy the marketing data.
I think people actually value some of the side effects of privacy on iOS though… one of them is that app developers just can’t be quite as appalling in their abuse of users.
Why does anyone think that apple is not spying on its users? They have a massively growing advertising business, that should tell you everything already. The only difference is that they don't want anyone else spying on their users, but that's simply to protect their business, not for the privacy of customers.
> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see.
One thing Apple has done masterfully is exploiting the status circuit in the human brain. Apple users often claim they pay more because the product is superior in some or many ways, or even argue that it is, in fact, cheaper when considering everything. However, in reality, they pay more because they can. They want to display their Apple products and they want others to see them.
> Apple could easily raise their prices for apps by 100% and not have a significant number of users jump to Android.
Apple doesn't charge for most of its apps. How would this work?
Are you arguing that Apple could raise the prices of apps sold through their App Store? Isn't that the developers' choice? To me, that doesn't seem to change the market argument (IANAL, obviously).
(I know Apple provides banding and international support so perhaps you're suggesting Apple might shift the bands?)
I used to spend money on apps, back when it was possible to buy them. Unfortunately, that's very rare these days.
I'm not paying exorbitant subscription fees for relatively trivial apps, let alone falling for the manipulative and often-basically-gambling nonsense of F2P games.
Apple are somewhat to blame for these trends though. Unlike 'real software for a real OS', mobile apps tend to need constant ongoing maintenance just to keep them working with OS updates and new devices. You can't just release a finished game/app and expect it to continue to be usable for decades, like the over-20-years-old Paint Shop Pro 7 that I still use almost daily on Windows.
Define the market as mobile OS and it would be pretty hard to argue that Google and Apple aren't a duopoly. And they both are definitely abusing that market power, often in very similar ways, including using that duopoly to favor their app store products, which includes a large commission for them.
The argument there for Apple is whether the App Store is a product, or a feature of their product. In Google's case they have chosen to offer their store un-bundled from the base OS. Apple does not, for them it's just a feature of their phone in the same way that the stores on games consoles are features.
Yep. It really feels like a bunch of kids read up on ‘90s Microsoft, internalised a third-hand wildly simplified definition of ‘antitrust’, and used it to add a moral high-ground angle to what is essentially an iOS power user feature request.
It’s often the first step in a whole lot of doublespeak. “This will set everybody free”, but at the same time, “this doesn’t present a security issue because nobody will use it”.
To be clear, I think that the government should storm Apple Park with buns glazing and force them to do a more reasonable degree of rent-seeking. I’m not going to pretend that this is for any reason other than “I think that 30% is a dick move”.
You don’t just get to pretend that Android doesn’t exist, or that the vast majority of ways that people communicate aren’t cross-platform, or that IOS has any material network effect whatsoever.
So you really end up with two camps, one camp who always stop short of saying “iOS is just better in my eyes, and I want to be able to do more with my phone.” And the other camp is…let’s be honest…Android users. And the mere fact that there’s so many people in this camp I think directly contradicts any assertion that there’s a monopoly in the first place.
you're not exactly agreeing with GP, you are going overboard, the court said these types of cases are covered by antitrust, but that Epic had failed to make its case. (like, murder is still illegal even if a particular case is not made)
But it said ... that Epic, regardless, had “failed to establish, as a factual matter, its proposed market definition and the existence of any substantially less restrictive alternative means for Apple to accomplish the procompetitive justifications supporting iOS’s walled-garden ecosystem.”
In other words, while these types of contracts can be within the scope of a Sherman Act claim, that wasn’t relevant to the court’s decision in this case.
I love how autocorrect mistakes sometimes just come out sounding like rhyming slang… a less obtuse version than most real dialects of rhyming slang, more understandable by most people.
There was an AI thread a few days ago about how Open AI could not come up with a catchy slogan for selling hot cross buns in the UK. Could be a reference to the thread, or the actual slogan used in the UK.
It’s an interesting shortcoming of the large language models that they struggle to “play” with the rules of the language very much. I’ve tried to get GPT 3, 3.5, and 4 to generate business names and other names for things and it’s not particularly good at it. It frequently “runs out of creativity, and starts to repeat the same combination of basing building blocks. The worst example I came up with had moderately specific business names with a particular theme like an “1890s” or “1970s” or “late 1990s computer startup” style of name.. it would frequently run out and start repeating the same building blocks in under 50 examples, the absolute worst started repeating itself at about item 20 and the list gets increasingly repetitive from that point.
