Can someone please explain to me why Apple hasn't been beaten into the dirt for anti-trust? I mean, aside from US anti-trust regulators having been de-fanged by decades of neoliberal cultists in...
Can someone please explain to me why Apple hasn't been beaten into the dirt for anti-trust? I mean, aside from US anti-trust regulators having been de-fanged by decades of neoliberal cultists in positions of power. Even they need to justify things somehow, if only for appearances' sake.
I don't understand how it can be justified that a single company produces the hardware, basic software, and repair components, together with controlling the sole authorized software marketplace and media storefront and the billing for all of the above. They also control a media production studio and a credit card. You could conceivably rely entirely on Apple products for every work and entertainment purpose and not deal with another corporation aside from your ISP and whoever produces your networking equipment. That's some Snow Crash-type cyberpunk dystopian shit right there, and yet no regulators seem to be taking them to task for it.
Epic tried to get anti-trust on them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple Then the Supreme Court declined to review the appeals (Apple didn't like the anti-steering ruling).
Epic tried to get anti-trust on them.
In her decision, Rogers identified that the market of concern was neither games (Apple's stance) nor Apple's App Store (Epic's stance) but digital mobile gaming transactions. Rogers identified that the demographics for mobile games was far different from computer or console games, and mobile games most often use the freemium payment model in which games are offered for free on the App Store but include additional features, such as cosmetic features or power-up bonuses, available for purchase, making this particular market sufficiently different from the overall video game market. Under this market definition, Judge Rogers concluded that Apple was not a monopoly and mostly a duopoly alongside Google, with potential competition to come from Nintendo and Google Stadia, and while Apple "enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinary high profit margins", that type of success was not an illegal monopoly. In this light, Judge Rogers ruled that Epic had failed to show that Apple violated federal or state antitrust laws, but ruled that Apple did violate the California Unfair Competition Law through the anti-competitive behavior of disallowing any mention of other payment systems within apps.
Part of the problem is that in computing, the line between vertical and horizontal integration is blurry at best. Especially once you offer both hardware and software. In traditional industry,...
Exemplary
Part of the problem is that in computing, the line between vertical and horizontal integration is blurry at best. Especially once you offer both hardware and software.
In traditional industry, there was a somewhat finite benefit to vertical integration, because of real world constraints. But with software, every bit that you add to your vertical stack makes it exponentially harder for market entrants that the vertical stack touches.
Look at Microsoft. They offer an OS, Office Suite, and backend server software. When they added Teams to their existing licensing for office, now the market players like Slack and Zoom have to compete against the whole of the Microsoft stack.
Apple's vertical integration in iOS would be less problematic if not for the double standard of letting third parties on their platform, but not letting those third parties compete against Apple's offerings.
If they fully locked out third party software, or allowed any third party to compete with their offerings, it'd be less-bad. Notice that almost none of these complaints are being leveraged against their desktop OS.
Ultimately, the largest players are too large, and their vertical and horizontal stacks need to be smashed to bits to allow room for smaller players again, and there need to be more gaurdrails to make it harder for multi-trillion-dollar companies from forming in the future.
Monopoly power is not the threshold for anti-trust. Sufficiently large influence im the market means additional scrutiny is required to prevent monopoly, oligopoly, and cartel situations in the first place.
That's the real reason that antitrust has been a joke from the 90s until Biden. Because all the teeth that served as preventative measures were ripped out.
I'd personally like to see a solid firewall between hardware and software. Hardware vendors become required to provide detailed enough driver specs or code for operating system authors, and are allowed to offer software for management up to the OS level (ie for BIOs and deployment), with a touch of blur there, but can't extend out into the application tier. So that would mean console OS vendors who do RFPs for hardware vendors. And yes, that would mean severing Apple's hardware and software offerings in twain. There would be growing pains, but in the end we'd all be better for it.
Antitrust law primarily exists to promote competition by breaking up monopolies-- to which the DoJ is currently accusing Apple of maintaining one on the mobile application market in the United...
Antitrust law primarily exists to promote competition by breaking up monopolies-- to which the DoJ is currently accusing Apple of maintaining one on the mobile application market in the United States, which they do control 51% of (and I think something ridiculous like 80-90% of the revenue.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2024)
Vertical integration, i.e. a company being a one-stop shop, is not really much of a factor in anti-trust law.
