Apple now rejecting apps with Pebble Smartwatch support

I am not convinced that this practice is worthy of concern. I don't think that a short-term predatory pricing loss incurred by a dumper can ever be recovered. This opinion is based mostly on the personal belief that the substitution effect is far greater than most economists care to admit, particularly when the potential substitution is to not buy anything at all.

You can't dump alfalfa to bankrupt existing hay growers and then make a killing by raising alfalfa prices once you dominate the market. Why? Farmers will feed their livestock gummy bears[0]. And then they will plant their own damned hay crops at the very next available opportunity. The net result is that you go bankrupt, too, because you took a huge loss right before killing your own market.

[0]http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/23/us-usa-cattle-cand...

http://www.naturalnews.com/037351_cattle_candy_marshmallows....

http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/10/news/economy/farmers-cows-ca...

For now.

A better analogy would be if Amazon suddenly refused to stock new Apple TVs and Rokus and Chromecasts in its warehouses and only stocked Fire TV devices, if we want to get all semantic about it.

> This whole uproar is about a single developer who had his app denied

There are multiple apps affected per the linked discussion.

> by a specific reviewer at Apple

No, by multiple reviewers on multiple occasions. Even appealing the decision results in the same response ("don't reference Pebble in your metadata").

> for a basic breach of their terms and conditions for putting Apps on the App Store

That's only being enforced for Pebble-related apps now that the Apple Watch has been released.

> The general consensus seems to be that a simple rewording (maybe not even having to remove the word 'Pebble') is all that he needs.

Apple's response (when SeaNav tried to appeal) was specifically to remove the word "Pebble". It's not a wording issue; it's an issue with that specific word existing in the metadata.

> Also, a theater buying a TV/Radio station and not allowing competing theaters to run ads is perfectly acceptable and realistic.

That's not what the more accurate scenario describes; you're still getting this backwards. It's the TV/Radio station buying/building a competing theater and preventing new ads from existing theaters that the corrected scenario describes.

> Just because one gets very large and popular doesn't suddenly mean the rules have to change for it.

Yes they do, per U.S. and European (at the very least; probably others are included) antitrust laws. Using one's market position to conspire to monopolize runs afoul of them.

And even if it weren't strictly illegal per se, it sure as hell doesn't mean that we should just lay back and let Apple do what it wants. What's the harm in calling them out on their dickery? A free market relies on an informed consumer base; such call-outs - at the very least - might put market forces in the consumers' favor for once.

"Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...

A company does not have to be the sole supplier in a market to be considered a monopoly in the eyes of the law.

> Apple has even run afoul of that at various times (like when it got dinged for its monopolistic behavior regarding e-books; it certainly didn't have an actual monopoly, but that still fell under antitrust regulations).

But that case didn't just involve Apple. It also involved the oligopoly of book publishers, who worked with Apple to engage in price fixing against Amazon.

With that said...

> Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly

If you read further in the paragraph you quoted, you'll find that Microsoft was specifically engaging in monopolization (i.e. the process of becoming a monopoly), which was the specific reason why it got dinged. It also states the and in there - that they had taken measures to disrupt attempts to counter their monopolization.

This analysis is consistent with the Sherman Antitrust Act (the law under which Microsoft was cited), specifically Section 2: Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony [. . . ]". It's also consisted with the Sherman Antitrust Act's intent, as specified by its authors (George Hoar: "... [a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist..(but was if) it involved something like the use of means which made it impossible for other persons to engage in fair competition.").

This isn't even mentioning the failure of the court to recognize that there were viable altneratives to Windows that, in their words, "a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs". GNU/Linux (which was designed for "Intel-compatible PC"s to begin with), three of the four mainstream BSDs (NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD), OS/2, and a variety of other operating systems existed at the time of that ruling. The only way the ruling's rationale would hold true is if they interpreted "Intel-compatible" to mean "Windows-compatible", in which case the ruling is directly applicable to Apple's behavior now (since Apple - like Microsoft then - is attempting to monopolize the application ecosystem of iOS; if Microsoft can get dinged for monopolizing a specific market segment, then so can/should Apple). In this case, Apple is "attempt[ing] to monopolize" smart watches within the the iOS application market (just like how Microsoft "attempt[ed] to monopolize" browsers within the Windows application market). The difference is that Apple's attempts are much more obvious.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

> That still leaves us with Google, which (as far as I know) is not considered a "monopoly" by any measure of the term.

I don't know how you've come to this conclusion. It is very reasonable to argue that Google has a monopoly on internet search. Whether they are engaging in antitrust is more unclear, but they wield an amount of power in the search market that no other company even gets close to.