I built a modified name generator based on some existing open source code that’s been around for several years now based on GPT2 and sure I couldn’t ask to go give me something with a specific theme… but damn it was way more creative at generating new words that could be names and it was t hard to filter the output to be useful since I could get it locally in batches of thousands overnight.
You’ve been much more proscriptive, and given it a larger task than I was trying to highlight, and I can see GPT4 doing well at the kind of task I’ve personally experienced it doing well at.
What I was trying to highlight is the sort of “small task” not, very short essay and feel free to make up specific words using specific linguistics as some guidance.
I’ve seen it make up words in this way too, even without prompting it to allow it to make up a word. I was more trying to highlight that its not particularly good at prompts like “please give me a list of 50 names for a hypersonic aircraft company for my science fiction novel”, counterintuitively it requires significant additional prompt text to expand its creativity in response to prompts like this, and not repeat itself if you ask it for a list of another 50 names.
I agree with you in that there is no Apple monopoly. What people are seeing may be something monopoly like because Apple is able to attract an affluent user base and then keep most of it over very long periods of time.
In some ways, from Apple's point of view, Android does not exist! Android is not the same thing Apple is, and most computer manufacturers are not doing what Apple is doing with the Mac either. Sure, a computer is a computer and a phone is a phone, but Apple has a far greater control over it's product than it's competition does, except perhaps Google.
Apple likes to sell products to people who will value them in the same way Apple does. A big part of that is Apple makes awful nice stuff! And unlike many other manufacturers, Apple asks for some money on every last bit of that value and Apple gets that money because it is all real value.
I'm typing this on an M1 Air that I got for a song. It's a sweet machine! I said the same thing about the last Mac I owned and used regularly too. Got that one for a song as well. From Apple's point of view, I might as well not exist!
I only value some of the things Apple does and that means I'm unwilling to pay what Apple asks for it's products, despite being a fan of said products.
We get along just fine too. I'm not paying what Apple wants and I almost never use the app store either. I have the software running on the machine that I want to run, and I can write the programs I want to write, use the peripherals I want to use enjoy media I want to enjoy, on the machine I want to enjoy them on. No worries.
Unlike many who disagree with Apple on value, I strongly support what Apple does and how they do it. It doesn't impact me one bit, or if it does and let's be real --it probably does, then I don't really notice. From there, it's a hop and a skip to who cares? I sure don't.
Most of the time when I see someone saying Apple is a problem, it boils down to a few great features, or how sexy the hardware is, or some other similar thing, and how that thing just should not cost as much as Apple wants to charge for it. Or I see someone point out how the BOM doesn't seem to add up in their view, and how that means over the top margins that "the market" does not support meaning something has got to be wrong, rent seeking, monopoly, SOMETHING!!!
The truth is so much more simple and I've already said it:
Apple puts value into it's products as fully as they can and Apple charges for all of that value and the fact is there are plenty of people out there who see that value and pay up.
They didn't get ripped off.
They didn't get abused.
They are not the victim in any way really.
Apple made a nice, high value product and people saw that value and paid Apple for that value.
Personally, I see it all break down this way when we look at prospective users and value:
The top isn't worried about money and they like nice stuff which makes an easy, high profit sale for Apple. Many of these people will buy all Apple.
Upper percentiles are also not worried about money, but are more practical. "nice stuff" isn't an easy sale to them. These people may buy all Apple, but are also pickers and choosers, maybe skipping Mac computers and buying iPhones. These are the most vocal complainers.
Middle of the road prospects can be worried about money, with more worried now than we may have seen in a long time. They generally do not buy products because they are nice, though attractive to them. They do buy products because they find them useful and are always looking for deals.
Lower percentiles will not typically buy Apple products new and do worry about money.
While it's more complex than that, I find the rough brackets of people useful.
Notice one last observation made possible by looking at this through the simple lens I just made:
Apple sells most of it's products to the body of people who are willing and able to pay the most, no worries! These are the most profitable customers. Others may do twice the work Apple does to put a similar amount of money in the bank!
This can look like some sort of monopoly or aberration in the market.
I'm not passing judgement on this case and this comment has no relation to its facts, but generally speaking a single company controlling ~51 percent of the market is not the definition of a monopoly, at least not for anti-trust purposes. Indeed a company can have market share well beyond this and not fall foul of anti-trust law, depending on facts of the case.