Perhaps it isn't, but it absolutely should be (and is, in some places). Apple and Google especially can leverage their market positions in one product category to give themselves an unfair...
Perhaps it isn't, but it absolutely should be (and is, in some places). Apple and Google especially can leverage their market positions in one product category to give themselves an unfair advantage in another, which can lead to just the sort of harm to society that government regulation of commerce is supposed to prevent.
We view the "trust" in "anti-trust" entirely too narrowly, and we do so because we're always erring on the side of liberality in economics. I think we need to reassess that default position before things really get ugly, if it isn't already too late.
And to be clear: They should be subject to this same kind of scrutiny as well. It's just that their overall impact on society as a whole is lower. We need transferable licenses for digital media....
And to be clear: They should be subject to this same kind of scrutiny as well. It's just that their overall impact on society as a whole is lower.
We need transferable licenses for digital media. So we can buy in one place and move to another.
Even if you buy the game somewhere else Sony / Nintendo etc.. still get a cut of the development and the sales process of the game. I’m pretty sure the software also has to be certified / approved...
Even if you buy the game somewhere else Sony / Nintendo etc.. still get a cut of the development and the sales process of the game. I’m pretty sure the software also has to be certified / approved by the console maker to even run.
The Switch requires physical games to be registered with Nintendo in order to have an encryption key on the console to get to the file contents (and then these keys are themselves encrypted). I...
The Switch requires physical games to be registered with Nintendo in order to have an encryption key on the console to get to the file contents (and then these keys are themselves encrypted). I forget if this system applies to eStore content, but of course they get their cut from there.
I think the secondary encryption level is a unique Nintendo method in response to the Wii decryption and Dolphin.
"But they did crime too" isn't a legal defense. We should also be scrutinizing game consoles and applying reasonable policies to allow a fair market for games, especially as digital sales are...
"But they did crime too" isn't a legal defense. We should also be scrutinizing game consoles and applying reasonable policies to allow a fair market for games, especially as digital sales are changing the landscape. The approval process, expensive dev kits and large cut taken by the system vendor was already onerous, and now that third party disc sales are being phased out that gives even more outsized power.
However, game consoles do not impact society anywhere near as much as the primary computing, communications and media device people interact with daily. They're a lower priority for limited justice system capacity.
I don’t think it’s an excuse, but if we are going to make new rules they should be applied consistently. I want a third party store on my console far more than I do on my phone.
I don’t think it’s an excuse, but if we are going to make new rules they should be applied consistently. I want a third party store on my console far more than I do on my phone.
They were in the EU, and now EU citizens can use alternative app stores and payment processors on iOS devices.. If apple can do it for the EU they can do it for every other region. It's just a...
Generally monopolistic behavior is only a concern to the US government if it causes things to be more expensive. If there doesn’t seem to be proof that they are artificially keeping prices high...
Generally monopolistic behavior is only a concern to the US government if it causes things to be more expensive. If there doesn’t seem to be proof that they are artificially keeping prices high they aren’t very concerned.
Well it's straightforward for Android, but I'm not surprised Apple is still fighting tooth and nail to limit sideloading and alternative app stores.
Can someone please explain to me why Apple hasn't been beaten into the dirt for anti-trust? I mean, aside from US anti-trust regulators having been de-fanged by decades of neoliberal cultists in positions of power. Even they need to justify things somehow, if only for appearances' sake.
I don't understand how it can be justified that a single company produces the hardware, basic software, and repair components, together with controlling the sole authorized software marketplace and media storefront and the billing for all of the above. They also control a media production studio and a credit card. You could conceivably rely entirely on Apple products for every work and entertainment purpose and not deal with another corporation aside from your ISP and whoever produces your networking equipment. That's some Snow Crash-type cyberpunk dystopian shit right there, and yet no regulators seem to be taking them to task for it.
Epic tried to get anti-trust on them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
Then the Supreme Court declined to review the appeals (Apple didn't like the anti-steering ruling).
That’s not what a monopoly is. Vertical integration tends not to be litigated.
Part of the problem is that in computing, the line between vertical and horizontal integration is blurry at best. Especially once you offer both hardware and software.
In traditional industry, there was a somewhat finite benefit to vertical integration, because of real world constraints. But with software, every bit that you add to your vertical stack makes it exponentially harder for market entrants that the vertical stack touches.
