The fact that the DOJ may be able to win the case does not make an antitrust case like this the correct way to legislate how we want companies to operate.
It would be SO MUCH SIMPLER to just pass a law that says “sideloading has to be legal, easy, and free”. That’s all it would take.
Or maybe “all cell phones must support RCS.”
But not only have we not done that, the lawsuit against Apple for being a monopoly on the App Store was won by Apple. A court said they are legally in the clear. Apple already said they were adding RCS before this whole thing started.
So the DOJ has come up with a bunch of issues, some of which that don’t even seem relevant anymore, in an attempt to draw out concessions from Apple in a settlement to get what they couldn’t get through previous court cases. Or perhaps win a verdict and charge them a whole bunch of money for stuff that doesn’t matter all that much because again, some of the stuff they seem to be really mad about Apple already won on in another trial.
The DOJ is supposed to be about enforcement, not creating the laws. This is not how this process should be working. And as Gruber and others have pointed out, if you have to twist a bunch of hundred plus year-old laws to try to come up with a case to do something that could’ve been done with a single stroke of a pen… maybe that’s what you should’ve done instead.
I haven’t seen anyone saying who is arguing that Apple should 100% get out of all of this and they’re not doing anything wrong. Gruber and many others in the app world have been saying for years that Apple’s blatant greed is going to get them a smack down, and they’ll lose some of their good policies along with the bad.
People are arguing that the lawsuit doesn’t seem well-made and that it shouldn’t how the government accomplishes its goals in the first place anyway.
Laws like you propose tend to age poorly. RCS is incredibly consumer-hostile (e.g., there is no end to end encryption unless you use Google’s data-harvesting stack on both sides).
Similarly, requiring side loading could preclude new classes of devices.
Usually, the laws are written more vaguely for this reason. I think the big change we need to make is to say that anti-trust laws apply whenever N or fewer organizations control over X% of the market. I think N=3 and 75% would be good starting points.
Among other things, this would open up licensing and cell plans on 5G modems.
It would also mean that the google app store and apple app store both have monopolies over cell phone software resale and distribution.
(Google’s “android is open source and supports side loading” argument wouldn’t matter in such a regime, unless that meant that consumers and device manufacturers could reasonably expect degoogled android to actually run android apps and stuff, and that over a quarter of the market actually did so).
There was a court case against IBM over anti trust that started in 1969 and it was finally dropped in 1982 because the world has moved on.
One of the issues in the current case is already irrelevant - Cloud gaming that Apple has addressed.
Another issue was whatever you call the mega apps. Apple has allowed that for years and Microsoft, Google and Facebook all moved away from the mega app into smaller apps.
It would be SO MUCH SIMPLER to just pass a law that says “sideloading has to be legal, easy, and free”. That’s all it would take.
Or maybe “all cell phones must support RCS.”
But not only have we not done that, the lawsuit against Apple for being a monopoly on the App Store was won by Apple. A court said they are legally in the clear. Apple already said they were adding RCS before this whole thing started.
So the DOJ has come up with a bunch of issues, some of which that don’t even seem relevant anymore, in an attempt to draw out concessions from Apple in a settlement to get what they couldn’t get through previous court cases. Or perhaps win a verdict and charge them a whole bunch of money for stuff that doesn’t matter all that much because again, some of the stuff they seem to be really mad about Apple already won on in another trial.
The DOJ is supposed to be about enforcement, not creating the laws. This is not how this process should be working. And as Gruber and others have pointed out, if you have to twist a bunch of hundred plus year-old laws to try to come up with a case to do something that could’ve been done with a single stroke of a pen… maybe that’s what you should’ve done instead.
I haven’t seen anyone saying who is arguing that Apple should 100% get out of all of this and they’re not doing anything wrong. Gruber and many others in the app world have been saying for years that Apple’s blatant greed is going to get them a smack down, and they’ll lose some of their good policies along with the bad.
People are arguing that the lawsuit doesn’t seem well-made and that it shouldn’t how the government accomplishes its goals in the first place anyway.