It's much harder to unfairly distort an open marketplace with 51% share than say 90%, most of the time. Again, this is why the marketplace definition step of this process matters so much!
I'd hardly call it open. Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
Moreover, Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.) And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring.
> Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
What do you suggest we do over this ? Forbid some people to search on Google ? Or give each user X queries / day then say "please use another search engine; here are some alternatives ...".
The laws are against monopolies abusing their power. As long as it's trivial to change provider we are in the clear; but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage. For example if Google says "You have to un-index you site from bing otherwise we will apply a ranking penalty on your search results".
But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
Break it up! That's what you do with monopolies. That's what they did with Standard Oil. That's what they did with AT&T. That's what they talked about doing and should have done with Microsoft.
> but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage
Google has leveraged its search dominance to gain dominance in a number of other areas too. For example, whenever I do a Google Search in Safari (without my content blocking extensions running), I see a big popup that says "Google recommends using Chrome". That's an abuse of power. (And naturally, Google is the default search engine of Google Chrome).
Google AMP is an abuse of power, forcing websites to redesign themselves specifically for Google, on penalty of lower search ranking.
I've already mentioned how the two duopolists colluding is an abuse of power.
Google has been accused by Mozilla of systematically sabotaging Firefox in various ways, for example on YouTube.
MS is still "the best" in this case. Searching for Firefox on a fresh Windows install (with Edge) will show Chrome and Opera as first two options (keyword ads), then Firefox. And then, when you download the Firefox installer, you are announced that it could harm your device.
Defaults matter. Making Google the default everywhere will cause people to stick with Google, for the most part.
Why is it legal for the monopolist to pay other companies to help it keep its monopoly? If Google couldn't pay Apple or Mozilla to make Google Search the default on their respective browsers, perhaps we'd see other, better defaults, and maybe people would continue using those defaults, eroding Google's market dominance.
> But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.
The ease of switching isn't all that matters. I suspect if you polled a representative sample of people, they would tell you they believed that Google is the only option for web search. At best, some might admit they've heard of Bing, and then only because it's been the default for IE/Edge for years.
It's not "web search", it's 'web search ADVERTISING'. There's definitely NOT a trivial way to switch to another provider, there isn't one (of equivalent scale, of course.)
I'm immediately reminded of how Google refused to port their YouTube app to Windows Phone back in the day, and when Microsoft cobbled one together itself, Google claimed that doing so violated its ToS.
A duopoly isn't a monopoly. Uber and Lyft coexisting is extremely different than just Uber existing, for example. Luckily, it's not even a duopoly since there are other mobile gaming options like the extremely popular Nintendo Switch.
>(I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
Because using an alternative, of which there are many, is as easy as typing in a different URL. They're all just inferior products and the market knows it.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Making a deal is not a conspiracy. It would be of concern if part of the deal was prohibiting switching to other search engines but nothing is stopping you from switching to Bing and having Google waste a few dollars of that deal.
Between Uber and Lyft you can make your choice every day. And at least here in this country taxis are still a realistic choice, not sure whether that applies to the US.
Between Apple and Android you have the choice only every couple of years. The rest of the time there is zero competition.
It maybe that the antitrust law is not well-written for this case. But nobody can claim their is a functional app market at the moment. Market meaning choice for the customer where to buy.
The issue is the definition of that market is fictional, and the nuances are in people’s heads. As soon as you write it down in legal terms, it becomes clear that it’s a very difficult thing to circumscribe without enormous government mandated regulations.
Like to me, the market IS functional - people can choose their mobile platform and get the apps available for that platform. More than that and we are legislating software distribution as a publicly regulated utility. Which to me is an overreaction to current market dynamics. Like we’ve not even had 20 years of smartphones and app stores out there and people act as if they’ve been around for a century.
> Between Apple and Android you have the choice only every couple of years. The rest of the time there is zero competition.
This is incorrect in two ways:
a) any particular individual (e.g. you) can switch between alternatives at any time. Nothing forces you to wait years…
b) there are new first time mobile users all the time and they can choose between these two alternatives (or smaller, much less successful platforms), and in the case of Android, between different device manufacturers
Seems like lots of freedom to me. If you’re thinking is that even given that there are only two reasonable options to choose from from a software point of view (Android and iOS), I’d be curious to know your solution. Is it to force some company to create a third alternative? Is it for the government to subsidize Microsoft to make Windows phones?
