Apple Fires Back at Spotify for Asking for 'Preferential Treatment'

I read this comment and the other ones, and it is interesting how you guys collectively think that being a monopoly is a prerequisite for an antitrust violation, and decided to debate the existence of a monopoly or not, instead of an actual antitrust issue lol

I wonder if this is also a reflection on broader society too

because it is very very inaccurate.

That's not true.

The fact of the matter is Amazon had a huge lion's share of the market for e-books (measured by $$$). They had such a huge monopoly position that they could dictate terms to all publishers, more than once they refused to carry a publishers e-books (effectively killing them) if a publisher didn't agreed to some terms that Amazon wanted. They would stop selling PHYSICALS books to push the contract. Since no one else old e-books in any reasonable quantity, Amazon was in the monopsony position of being the only real buyer.

So not only did they do that, what they really like doing with selling Kindles. And a great way to sell Kindles is to discount the books below the actual selling price; eating the loss and making the publishers e-books on other platforms (as well as physical books) worth less. To a fair degree it didn't matter to Amazon if the prices were unsustainable, it fueled growth in their devices which fueled growth in their profits.

And then they would do something like push Prime since you could get free books that way (more loss for publishers) and Amazon would make up the money. And the publishers could either choose to go along with it and get a small price for each book or say no and get all their e-books pulled.

Plus Amazon had cable direct, which was a publishing platform that anyone could access. This meant that they had TONS of content by authors who were willing to sell it dirt cheap. This put the publishers in the same position that the media is right now competing with YouTube. And of course some of those books were actually really really good (Silo series by Howey) and became great sellers. Maybe even books that the publishers had passed on. It wasn't all garbage. So Amazon could show the publishers that they weren't nearly as necessary as the publishers thought they were.

Apple NEVER did anything like that. When Apple sold music it was at a flat price. They never undercut the publisher. After a little while to even let the publishers raise prices. And the whole time selling on the iTunes Music Store was an option since you could still sell CDs or sell to other DRM music stores like Amazon.

Amazon was easily the standard oil of the e-book market. They WERE the e-book market. No one ever went after them.

Then Apple came along, is part of the deal with publishers that broke Amazons monopoly, and they got an antitrust suit. None of that makes any sense to me.

At this point there are only two mobile phone platforms with apps. iOS is smaller, but has tons of apps. It started the trend and people seem to like to pay more money on iOS for apps than they do on Android (I don't know if that's as true today as it used to be, but I think it still holds). Even if users don't like paying as much on android or paying it all, Android has a larger market share in thus is still worth developing for. Both platforms have hundreds of millions of users.

Windows phone is dead. BlackBerry is dead. Palm OS. The previous versions of Windows Phone. The Sidekick. Amazon Fire Phone. Canonical's phone, the Firefox phone, whatever other Linux phones I can't think of.

It doesn't matter how big the company backing it is, even if they actually do a good job (like supposedly the recent Windows Phones). At this point the first mover advantage for Android and iOS are too big. Even if you spend all the time to make a great platform no one's going to buy it because the top hundred or thousand apps aren't available. Because no one's gonna Byatt know it's gonna make apps for because there's no one to buy the apps. You're stuck in a cycle.

Microsoft tried to buy their way out of it, and blackberry did too to a degree. But it doesn't matter if you pay to get the top 40 apps from iOS, because nobody uses all of them. They use some percentage of the top hundred apps. Or 500 apps. So every users going to have a couple of apps that they really want that are unavailable and will never get ported. The apps that do exist (like Twitter and others) often don't get updates, and if a game or something does come out for the platform it's not until years after the big two.

Until something very different comes along, or some HUGE external force appears, we're only going to have two big phone OSes. The only thing that slightly possible (in my eyes) would be someone as big as Samsung pushing their own OS in other countries and possibly getting a good foothold there. Maybe Xaiomi.

Apple doesn't get a 30% cut from any user who uses Spotify on iOS, that would be pretty blatant anti-trust. However Apple gets 30% from anyone they handle billing/tracking for.

Spotify, if they allow subscriptions purchased in app, is paying Apple for a service. They're free to think that price is way the hell to high and not sell there.

What if Spotify got their way? What if any app could embed their own payment system minute? Now Apple has hundreds of millions of users who could easily be defrauded and have their credit card stolen from stuff downloaded from their store. They get sued.

As a user, I wouldn't use any of them. The reason I buy so much on iOS is because I trust Apple. I know that if I signed up for a subscription for something it turns out to be a piece of junk, I can easily cancel it with one click. No weird cable company style negotiations. No worrying if some unscrupulous company is going to steal my credit card. Apple has some pretty reasonable reasons for this policy (besides all the obvious selfish/monetary ones).

That's not the case at all. You only have to pay the 30% IF APPLE HANDLES THE BILLING. Any subscription Spotify sells directly, outside the app, does not give Apple a penny even if that user only ever listens to Spotify on your iOS devices.