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Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

npr.org

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Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#241

Post by redwall_hp »

braythwayt wrote: post #73
ksec wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on most if not all points but the article didn't argue against any of that. It did point out two things. Companies don't have to literally be the only buyer in a marketplace to wield "monopsony power." If competition isn't perfect — like when there are only a few companies in a market and they aren't undercutting each other's prices — companies gain some ability to lower the price on the stuff they buy. Sellers…

Monopsony is a slippery concept. If I tilt my head just right, we could be discussing the way WalMart purchases products. They sell a product in their store, they decide they want a certain margin, and then they tell suppliers to meet a certain price target if they want their products in WalMart.

The difference is you don't purchase a Walmart store first. Neogreekisms aside, I personally think the iPhone ecosystem smells like a new kind of monopoly that the people who set down existing antitrust law couldn't have foreseen.

Imagine buying a nice desk to work on, and being told you could only buy paper and pens from the manufacturer of the desk. Maybe other vendors could be considered if 30% of their revenue went to the desk manufacturer. Preposterous, right? That's the world be live in and accepted as the norm for smartphones. Not a monopoly on a market scale, but the notion of selling someone a "platform" couldn't have really been foreseen a century ago. It's a similar idea, but it's more monopolism targeted at the market that surrounds the platform.

One particularly egregious example: Apple should reasonably be allowed to determine which products they sell on the App Store, but by preventing the installation of arbitrary apps from outside of the store, they've created a monopoly that they use for moral policing and anticompetitive practices. Apple not only disallows nudity-centric apps or apps that control nicotine vaporizers on their store, but effectively has banished them from their phones entirely. Which seems very suspect, and arguably they should not have the right to stop people from using what may be their primary computing platform as they see fit.

Then there's the issue of ebooks and music: Apple takes 30% of every in-app purchase, and developers are forbidden from using alternate payment processors to get around that. As such, Amazon can't reasonably sell ebooks in their app (you have to use a web browser and figure out the weird absence of buying capabilities yourself, as a user) since it would soak up the entire margin. Apple, however, competes with Amazon and sells ebooks themselves...which is questionable. Spotify cannot sign people up for their service without giving Apple an ongoing 30% cut of the subscription...meanwhile, Apple competes with them.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#242

Post by Quarrelsome »

scarface74 wrote: post #228
Quarrelsome wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or make their OS available for virtualization. Remember this was 2012 so our entire build process was done via cloud vms and Mac's requirements were a nasty welt on an otherwise exceptionally smooth process because there were no options available at the time.

It is available for virtualization - on Mac hardware.

wait you can now finally virtuaise them but you have to do it on Mac hardware? Its like someone didn't give them the manual or something.

I guess that explains why some companies can finally offer "macs on a rack" because they are literally macs.

The point remains that its a bunch of hoops they force people to jump through, BECAUSE THEY CAN. Not for any good technical reason.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#243

Post by simion314 »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #184
simion314 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe we could get side loading on console.

The fixed hardware that is long-lived and affordable is possible because the hardware manufacturer subsidizes it, especially at the beginning. If they were not able to rely on money from game sales, the hardware would be much more expensive. An alternative way for companies to make money manufacturing gaming hardware is to keep the prices low until there are a lot of great games for the system, and then jack up the h…

The PS4 was as expensive as a regular PC so any idea how much the latest consoles were actually subsidized? I assume Sony and Microsoft can negotiate with AMD for giant discounts so IMO they made profits when selling the consoles but I do not know if they would admit this.

Other issue I have with digital games is that the physical game is the same price but the digital game I do not own(I have less rights) so why don't we get same rights on digital games or cheaper digital games.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#244

Post by zionic »

pornel wrote: post #132

Apple made themselves an exclusive payment provider for all iOS in-app subscriptions and payments for digital products. Merely mentioning anywhere that cheaper payment options exist is an AppStore ToS violation.

