Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#351

Post by lallysingh » Wed, May 15, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

sjy wrote: post #238

lallysingh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not fair. Your lawyer should make any arguments they need to defend you, even if they're not what you believe. As long as they're not false or misleading, it's good practice. Nobody's claimed that Apple believes that people buying their phones aren't their customers. Apple claimed (IIUC) that in this scenario, it's the app store vendors that are the customer of the app store. Which is a reasonably valid way to…

Your lawyer should advise you of all of those arguments but that doesn't mean you have to instruct the lawyer to make them. Litigants who make legally tenable but unethical arguments can still be criticised on ethical grounds. Apple could have conceded the plaintiffs' standing in this case but chose not to. The fact that this case has been tied up in expensive preliminary litigation so long surely acts as a deterrent…

What's the unethical argument here?

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#352

Post by tekknik » Wed, May 15, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #252

Can anyone now blast Apple on anti-trust grounds, for banning competing browsers in their store? When Apple want to sabotage universal adoption of certain technology (such as DASH for video streaming), they can avoid implementing needed components on the client side in their engine, forcing everyone who wants to target iOS (a sizable chunk of the Web market) to support their own technology instead of only something e…

Kinda like Google and their widevine DRM only being available on Chrome and first party apps. If you want to watch Google Play purchases you MUST use their clients. Is this monopolistic or are we still gonna ignore all the crap Google does?

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#353

Post by tekknik » Wed, May 15, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #193

wayneftw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a story recently about how "83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610357 So, they're certainly a monopoly in that market today and possibly in the general market in the near future. I have also read that you don't even need to have a higher than 50% market share to be considered a monopoly. You simply need to affect the entire market, which Apple certainly does…

It's ridiculous to think that Apple will be a monopoly in the future. The overwhelming trend is towards Apple losing share as Chinese phone manufacturers start to increasingly capture the middle market.

yet all it would take is Apple reducing prices to change that trend, which can happen at any unpredictable moment

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#354

Post by michaelmrose » Thu, May 16, 2019, 5:46 AM UTC

gwright wrote: post #349

michaelmrose wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you comprehend how absurd this situation is. Benefits are inversely proportional to income meaning that a below survivable wage requires people on the verge of not being able to eat to actually step down in pay in order to take the natural progression of an increase in wages. In order to avoid this you just don't let people pay less than a minimum survivable hourly wage so they can't force the government to s…

I understand what you are saying regarding the relationship between income and benefits. I think it is actually somewhat worse than you suggest due to the various step functions in the benefit calculations -- an increase in wage income can actually result in a larger decrease in benefits. In the absence of a minimum wage constraint, and all other things being equal, a change in government assistance is going to resul…

You yourself said that offering generous benefits inspires low end workers to tend to work for less because they can live on it and ultimately drives down wages.

In a fictional world without minimum wage or assistance a low wage employee can't afford to work for less than would be required to live for very long so one would expect the wage to float to somewhere in that neighborhood. Lets completely arbitrarily set that value at $10 an hour without worrying what the actual value would be. Imagine that the company expects to create $15 of value on average for each $10 paid out.

Note that in this universe even without a minimum wage the wage still can't float arbitrarily low because people can't live and certain people who truly don't create the needed value are STILL pushed out of the labor market by more employable people. Without any benefits they just die.

Now lets add welfare! People with enough to eat, free medical, cheap rent can indeed afford to work for less even if the company is still generating the same $15 net on each labor hour. Say the person effectively gets $7 an hour in benefits and companies average out to pay $5.

This means that in the original arrangement customers paid out $15 and the employee collected $10 the employer $5.

In the new situation the customer paid out $15, society kicked in $7, and the employee collected $12, the employer collected $10.

One could have achieved the same societal benefit by giving the employees $2.

Nations that provide sizable benefits to poor are obliged to set a minimum wage to avoid the situation where the social safety net represents a net transfer of wealth to low end employers by allowing employees to offer below living wages.

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#355

Post by pankajdoharey » Thu, May 16, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

chj wrote: post #297

pankajdoharey wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can install alternative app stores on iOS Devices without jailbreaking. Essentially all you need is a profile for that app store, the entire ecosystem of enterprise Device management in built on this mechanism which provides custom app stores to enterprises.

No, you can't distribute apps directly to customers. That's why Facebook's certificate got revoked by Apple. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

I wasnt aware of this!

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#356

Post by gwright » Fri, May 17, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #354

gwright wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying regarding the relationship between income and benefits. I think it is actually somewhat worse than you suggest due to the various step functions in the benefit calculations -- an increase in wage income can actually result in a larger decrease in benefits. In the absence of a minimum wage constraint, and all other things being equal, a change in government assistance is going to resul…

You yourself said that offering generous benefits inspires low end workers to tend to work for less because they can live on it and ultimately drives down wages. In a fictional world without minimum wage or assistance a low wage employee can't afford to work for less than would be required to live for very long so one would expect the wage to float to somewhere in that neighborhood. Lets completely arbitrarily set th…

I see what you are saying but I don't think that addresses my point that the higher minimum wage, which by your example causes some of the welfare benefits to stay with the recipient and not the employer, also results in unemployment for people who can't bring enough value to the table.

I'm not claiming I have a good solution, just pointing out the side effects of the high minimum wage (higher that the otherwise natural market clearing price).

Re: Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

#357

Post by sjy » Sun, May 19, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #351

sjy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your lawyer should advise you of all of those arguments but that doesn't mean you have to instruct the lawyer to make them. Litigants who make legally tenable but unethical arguments can still be criticised on ethical grounds. Apple could have conceded the plaintiffs' standing in this case but chose not to. The fact that this case has been tied up in expensive preliminary litigation so long surely acts as a deterrent…

What's the unethical argument here?

I think it is important that the anticompetitive effects of Apple's control of the iOS app store be examined by US antitrust courts. Regulators and app store developers had not taken action at the time this lawsuit was filed, and I think it is important that app store users can force the issue in these circumstances. I think there is at least an ethical issue with Apple choosing to argue that the plaintiffs do not have standing, rather than explaining why its actual behaviour is consistent with current US antitrust laws.

Apple won on the standing point in the trial court, then lost on appeal to the circuit court, and chose to protract the preliminary litigation by running this failed appeal to the Supreme Court, at significant cost to its opponents. Perhaps in doing so, Apple achieved a public benefit by securing a Supreme Court decision that explains this contested part of the law on standing. But if the minority opinion had prevailed, Apple would have won a victory that deprived the courts of the opportunity to review the legality of its behaviour for a few more years.

I don't know enough about the decision-making process to say whether Apple's behaviour in running this litigation was ethical. My point is that Apple executives are morally responsible for it, even if it is perfectly legal.