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Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

wsj.com

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Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#431

Post by Wobbles42 »

graemep wrote: post #390
resource_waste wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, not just the trillion dollar companies. I That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with. Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act. Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by…

This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it.

In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.

Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#432

Post by jim201 »

I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding.

I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#433

Post by danaris »

joshkel wrote: post #406
poincaredisk wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader. ...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear. Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court .

Belief within limits, yes. At least, I can only think of a couple of possible explanations for the event: 1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple…

It's also worth noting that the meeting in question was in 2104. That's over a decade ago now.

It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#434

Post by enragedcacti »

snowwrestler wrote: post #343
clhodapp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phil Schiller was one of the strongest voices against cross-platform messaging interoperability. He's just as bad as the rest of them.

You can’t guarantee E2E across messaging networks. Apple still doesn’t do it, and neither does Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.

> RCS update adds end-to-end encryption, Google and Apple confirm support

https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#435

Post by nilamo »

raincole wrote: post #361
kmfrk wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so jarring to get these kinds of message, especially for compliance with EU directives, because it's so obviously designed to look un-Apple-like which triggers some sort of malware or scam heuristic without the typical nice Apple presentation. Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.

I'm not even sure how "external website" is malicious compliance. Yes, I know the intention is to sound scary. But external website is the correct, neutral term which means... external website.

Why does it need to be labeled at all? Is opening netflix.com while in the Netflix app really an external website?

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#436

Post by mananaysiempre »

registeredcorn wrote: post #429
cwmma wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege, which is one of the reasons the judge is SO pissed at them.

>they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments? I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?

> THE COURT FURTHER FINDS that Apple’s abuse of attorney-client privilege designations to delay proceedings and obscure its decision-making process warrants sanction to deter future misconduct. Apple is SANCTIONED in the amount of the full cost of the special masters’ review and Epic’s attorneys’ fees on this issue alone through approximately May 15, 2025, the anticipated date of completion.

So pretty mild thus far. As far as I remember from reading other court decisions, court-imposed sanctions against individual lawyers are also a thing. As far as the clients are considered, given production of documents is mandated by a court order, presumably this counts as defying a court order and so any punishments would fall under criminal contempt?

(Not a lawyer, in case this wasn’t clear from the above already.)

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#437

Post by Wobbles42 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #156
thealexliang wrote: post #44

"Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, the…

It's so good... but also it has taken so, so long to get here. The US should've done something about the app store tax a long time ago. People thought Apple won their case, but it... really just took time to get here. You get to try malicious compliance with judges exactly once, and then you're over.

> and then you're over What does this mean in practice?

Apple is still doing business, has three years of profits from the malicious compliance, and appears to have attracted not much more than a sternly worded letter from a judge, and possible criminal contempt charges for a couple of individuals.

What real world consequences does Apple face for this behavior?

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#438

Post by petesergeant »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #420
petesergeant wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

It feels like if you'd expect someone to be something based on their background, _and_ they profess to be that thing, then the onus is on the person disputing it to come up with the evidence contra?

> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying

The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#439

Post by poincaredisk »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #364
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot me down with examples here, but my impression is that the US (historically, not just in the last three months) will never hurry to curtail the ability of a US company to make profit. With the possible exception of when a US company egregiously flouts laws that already exist. Effective regulation isn't a strength of the US.

The US has no problem with regulating its industries. It just doesn't do it pre-emptively out of fear the way the EU does. It actually lets business develop before assessing any damages.

So you're arguing that it's s still to early to assess Google, Meta, Amazon and other big tech? Somehow I don't think that's right and EU realized the need of regulation much earlier.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#440

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

saagarjha wrote: post #289
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR. Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation…

Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.

Illegal but practically never actually consequential.
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