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Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

wsj.com

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Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#71

Post by lwo32k »

echelon wrote: post #35
autobodie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for? The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated. Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.

100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile. Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced t…

Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#74

Post by thaumasiotes »

flawn wrote: post #2

https://archive.ph/ZQLtD

The article is short enough that it makes more sense to quote it in full than to provide an archive link:

> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.

> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.

> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.

> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#75

Post by to11mtm »

mil22 wrote: post #4

About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?" Excerpt from the filing: "In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompe…

> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.

Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#76

Post by Aloisius »

socalgal2 wrote: post #62
nozzlegear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems rather arbitrary. I'm not doing any general computing on my iPhone, I'm just browsing Hacker News and watching YouTube. If your contention is that the phone is capable of doing more than those two things, well, isn't the Xbox capable of doing more than just gaming?

You're not. The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone. They are using their phone for everything they used to use their computers for. Almost no one is using an XBox to replace their computer.

> The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone

Source?

I can't find anything that backs that up.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#77

Post by canogat »

w_for_wumbo wrote: post #73

This is huge, because it means that anyone buying an iPhone or apple product going forward is knowingly supporting this behaviour. I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.

Apple is still a hardware company. A loss of revenue from software and services sales is far from ruinous for Apple.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#78

Post by brailsafe »

w_for_wumbo wrote: post #73

This is huge, because it means that anyone buying an iPhone or apple product going forward is knowingly supporting this behaviour. I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.

This seems like a bit of a reach tbh. It's no doubt hopefully huge, but by buying a product you're not implicitly agreeing with every or any element of internal company politics that occured during its production. I buy Macbooks because I tend to like most aspects of them, but use mostly Pixel phones, does that mean I support literally anything Tim Cook or leadership does to produce anything else? Not really, I just use the tools that work for me.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#79

Post by to11mtm »

elpool2 wrote: post #28
mrcwinn wrote: post #13

The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those ex…

As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that (1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14…

This is obscene lmao.

if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.

Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#80

Post by to11mtm »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #30
cyberax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. It would have shown that their commissions are nothing but rent-seeking.

Exactly my point! This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!" Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market. Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity. (Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberti…

When a company builds the moat too high (i.e. restrictions on external sub signups) it becomes monopolistic.

Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.

(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)

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