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Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

wsj.com

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Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#411

Post by DannyBee »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #399
DannyBee wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also wrong. Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned. Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be? Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.

Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise). Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that t…

Again, once you lose, the adversarial part is over.

Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.

Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.

Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.

There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.

I quoted McComb in another comment (so don't want to paste it again here), but see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/ and friends.

In the end, once you lose, if you play stupid games, you will usually win stupid prizes.

That doesn't mean people don't play, but it's almost always against their lawyers strong advice.

As for jail - you have to distinguish civil and criminal contempt. Criminal contempt can get you thrown in jail, and has different requirements.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#412

Post by rrgok »

I’ve always been critical of headlines that frame the company as the culprit—especially when the company can’t be sent to prison or face personal consequences. No, it wasn’t "Apple" that violated antitrust laws—Tim Cook approved the actions. Apple doesn't make decisions on its own; it operates under the direction and vision of the people in charge.

It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#413

Post by Wobbles42 »

lazide wrote: post #302
Jensson wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we will have corporate training programs teaching us to say "inform the user" when we mean "scare the user", and then this wont show up in court. Just like how Microsoft taught us to never say "crush the competition". They will do all the same things though.

Then that training will get called into evidence (like Google’s prior training re: anti competitive training) to prove they were being intentionally anti-competitive, and rinse repeat.

I received training like this over 20 years ago as a brand new engineer at my first job. The training was literally about how to avoid writing emails that could create legal liability due to careless language. Emails that came out during the Ford Pinto lawsuits were used as examples. It was all carefully worded to be about not being misperceived in court.

That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.

Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.

Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#414

Post by SkyBelow »

DannyBee wrote: post #381
hajile wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the judge actually specified the type of language to be used, this seems completely compliant. Are they supposed to say "Please use our competitor. You'll find your experience with them far superior to what we provide" or something similar?

Lawyer here - that's not how these things work. This is definitely non-compliant. Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does. You…

>You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes. That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.

What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#415

Post by AntonyGarand »

jillyboel wrote: post #397
firloop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why do we want an apple link that just redirects to the original article? is this just "look at me i'm a mac user" levels of spam?

I believe this is a way to use their own apple news subscription to access the article instead of using the archive version: It only redirects if you're not logged in to apple news.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#416

Post by Wobbles42 »

amelius wrote: post #319
xpe wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others. One takeaway to startups that…

Therefore it's better to stay the hell away from companies who actively seek to take away your freedom.

I don't think there are any companies that care one way or the other about taking away your freedom.

Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.

The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#417

Post by Cthulhu_ »

resource_waste wrote: post #307
caseyy wrote: post #272

Many people blame the EU for targeting US companies when it passes anti-monopoly and pro-consumer laws, or penalizes the companies for breaking them. Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.

I don't really know this issue, I don't study it. But from afar: >An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy. >This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked.…

> An EU law stiffles all companies > it feels like near anarchy

These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.

Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)

[0] https://www.kvk.nl/en/international/doing-business-with-the-...

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#418

Post by Wobbles42 »

Tarq0n wrote: post #270
xpe wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others. One takeaway to startups that…

Sadly the openAI debacle has undermined faith in those kinds of structures as well.

This is probably a good thing -- faith in such structures was never justified.

Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.

Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#419

Post by pasc1878 »

rafaelcosta wrote: post #267
pasc1878 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If through Apple it is easy to cancel and all subs are listed in one place. If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing. Thus I expect the scamming to increase.

Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC dat…

Apple also, I think by default, send out emails just before a subscription is due telling you how to unsubscribe.

I doubt a scammer will do that.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#420

Post by Wobbles42 »

petesergeant wrote: post #313
satvikpendem wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.

I have no trouble believing a gay boomer from the South instinctively cares about personal privacy; he will have spent much of his early life needing to be very protective of his.

I would agree that most people with that exact background would have learned the hard way to care about privacy.

The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.

My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.

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