Live data from Hacker News

U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

nytimes.com

21–30 of 1001 posts

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#21
How do you think Apple will differentiate their case from United States v. Microsoft Corp., where Microsoft was implicated for almost identical monopoly misconduct?

The complaint literally says verbatim, "But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows."

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#22
It looked surprisingly pretty weak to my non lawyer eyes. I mean I fully understand that apple business practices are building a moat through highly integrated software but its almost a feature for their system and you buy it knowing that.

It feels like it goes back to Android vs Apple approach to their ecosystem.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#24
Finally. It was about time that this would happen.

Google got one anti-trust lawsuit, Meta should get another one (by owning too many social networks with billions of users each) and after the failed anti-trust lawsuit that Epic tried to sue Apple under, this time the DOJ is finally going after Apple.

Good.

I'm really looking forward to the United States v. Apple Inc. anti-trust lawsuit that will actually make some changes to stop the 30% commission scam once and for all.

After that, now do Microsoft (again)

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#25
post #11

IANAL but it's baffling to me that this one took so long. This has been the clearest-cut abuse of monopoly in tech for a long time. Why did they waste time trying to convince judges that "free" could be monopoly pricing, when this was in broad daylight?

How is this even a monopoly? That's like saying "Walmart has a monopoly on selling products at its stores." There are thousands of competing phones with their own software and app stores.

They have a remarkably durable market share. Some people are in effect forced to choose apple since apps they need (in some cases medical apps!) are iPhone only as the seller just does not bother with android.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#26
post #11

IANAL but it's baffling to me that this one took so long. This has been the clearest-cut abuse of monopoly in tech for a long time. Why did they waste time trying to convince judges that "free" could be monopoly pricing, when this was in broad daylight?

How is this even a monopoly? That's like saying "Walmart has a monopoly on selling products at its stores." There are thousands of competing phones with their own software and app stores.

There's approximately 2 app stores, I wouldn't call that competition.

Even in the most egregious days of Microsoft's OS monopoly, you could still choose to install software. Apple makes it basically impossible to do this outside of the context of their app store, which they charge heavily for access to and have no qualms removing or preventing apps that compete with its own. If this doesn't constitute monopolistic behavior, the bar is so high I'm not sure anything would ever qualify for it.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#28

How do you think Apple will differentiate their case from United States v. Microsoft Corp. , where Microsoft was implicated for almost identical monopoly misconduct? The complaint literally says verbatim, "But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows."

On the browser front, it’s easy. iPhones have batteries so battery life is a concern. That’s why Apple treats them differently than Macintosh computers, which you can choose your own default browser engine for.
Post reply on HN