The Switch is not a substitute for an iPhone or Android phone, and I think this perhaps illustrates a problem with how we think about this issue.
Sure, if I have an iPhone or an Android phone, and I don't like the gaming landscape on either of those, I can get a Switch. But the Switch doesn't replace my phone. I can't toss the phone and now carry a Switch with me everywhere. (I also wouldn't want to carry a Switch everywhere; it's nowhere near as portable and doesn't fit in a pocket.)
So is it ok for a company to abuse their market position, if a consumer has the option to buy an additional device made by a competitor, and then have to lug around two devices, since the other device doesn't actually replace all the functionality of the original one? I would say no, it's not ok.
There was multilingual topic talking about some research not showing advantages. One advantage is that one has to learn how to describe something when you cant think of the word for it.
Fitting the definition of a monopoly is probably a lot harder than to ask what is undesirable about monopolies. If google or apple hold a monopoly isn't very interesting. We can easily agree that the motivation to innovate is not there if there is no real competitor. We are kinda blessed by there being 2 platforms but that they are like prisons for developers is not beneficial.
We are also blessed with the www in how incredibly open it is. With the phones we got entities that dictates the rules of the game. In stead of domain names the www could have been what these mobile application stores are: a web directory with enormous fees.
Before the www I tried to create a teletext page. We had countless TV channels each with their own text pages. Even the smallest TV stations wanted me to pay for hardware and charge an enormous monthly fee. They made it into a completely useless offer. It didn't have to be a monopoly to get there.
In the US rent-seeking percentage fees on transactions are quite normal, in the EU many just pay for the transaction. How large it is is quite irrelevant?
We are also blessed with a relatively open Android OS. For a new OS it is hard to get any of the other popular prison builders onthere.
Government should regulate where companies try to own and control things that are non of their business or clearly not theirs to own.
For example chat history or email is important for the legal process. People need to prove conversations happened. I just send a whatsapp screenshot to my boss where my previous manager approved my day off. I could easily doctor such an image. We have the technology to grant someone access to part of a conversation in a legally binding way, technology just didn't mature enough, its to childish to do those things.
To have corporate platform owners decide which company lives or dies is simply undesirable. They [may] do it without dialog and without explanation. A company should not be forced to put it self in that position.
People purchase mobile computer. Companies desire to offer software for their mobile computer. The manufacturer then gets to decide if they approve?
I buy a toaster, you make bread, the manufacturer disapproves of the bread? Or they desire 30% of the money?
Manufacturers can't stipulate which cartridges you have to use in your printer. They may have a preference (using their own brand) but they can't force you to. Car makers can't make you use a certain brand of fuel. Dishwasher manufacturer may not force you to use a specific brand of tablet. Coffee machines may not lock you into their preferred brand of coffee.
It's not a position that arises from logic, it is just that making the hardware created the possibility. It is quite unusual to force customers to not just buy specific coffee but also buy it from a specific store.
If we are going to allow that other manufacturers should be allowed to do the same. We should allow MS to force users to use Edge for everything. If you want to use libreoffice you can install a linux?
> For example chat history or email is important for the legal process. People need to prove conversations happened. I just send a whatsapp screenshot to my boss where my previous manager approved my day off. I could easily doctor such an image. We have the technology to grant someone access to part of a conversation in a legally binding way, technology just didn't mature enough, its to childish to do those things.
For whatsapp, they actually use the Signal protocol for messaging, which has built in deniability, so you can't use the cryptography it uses to prove a conversation happened, since any participant is able to falsify messages after the fact.
Messages should be the property of the sender and recipient. When we want or need it they should be on the record. The technology is almost 500 years old.
> Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
You seem to be under the misconception that it is illegal for Google to possess a monopoly over web search. This is not the case. It is only illegal if such a monopoly was obtained or maintained via anticompetitive means. If the monopoly was obtained via "growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident", then it is entirely legal.
Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
> You seem to be under the misconception that it is illegal for Google to possess a monopoly over web search. This is not the case. It is only illegal if such a monopoly was obtained or maintained via anticompetitive means.
I said, "And the craziest part is, our so-called antitrust laws allow Google to pay Apple $billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. The duopolists openly conspiring." But you chose to completely ignore that and accuse me of misconception.
> Moreover, the government has done something about it when Google tried to use their monopoly over web search to obtain a monopoly in other markets via anticompetitive means.
