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Comment by abritinthebay | Hacker News Reader

And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with anti-competitive behavior.

If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.

Until a monopoly (or a collaborative effort by members of an oligopoly - in the case of price fixing) abuses these things we don’t care - and rightly so.

Plus, when it comes to media like movies, you really should complain about the movie studios & their licensing. That’s why Apple locks down videos - they have to or they wouldn’t be able to offer the content. You can see their free & easily shareable approach to music purchasing as a counter example to movies.

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Patents, copyrights, trademarks etc all keep competition from from benefiting from your hard work (or stealing it) to give first to market a true advantage. This is not anti-competitive but rather things built into the system to reward investments in innovation.

If Apple had an open platform then they'd be required to compete on quality and services. Instead they lock-in users and lock-out competing services from even being able to exist in their platform. This is anti-competitive.

Note that I say this as a user with a MBP, iPhones, AppleTV, iPad, etc... I admit I would probably be fine switching to Android (for example) if I felt the quality of the platform was better without fear of not having access to other services (but IMO the quality isn't there).

Let's look within the platform itself, though. This is a platform en-composing millions upon millions of users across over a billion active devices (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10835748/apple-devices-ac...).

Apple leverages its control of the platform to give Apple services an advantage over the competition. If Apple is not careful this will almost certainly end in anti-trust litigation.

> If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.

Patents and copyright exist novel and interesting works and ideas for a limited amount of time. It's an obvious argument that it would be anti-competitive to allow a giant competitor to steal novel ideas from their creators without recourse. It's not obvious to me how protecting serendipity is clearly anti-competitive.

Trademarks are in no way anti-competitive. They exist to support fair business practices, in particular to prevent malicious actors from falsely claiming they represent a business. It would be anti-competitive to allow anyone to steal your trademark and sell products under it.

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