Look at Microsoft. They offer an OS, Office Suite, and backend server software. When they added Teams to their existing licensing for office, now the market players like Slack and Zoom have to compete against the whole of the Microsoft stack.
Apple's vertical integration in iOS would be less problematic if not for the double standard of letting third parties on their platform, but not letting those third parties compete against Apple's offerings.
If they fully locked out third party software, or allowed any third party to compete with their offerings, it'd be less-bad. Notice that almost none of these complaints are being leveraged against their desktop OS.
Ultimately, the largest players are too large, and their vertical and horizontal stacks need to be smashed to bits to allow room for smaller players again, and there need to be more gaurdrails to make it harder for multi-trillion-dollar companies from forming in the future.
Monopoly power is not the threshold for anti-trust. Sufficiently large influence im the market means additional scrutiny is required to prevent monopoly, oligopoly, and cartel situations in the first place.
That's the real reason that antitrust has been a joke from the 90s until Biden. Because all the teeth that served as preventative measures were ripped out.
I'd personally like to see a solid firewall between hardware and software. Hardware vendors become required to provide detailed enough driver specs or code for operating system authors, and are allowed to offer software for management up to the OS level (ie for BIOs and deployment), with a touch of blur there, but can't extend out into the application tier. So that would mean console OS vendors who do RFPs for hardware vendors. And yes, that would mean severing Apple's hardware and software offerings in twain. There would be growing pains, but in the end we'd all be better for it.
I didn't say anything about monopoly.
Antitrust law primarily exists to promote competition by breaking up monopolies-- to which the DoJ is currently accusing Apple of maintaining one on the mobile application market in the United States, which they do control 51% of (and I think something ridiculous like 80-90% of the revenue.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2024)
Vertical integration, i.e. a company being a one-stop shop, is not really much of a factor in anti-trust law.
Perhaps it isn't, but it absolutely should be (and is, in some places). Apple and Google especially can leverage their market positions in one product category to give themselves an unfair advantage in another, which can lead to just the sort of harm to society that government regulation of commerce is supposed to prevent.
We view the "trust" in "anti-trust" entirely too narrowly, and we do so because we're always erring on the side of liberality in economics. I think we need to reassess that default position before things really get ugly, if it isn't already too late.
You've pretty much described every gaming console that exists.
But for most gaming consoles, especially prior to them having their own integrated store, you can choose where you buy the copy of the game.
And to be clear: They should be subject to this same kind of scrutiny as well. It's just that their overall impact on society as a whole is lower.
We need transferable licenses for digital media. So we can buy in one place and move to another.
Even if you buy the game somewhere else Sony / Nintendo etc.. still get a cut of the development and the sales process of the game. I’m pretty sure the software also has to be certified / approved by the console maker to even run.
The Switch requires physical games to be registered with Nintendo in order to have an encryption key on the console to get to the file contents (and then these keys are themselves encrypted). I forget if this system applies to eStore content, but of course they get their cut from there.
I think the secondary encryption level is a unique Nintendo method in response to the Wii decryption and Dolphin.
"But they did crime too" isn't a legal defense. We should also be scrutinizing game consoles and applying reasonable policies to allow a fair market for games, especially as digital sales are changing the landscape. The approval process, expensive dev kits and large cut taken by the system vendor was already onerous, and now that third party disc sales are being phased out that gives even more outsized power.
However, game consoles do not impact society anywhere near as much as the primary computing, communications and media device people interact with daily. They're a lower priority for limited justice system capacity.
I don’t think it’s an excuse, but if we are going to make new rules they should be applied consistently. I want a third party store on my console far more than I do on my phone.
The thing is, with the DMA in the EU, it's just a matter of convincing the regulators that they are roughly equivalent players.
So yeah I'm into it but what does it actually look like? Like online is locked behind a subscription, do we get rid of that too?
Subscriptions can be store specific. At least that’s how I think it would make sense to handle it.
They were in the EU, and now EU citizens can use alternative app stores and payment processors on iOS devices.. If apple can do it for the EU they can do it for every other region. It's just a matter of regulators actually doing something.
Generally monopolistic behavior is only a concern to the US government if it causes things to be more expensive. If there doesn’t seem to be proof that they are artificially keeping prices high they aren’t very concerned.