You said: "I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this."
But nothing you've described is necessarily illegal so I think my point about your misconception stands. It might be anticompetitive (in your opinion) but that does not mean it is actually a violation of the law.
> "necessarily illegal"? So... it might be illegal?
That will depend on the outcome of the several current ongoing lawsuits and has not been established at this stage. I mean, just look at this case. A lot of people decided what Apple was doing was illegal after Epic filed suit and it turned out they were wrong.
> You didn't answer my question: "What have they done?"
I don't think there's much "right and wrong" in the court system. There's so much arbitrariness and even politicalization among judges. Just look at the Supreme Court.
The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.
One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I also thought, to be honest, that Epic's lawyers in the case were not great and seemed not fully prepared or technically knowledgeable. And some of the toughest questions for Apple were asked by YGR rather than by Epic.
"Entering into long-term agreements with Apple that require Google to be the default – and de facto exclusive – general search engine on Apple’s popular Safari browser and other Apple search tools."
That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
> The judge in the Epic trial, YGR, invented a whole new market concept out of thin air, "digital mobile gaming transactions", a market that neither side in the case argued for. I thought that was complete crap and a bad decision. What's the legal basis for a judge inventing a market? This seems like a classic case of judicial overreach.
This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.
> One of the weirdest things about that market definition is that the App Store is not a game store. Of course there are a lot of games that make a lot of money in the App Store, but there are a ton of non-games in there too. (Also, WTF is "digital" supposed to mean? Are there analog mobile gaming transactions?)
I agree that the relevant market probably should have included all app transactions and not just gaming transactions but frankly it would not have changed the outcome of the case.
> That was precisely my complaint! So if I have a misconception, then apparently the Department of Justice also has the same misconception.
The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means. It remains to be seen whether such browser payments will be considered anticompetitive in the eyes of the courts.
> This actually happens all the times in antitrust cases. Almost always the plaintiff argues for a very narrow market and the defendant argues for a very wide market. Then the judge has to come in and look at actual consumer behavior to decide what the relevant market actually is.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the judge invented a market that nobody considered to be a market before the trial. The judge didn't refer to any other market analysis or economic literature but simply pulled "digital mobile gaming transactions" out of her ass.
> The way your original comment was phrased implied the problem was with having 93% market share in the first place. I was simply pointing out that's not illegal unless it was obtained or maintained through anticompetitive means.
> The issue is that the judge invented a market that nobody considered to be a market before the trial.
Not true. I'll just quote from the ruling:
"Epic proposed two single-brand markets: the aftermarkets for iOS app distribution and iOS in-app payment solutions, derived from a foremarket for smartphone operating systems. Apple, by contrast, proposed the market for all video game transactions, whether those transactions occur on a smartphone, a gaming console, or elsewhere. The district court ultimately found a market between those the parties proposed: mobile-game transactions—i.e., game transactions on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets."
I mean you said the judge made up a market out of thin air but what actually happened was she agreed with Apple's market definition minus gaming consoles.
>I'd hardly call it open. Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
Why is that relevant? That was not the question before the court. However, to prove an illegal duopoly you have to show collusion. IANAL, but I think it is unlikely anyone could show enough collusion between Apple and Google to reach the threshold of an illegal duopoly.
With a duopoly you don't need direct collusion, you can exercise monopoly power just by watching what your "competitor" is doing. You don't have to meet behind closed doors to fix prices, you just set your prices to be exactly equal to your competitor. Or if the market is segmented in some way, and one competitor enters a specific segment, the other one can focus on other segments. Like say Lyft focusing on cities that don't already have Uber, and vice versa, to reference another comment.
> you can exercise monopoly power just by watching what your "competitor" is doing
That is not a monopoly, which implies that the market is controlled by only one company. Not two. “Monopoly” is not just something you say when you don’t like a company. Also, a monopoly in itself is not necessarily illegal or problematic. The real issue is a company abusing its market power, which does not require anything like a monopoly.
> You don't have to meet behind closed doors to fix prices, you just set your prices to be exactly equal to your competitor.
Then it is not collusion. It’s just a poorly functioning market, or something that cannot work as a free market (some natural monopolies are like that).
> Whether or not you call Apple a monopoly, Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
In mobile gaming, Apple and Google are the largest participants, but not the only participants. We have the Switch, the Steam Deck, and other smaller companies as well.
