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Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

wsj.com

81–90 of 631 posts

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#81
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?

Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars ?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying u…

There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#82
post #28
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…

The first thing the consulting group would have asked Apple was "what do you want this number to be?".

That's the point of hiring consulting groups.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#83
post #26

Their entire setup was egregious. They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it. I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it. https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-e…

Only one I'm aware of is Delta Emulator by Riley Testut [1].

[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#85
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?

Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars ?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying u…

I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#86
post #7

Finally. The AppStore rules are ridiculous. Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping: 1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices. 2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app. 3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows. 4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales. All…

> All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).

I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.

Absolutely terrible experience.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#87

Is there any hope of a non-joke fine here? Or are we just looking at another kiss of the wrists as them and Google and all the other big tech cos fuck literally everyone over?

The important penalty isn’t a fine, it’s a forced change of behavior to comply with the injunction. The referral for criminal contempt charges will end up being a slap on the wrist if they are even charged though.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#88
post #61

Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference. Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.

Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner. As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.

that's still not even a billion a year though, on a revenue of hundreds of billions.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#89
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…

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.

I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company. And void any forward looking renumeration in their contracts.

Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.

There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.

Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?

The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.

You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.

The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.

TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.

Re: Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds

#90
post #71
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then maybe they shouldn't be making billions of dollars
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