I generally support Apple but this is inexcusable. Regulators need to come down hard on this kind of payment monopoly.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#245

Post by summerlight »

vturner wrote: post #6

The key point I presume is the definition of "market" here; and I'm not convinced the market "software that runs on iOS" is so large that monopwhatever can be declared there and used to justify price control. Though as a thought experiment Apple is like a wealthy landed gentleman who sets up a well maintained outdoor market for the tradesmen to bring goods and the lower classes to buy them. If Apple owns so much land…

> and I'm not convinced the market "software that runs on iOS" is so large that monopwhatever can be declared there and used to justify price control.

The size of the market is not relevant here. The real question is whether customers have viable alternatives or not. If not, then you're in a "monopwhatever" situation. We don't yet know if DoJ thinks iOS users have alternatives or not though.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#246

Post by redwall_hp »

e_y_ wrote: post #11
vturner wrote: post #6

The key point I presume is the definition of "market" here; and I'm not convinced the market "software that runs on iOS" is so large that monopwhatever can be declared there and used to justify price control. Though as a thought experiment Apple is like a wealthy landed gentleman who sets up a well maintained outdoor market for the tradesmen to bring goods and the lower classes to buy them. If Apple owns so much land…

I don't think we need to divide the market into specialized segments (iOS devices, luxury smartphone, etc) to make the case against Apple. They have somewhere around 50% of the global market in terms of smartphone revenue (not devices shipped). For the App Store, which is what matters to developers, revenue was around $25 billion in the first half of 2019, vs $14 billion for Google Play Store. It's not literally mono…

The use of monopoly as the primary measure of whether market abuse is happening or not is a flawed presupposition to begin with. There are only two mobile phone platforms, which are easily more dominant general computing platforms than desktop operating systems, and the proprietors of both routinely use their influential positions in various ways to manipulate secondary markets that depend on them. This is no different than Standard Oil and the railroads.

Quite simply, if the legal tools don't exist to deal with this abuse, they need to be created...just like the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#247

Post by scarface74 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #242
scarface74 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is available for virtualization - on Mac hardware.

wait you can now finally virtuaise them but you have to do it on Mac hardware? Its like someone didn't give them the manual or something. I guess that explains why some companies can finally offer "macs on a rack" because they are literally macs. The point remains that its a bunch of hoops they force people to jump through, BECAUSE THEY CAN. Not for any good technical reason.

Yes. Apple is fully in its right to decide how to distribute its software. Just like an open source software license can dictate how their software is used. If you want to use MacOS you have to use a Mac.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#249

Post by simonh »

mcv wrote: post #133
simonh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't get my head around this argument. To write software for a computer platform, shock horror, you need to develop and test it on that platform. To develop software using Apple's OS, services and libraries, you need to buy that OS, those services and those libraries that Apple sells. I don't get why that is a contentious issue, or even a question.

That you need to have the hardware and OS you're developing for is not the issue. That you're not allowed to sell and distribute software for the platform without the permission of the creator of the platform is the real problem here. It's a kind of vendor lock-in. iPhone users aren't allowed to install apps on their own phones without permission from Apple. This gives Apple the power to make or break businesses. We…

It clearly is the issue raised in the comment I am replying to.

Anyway we have always had this on games consoles, and had it on phones for many years before Apple even made a phone. We have it on some embedded platforms too.

There is nothing at all novel or special about this business model, and braking it will kill the business model of a lot of companies, including all the console makers. In fact compared to them iOS is a paradise of openness and market competition for software. Yet for some reason, I never see anyone rolling out this argument against Nintendo.

Re: Apple’s “monopsony” power, and the woman who named it

#250

Post by scarface74 »

simion314 wrote: post #238
scarface74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you’re not implying the old wives tale about Apple nit allowing apps that compete with it on the store. If so, there are plenty of existence proofs that that isn’t true.

I mean browsers, then there was an app that did some phone activity tracking and all was fine until iOS had it's own app and for some reason the old app was kicked out from the store. Then there are the cases where Apple apps have special access to APIs but a popular application like Spotify was denied access. Can you link to the case you are mentioning?

The app that did “phone activity tracking” used an MDM and tracked all of your activity and stored it. This was a severe privacy concern.

Spotify - was complaining that there was no facility to integrate with Siri - Apple added intents in iOS 13.

Spotify also complained that they couldn’t do music streaming on watchOS - that was also added in the latest version of watchOS.

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