Neither my switch nor my steam deck fits inside of my pants pocket. They are also not the device that dominates almost every human beings life. Cellphones and their evolution of smartphones is probably the single biggest technology revolution we had in a very long time. It's bigger than the invention of computers and the PC. While PCs changed work life for a huge population, smartphones are owned by 86% of humans.
Having a huge market share by itself is not a problem. If you just make a hugely popular product that more people buy without coercion or exploitation, that's fine. It's just people making that choice, and they are free to do so.
What that does do is create an increased onus on the company holding that position not to abuse it. So that kicks the can down the road to disagreements about what constitutes abuse, but just being popular isn't a crime. You'd need to demonstrate actual harm to consumers.
In the case of search, the web search market and the mobile phone market are two different markets. You can't constrain Google from doing commercial deals with other companies in different markets, just because it's search product is hugely popular. Again you'd have to demonstrate harm to consumers.
I'm not saying there isn't any harm, just this is the situation. Only once we have the issue properly framed can we discuss whether there's harm.
>Apple and Google indisputably have a duopoly over mobile OS.
A duopoly is not a monopoly. Unfortunately, anti-trust law seems to only be concerned with monopolies, and totally ignores duopolies and oligopolies.
>The duopolists openly conspiring.
Exactly.
>Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
This isn't quite a monopoly (Bing does exist, you know), plus it's free (or "free").
It doesn't help when the competition is so awful, though. See yesterday's article and discussion about DDG. Many times, monopolies (or near-monopolies, or duopolies) arise because the competition is so inept and incompetent.
A monopoly is where there is a single player that has enough power to manipulate the market. Despite Bing existing, Google can manipulate traffic by altering its search results and due to it having 93% of the search share, it can manipulate it's position to direct people to one site over another or kill a site by no longer including it in results.
That would be Googles solution so that it could show meaningful competition and Bing would be a credible alternative.
My solution would be to fine them 25% of their total revenue every time we see market manipulation due to Google altering search results.
If we have no evidence of that, then I don't see a problem with the current situation.
As for Epic, they have plenty of alternative platforms to use. The fact that they don't target the Steam Deck because Tim Sweeney is petty makes me have very little sympathy for their argument.
It genuinely sounds like you are generally not aware of the common definitions of the words you’re using. You seem to just be…intuiting them, and using that as the basis for some sort of legal argument.
> Moreover, Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)
There are other free search engines. Also Google makes money as an advertiser, not as a search service. Search itself has always been free, even before Google existed.
I can’t tell if you are trolling or not. Both of those are alive and well. Since at least the early 1990s, there have been free search engines. eg: Archie, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, etc…
If your social game is not on iOS you won't lose out on that 50% of the market, you lose period. Even single player apps that need to go viral must be on iOS, because network effects are intrinsically social.
It doesn't matter whether your product is Facebook, Whatsapp, Trello, Angry Birds, or Uber. If you're not on iOS you're done. Game over.
If that isn't monopoly power, I don't know what is.
The same can be said for Android (given that that’s the other 50%), no? Would you then say that both Apple and Google are monopolists of the same market?
I don't believe this. There are plenty of huge apps that are only on one platform or another. As an example third party Reddit apps largely are single platform.
» As an example third party Reddit apps largely are single platform.
I don't have skin in this conversation
but I just want to call out your fallacy here.
It is kind of cheating a little to give reddit apps as an example here because as long as you can get on reddit somehow, you are a part of the network. You don't have to use the same app as the other guy...
If I recall correctly, needing to have a majority market share is not even srictly a requirement to have monopoly power. I have looked up the actual law before, and it's just that majority market share is the more common way to obtain monopoly power but not the only way. If I understood what I read correctly.
You don’t recall correctly. There is no such a thing as “monopoly power”. A monopoly is a situation in which a market is controlled by a single company. It is a purely descriptive term, unrelated to whether that companies abuses that situation or not.
What you are saying seems closer to “abuse of dominant position”, which is the cornerstone in EU antitrust law, but not so clear in US law where the bar to prove abuse is higher. This does not require a monopoly, just a market share large enough to steer the market. It’s hard to allege this when a company has a minority market share, though.
