U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#501

Post by yieldcrv » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #13

> The Justice Department, which began its investigation into Apple in 2019, chose to build a broader and more ambitious case than any other regulator has brought against the company. As I was reading the specific charges detailed in the article, I was thinking this case seems like a stretch and will be difficult to prove. Apple will argue that security and/or performance reasons drove their decisions related to brows…

yeah its a novel expansion of antitrust law to say that merely maintaining features that the market chose is an antitrust violation

if you weren’t anticompetitive to get to that place, thats been good enough?

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#502

Post by khazhoux » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

Draiken wrote: post #433

endisneigh wrote: post #129

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products. In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device? Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Wh…

If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways? IMO it's clear that without abusing its position, we would actually have competition for all of the bundled services from Apple. But this is capitalism. The ultimate goal is always monopoly, so they'll keep chasing that by whatever means necessary. >easy to make alternatives to Apple products What? This is plain fal…

> If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?

iOS today regularly updates with improvements across the full software stack, up to the Apple apps themselves. Sometimes these changes are major. In the world the justice department is asking for, big changes to —for example, Messages app— would have to be coordinated with every app developer in that category. Changes would takes much, much longer, and in many cases would have to be watered down.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#503

Post by skeaker » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #129

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products. In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device? Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Wh…

Their platform is big enough that it affects the market even if you never use their products. Idiotic decisions that they make can ooze into other unrelated products in order to compete with them. Try buying a flagship Android with a microSD slot and a headphone jack. Now recall where the trend of eliminating those two things came from. The average consumer is not very keen to these things. They see the biggest player, Apple, gut a feature and lie to them about it being a good thing, and they will believe it. Now to recapture the average consumer the other players in the market have to adhere to those changes.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#504

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #493

ChuckMcM wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. The first one I heard about[1] was IBM versus Memorex which was making IBM 360 "compatible" disk drives. IBM lost and it generated some solid case law that has been relied on in this sort of prosecution. In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of…

> In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money I’m curious what market opportunities the Apple suit could open up. - Xbox cloud game streaming - WeChat like super apps w e-commerce (X wanted to do this play but more likely Facebook Messenger and the like) - iMessage on android - a receipt tracking app or something directly tied into Apple P…

From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.

The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#505

Post by jobs_throwaway » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

supportengineer wrote: post #499

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

This makes me so angry. You have a choice in the market! Everything on this list is a feature which I am choosing as the customer. If I didn't want these features and benefits then I would make a different choice as a consumer. As a consumer I am not a victim. I can choose between iOS, Android, or something else.

You are specifically choosing to not have message interoperability? Why?

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#506

Post by shuckles » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

harkinian wrote: post #449

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#507

Post by skyyler » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

supportengineer wrote: post #499

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

This makes me so angry. You have a choice in the market! Everything on this list is a feature which I am choosing as the customer. If I didn't want these features and benefits then I would make a different choice as a consumer. As a consumer I am not a victim. I can choose between iOS, Android, or something else.

I wonder if people made comments like these in support of Internet Explorer when Microsoft was dealing with antitrust law in court.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#508

Post by mrkstu » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #442

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

Interesting! So this doesn’t include the 30% Apple tax in this lawsuit?

Epic losing their suit pretty much torpedoed that plank. The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#509

Post by khazhoux » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

I hope this lawsuit fails. As a user, I’m very happy with the tight Apple ecosystem, and I don’t want my experience to be compromised just because some other companies wants to make money in Message or Photos space.

The only place Apple needs to change, imho, is the app store tax.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#510

Post by rootusrootus » Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

harkinian wrote: post #449

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets?

Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.