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Comment by fuzz4lyfe | Hacker News Reader

In United States v. Microsoft Corp.[0] it was determined that Microsoft abused monopoly it's power by simply preventing OEMs from removing internet explorer.

Apple demands that all web browsing is done via Safari on IOS as I understand it.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

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Microsoft had a 90%+ market share in computer operating systems, aka a monopoly. So there's that.

But Microsoft did have a monopoly in the browser market at that time. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the browser market or the phone market or the app market. You can’t abuse a monopoly you don’t have.

The monopoly was in the OS market. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to use that monopoly to create a new one in the nascent browser market.

And Apple has no monopoly. Having a monopoly is a pre-requisite for being found guilty of using a monopoly to leverage your way into an adjacent market.

End of story.

QCOM doesn't have a monopoly in the baseband market either, yet Koh's court found QCOM's monopoly there. The FTC simply redefined a market where QCOM had a dominant marketshare -- the "premium" modem market (LTE) -- for Koh to come to that ruling.

So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.

> So I guess if someone can prove AAPL's dominance in "premium" PC, education, or some niche subgroup in PC market, it too can be in trouble.

If Apple used its dominance in some niche subgroup PC market to force buyers to pay a percentage of the total cost of all USB-C devices they buy, including non-Apple devices, to Apple to pay for Apple's patents related to USB-C. And if those buyers were companies like Best Buy that needed to be able to buy Apple devices or else lose access to over half their market. And if Apple refused to sell buyers any devices unless they agreed to those terms. And if Apple promised during standardization of USB-C to offer licenses to said patents on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms. Then that analogy might hold a little water.

You can use Chrome on iOS.

Chrome on iOS still uses Safari's renderer and JS engine.

My understanding is that Google is allowed to use their own renderer and their own Javascript engine - as long as it doesn't do JIT compilation. The ability to mark pages or files as executable is a platform security model thing.

Chrome uses WebKit because Google would rather use a WebKit/JSC engine than a slow Blink/V8 engine - especially since Blink is a WebKit fork.

If the alternative is something so slow that nobody would actually use it, does the why really matter that much in practice?

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