Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#201

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:40 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #130

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them Have you been to a traffic court?

Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here." Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed." Hu…

That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#202

Post by bigyabai » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:42 AM UTC

russellbeattie wrote: post #162

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup) Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the signific…

At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal. The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.

2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."

2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#203

Post by sophiebits » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:42 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #184

firloop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple News+ link: https://apple.news/AlNSjMktVT9afQICM2yRVYw

nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.

In Safari you can hit the Share button at the bottom then pick News.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#204

Post by williamscales » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:42 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #184

firloop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple News+ link: https://apple.news/AlNSjMktVT9afQICM2yRVYw

nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.

Usually if the article is on Apple News+ it will come up if you search the headline on the “following” tab

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#205

Post by realusername » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:55 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #151

realusername wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that. I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible

> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup) Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the signific…

> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions

Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.

And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.

And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#206

Post by scripturial » Thu, May 01, 2025, 5:58 AM UTC

gpm wrote: post #157

leptons wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.

Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps. There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running sof…

A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#207

Post by randunel » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:01 AM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #105

DecentShoes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they refuse to comply, why don't we just... arrest them? Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?

You can’t arrest a fictitious person.

A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.

In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.

Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#208

Post by ane » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #174

brudgers wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t arrest a fictitious person.

Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?

Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#209

Post by JKCalhoun » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

xuki wrote: post #107

> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...

I’m liking Phil more than I expected to.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#210

Post by SchemaLoad » Thu, May 01, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #32

mrcwinn wrote: post #13

The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those ex…

They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate. It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0,…

The problem is less the actual % itself and the fact that it's bundled in with so many things you can't pick or substitute. You can't avoid the app store and you can't avoid the Apple developer tools because they force you to use both of them. So then charging money for something you don't have an alternative to is the issue.

Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.