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Comment by CriticalCathed | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame that the Apple Walled Garden prevents customers from being able to purchase and use the software that they want.

Seems inefficient. And potentially anti-competitive.

>Spotify complained to European regulators last month that Apple used the App Store to give its Apple Music service an unfair advantage over Spotify’s competing app. Dutch regulators announced this month that they would investigate whether Apple abused its control of the App Store.

Funny that Europe of all places ends up being more pro-market than the 'States.

>In the United States, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democratic candidate for president, recently suggested separating the App Store from Apple as part of her proposal to rein in the American tech giants.

Though, maybe that will change.

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> Funny that Europe of all places ends up being more pro-market than the 'States.

Why should that be funny? The EU is explicitly pro trade and has much cheaper telecoms, air travel, and many other items thanks to aggressive pro competition policy. They forced Microsoft unbundle explorer.

In fact they have a very powerful competition commissioner unlike the us which has no such, and where antitrust has been systematically watered down for almost 40 years.

Being pro-trade and pro-competition very often means not actually being for a free market. Policies that dictate what apple can do with its iphones’ app access might be “pro competition”, but the regulation used is against free markets.

The free market argument would be to let Apple do what it wants with its products. A “competition commissioner” is antithetical to that.

Free market != allowing companies like Apple to do what they want.

Even in a free market there are regulations in particular around around anti-competitive conduct.

> Being pro-trade and pro-competition very often means not actually being for a free market.

"Free" in this context is an ambiguous word. The libertarian argument is that no regulations make a market free to access for everybody. The counter-argument is that, under no regulations, rich-get-richer dynamics inevitably lead to such wealth inequality that most actors are free in strictly legalistic terms, but prevented in practice from taking any actions but the ones that attend to their immediate survival needs.

It seems clear to me that unregulated markets inexorably condemn the majority of the population to wage-slavery and having most of their waking hours controlled by someone else.

In Europe, we are interested in freedom in practice. This is only possible by protecting the underdogs, so that they do not fall into poverty traps that are impossible to get out of, as is the case in the US -- people having to work all of their waking hours just to survive, no chance of savings that would allow them to take a break and learn new things, or try new things, or just take a deep breath and think about the big picture for a second.

It seems to me people use terms like "pro-market" to mean two different things:

- we should make sure goods and services are allocated using competitive markets

- we should let for-profit corporations do anything they choose

The EU may be doing a better job than the US at the former, but I fear they are lagging a little in the latter (only a little, though).

That's good for EU on both counts. Unchecked corporate power is a bad thing.

Pretty sure that second point was sarcastic.

Anti competitive legislation in the US exists but seems impossible to enforce when the would be subjects of this are major campaign contributors as well. Presidential candidates talk tough but start doing their donors favors as soon as they get elected. Political campaigns are big business and most of the elected officials do so on the back of lots of corporate sponsoring.

The EU has its own issues when it comes to free markets. One worrying trend is that the same companies buying influence in Washington are also donating to EU parties in Brussels.

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