Reply to a couple hundred comments: You don’t have to be a monopoly to be deemed to be acting in an anti-competitive manner.
Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.
Imagine how quickly we’d answer the question of whether consumers actually prefer Apple’s walled garden and are voting with their wallets, or if they’re just locked in and being taken advantage of, if 3rd party app stores with much lower overhead were allowed. If your monthly subscription cost $10 on the Apple app store but $7 on the other one, for the same product, I think we’d get an answer rather efficiently.
Besides the "One App Store" policy (that tbf keeps out the worst scams you can find on android), what bothers me most is that an app can be banned fors speech like "here's the FAQ on our HOMEPAGE".
Huh? "One App Store" is bad, it forces you into a vendor lock-in, to have no choice but to accept whatever a store wants you to do. I'd rather have the freedom of choice rather than being limited to a monopoly.
I'd be ok with one app store if the criteria for being included are transparent, reasonable and not biased towards less strict rules for big players.
Patreon was told to change its whole billing model until a court found in their favor: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1878206.html That's the kind of thing I think we'd both find unacceptable.
But I'd still be ok with "one store, resonable rules, respect user privacy".
Meanwhile on google's lawn, there's hundreds of things like this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.falnesc.to... a torch app that contains ads and shares your location with selected third parties. At least they don't require permission to read your contacts. (You can buy an ad-free "secure" version for $0.99, or you can just ... turn on your phone's LED for free because that's provided by the OS.)
Technically firefox extensions are "one app store" too - you can't sideload unless you install from the dev/nightly channel and fiddle with the settings. But at least it's a not-for-profit store. Chrome and even Edge allow you to sideload.
Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.