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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Except the competition isn’t suppressed, and there’s no actual monopoly here.

What we have is a pretty clear case of a minuscule minority of users bitterly complaining that a company isn’t making its products exactly the way they want them to.

A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores.

It just so happens that Apple’s customers absolutely love its products, and that Apple’s products are absolute technological leaders in their space.

Apple didn’t get there, e.g. like Facebook by buying up the competition any time it started to emerge as a threat. They got there through decades of focused development and investment.

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> A store is allowed to charge what it wants for its products. A store is allowed to set the policies that it wants for the goods that it sells in its own stores.

A store is allowed to block you from using any other store? These aren't natural continuations or logical extensions of meatspace, stop pretending they are.

This is literally not what’s happening. The iPhone is their product. If you don’t want to use their products and their store you do not have to. Buy a different device. There are plenty.

Apple doesn’t get to tell Google, Samsung, Huawei, LG, OnePlus, Fairphone, etc. how to build their devices.

The one device they do get to decide how it works is the iPhone. Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.

Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not. Overwhelmingly, they decide that they do.

You're making normative claims as if they are "the way things are."

Maybe the above is how you think things ought to be (I disagree), but anti-trust jurisprudence does not agree with your pseudo-libertarian worldview.

Maybe we can both at least agree the normative claims I’m making are true absent a monopoly finding.

Anti-trust only applies if there’s a finding that Apple is a monopoly. The jury, so to speak, is still out.

If Apple was found to be a monopoly, then there may need to be some restrictions placed on how they operate.

But I think controlling how your own product works is the presumed default, even if that product is wildly successful, as long as that success is through actual product merit, and not done deceptively or through illegal collusion.

> Anti-trust only applies if there’s a finding that Apple is a monopoly. The jury, so to speak, is still out.

Wrong again, you can violate anti-competition law without being a monopoly. You're correct that it hasn't been decided in a court of law.

I'm saying that I think they are engaging in anti-competitive behavior, you are saying "actually it is okay because they haven't been judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior in a court of law", which does not seem contrary to my claim, which is that I think they should be judged to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

That’s not what I’m saying.

The case law on this is not as definitive as you are claiming. I don’t think their behavior is illegally anti-competitive.

Sure, you can say that not supporting a specific 3rd party application (e.g. an App Store) on your device is “anti-competitive” but obviously not illegally so for any business.

Behavior which is totally legal can become illegal in a monopoly situation.

Dude, you're the one who said

> Their device, their decision. The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not.

and now you're telling me that the case law isn't definitive?

That's my whole point - you're making strong assertions as if they are the way the law works, when they are just your personal opinion on how things ought to work. Numerous decisions in the past have required companies to change how they do things on their devices. I'm not saying the case will be decided against Apple.

It comes down to what you mean by anti-competitive. If you mean illegally anti-competitive then there’s a debate to be had. If you mean “anti-competitive” in the sense that they don’t offer their entire code base MIT licensed, then 100% they are anti-competitive in that sense, and they have every right to choose to be.

To somewhat oversimplify, you are allowed to not invite competitors to sell to your customers in your own backyard. Unless you are a monopoly. Because then that “backyard” isn’t rightfully yours to control.

At the moment I am inclined to believe the iPhone is Apple’s own backyard and they should have dominion over what happens there.

If you want to confiscate Apple’s backyard, you do it at the risk that you damage a company that has done a great service for the world, and a company that IMO deserves the benefit of controlling its own destiny and should be left to continue innovating on its own terms.

If someone thinks they can do better then there’s trillions of dollars in market cap on the line and I welcome them to try. Apple won’t stop them from trying, but will certainly compete fiercely on the merits.

> The iPhone is their product.

The same exact argument could be used regarding the desktop PC.

Do you think that microsoft could prevent competing web browser from being installed on the PC, if it choose to do so?

I think not. They would lose that anti-trust lawsuit.

> Because they created it, they own it, and they get to decide its future.

No, actually they dont get to decide that. If they are breaking anti-trust law, via anti-competitive behavior, then there are certain actions that they cannot do.

> The consumer gets to decide if they like it or not.

The consumers, or other companies, can also sue them for breaking anti-trust law, which Apple is required by law to follow.

> Their device, their decision.

Once I buy an iPhone, I own it and it is my device.

Owning the atoms is less consequential than you infer. You don’t “own” the operating system software loaded on it, it’s only licensed to you.

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