Where I was off a little was in mixing market power and monopoly power. As the article explains and corrects my statement to a degree, courts have found it difficult to assign monopoly power when market share is below 50%. However, it does seem possible that a monopoly power can still exist without historical levels of market share. I believe the historical cases do not necessarily apply to technology companies, because these companies throw their power around and enforce it via software and not materialized objects like railroads or commodities. I think being overly preferential to market share is a mistake, particularly for global companies where the market share will vary drastically. In addition, these technology markets are massive. Abuses and competition stiflingly can be very disruptive. They are also very easy to hide behind the complexities of software.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
A literal monopoly is 100% market share. So all this quote is saying is that 100% market share is not required before antitrust law applies, which doesn't really tell us anything meaningful.
They don't control more than half of the entire market. Come on, you know that. It's trivially easy to show that Android has greater "market share" than iOS.
Now... do buyers of third-world shitphones buy a bunch of expensive (or any) applications? Hell no. But they still count as Android "market share."
> How is a single company controlling more than half of the entire market not monopoly power?
AppStore is merely a package manager for iDevices. It is not it's own market any more than YUM is for RHEL or FreeBSD Ports is for FreeBSD. The market is software. Apple does not control half the entire software market.
The difference is: on both all Linux distros I know and from as far as I know all BSD derivitives (except PS' BSD) you can compile and use software that doesn't need to blessed by Tim Apple, be it either through the AppStore or via you forking over money to compile on other Apple hardware with an Apple certified license.
Law is predicated on conditions. If you're going to argue that someone used "monopoly power", then you have to show discriminatory practices. A lot of people keep bringing up Standard Oil, and completely overlook the court's consideration of discrimination in rendering its verdict. It is a necessary condition.
So it has neither a monopoly market share, (~27% globally and ~50% locally), nor does it discriminate in favor of wholly owned sham companies in the fashion of Standard Oil's practices.
Guys, we can't go into courts of law and make poop up. Judges will toss you out.
My own opinion is that the laws themselves have to change. A company like Apple will very likely never meet the legal definition of a monopoly. The digital age has outstripped these definitions, and laws need to change to reflect that fact.
> Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?
Quite arguably, you can’t, but monopoly power (particularly, its expression as pricing power) can be observable (and itself proves an actual monopoly) when monopoly would not be clear by other means.
The ability to price without sales going to a competitor demonstrates the absence of actual competition, regardless of the superficial apparent competition in a described market.
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power."
The perversity of this can be seen by the thought experiment of Android not existing. What would happen? Apple would ironically have less power to abuse their platform because regulators would gain authority to police many of the abuses.
Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.
As much as so many hate how Apple acts, they’ve gotten better since day 1.
They let developers choose more price points. They offer only a 15% cut of subscriptions in a number of circumstances instead of always taking 30%. IAPs and subscriptions have given developers more choices of how to monetize their apps.
At no point did they ever use their position to squeeze more money from developers. Even the yearly developer fee is still $99 despite the HUGE increase in App Store revenue.
It’s understandable people want Apple’s cut to shrink, but that doesn’t appear to be legally required. They didn’t make things worse so it seems they’re in the clear.
(They still lost on the alternate payment method thing)
I had never thought about it but I wonder if this is why they’ve never tried to raise rates.
It would certainly be a PR nightmare. But would it also immediately open them up to the “iOS monopoly abuse” case so many think this case was/wanted it to be?
Nope, on J2ME and Symbian phones, unless you had a developer kit, you would run what the telecom provider made available on their stores, reachable via WAP or SMS download links.
If Android didn’t exist, some other OS would take its place. Samsung would have developed its own most likely, which would at this stage probably resemble something very similar to what we have today. Only difference is that Google would have been in a position more similar to the one it faces with Apple.
I agree also the point you are making. If Apple somehow commanded 90+% of the smartphone market then they would likely face much regulation.
>the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market.
This seems surprising low, and I suspect there is some kind of nuance being left out or an oversight in the methods of the study that found that number.
The court did not decide that the relevant market was iOS only, as Epic wanted.
> A threshold issue in any antitrust case is defining the “relevant market.” Here, Epic argued that the relevant market is Apple’s iOS system. Apple argued that the relevant market is the market for all digital video games, where it is one of many players. The court disagreed with both sides, and it instead defined the relevant market as “digital mobile gaming transactions.” Under this formulation, the court found that Apple has a 52–57% market share in the “digital mobile gaming transactions” market. But this was not enough for the court to conclude Apple has monopoly power.
https://www.klgates.com/Court-Issues-Mixed-Ruling-in-Epic-v-...
This article is about Epic losing their appeal of the lower court's rulings.