Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> You are not a monopoly on your own platform, especially if that platform doesn't even have the majority of the relevant market.

iPhone has a market share of almost 70% in Japan, the location of the plaintiff. iPhone also has a market share of over 50% now in the United States, by the way.

> A company makes a platform or product so that they dictate the terms and if it's a marketplace, what and how it accepts to sell in it.

Historical revisionism. For more than 30 years prior to iOS, general-purpose computing platforms were mostly open with no vendor-controlled store.

View on HN

>Historical revisionism. For more than 30 years prior to iOS, general-purpose computing platforms were mostly open with no vendor-controlled store.

That's quite the historical revisionism.

Phones weren't "general-purpose computing platforms" for the most part of those 30 years (Gordon Gecko's phone didn't have apps). Nor where they considered as such.

And there were tons of capable of "general purpose computing" popular devices in those 30 years with closed markets or even restricted acccess to the SDKs themselves, almost all game consoles for example.

> Phones weren't "general-purpose computing platforms" for the most part of those 30 years (Gordon Gecko's phone didn't have apps). Nor where they considered as such.

We're all well aware of that, but so what? There's nothing inherent to smartphones that requires vendor-locked stores, and indeed some other smartphone platforms allow various levels of so-called "sideloading".

> And there were tons of capable of "general purpose computing" popular devices in those 30 years with closed markets or even restricted acccess to the SDKs themselves, almost all game consoles for example.

I used the term "general-purpose computing platforms" specifically to contrast with platforms such as game consoles, which are by their very name single-purpose.

By the way, I don't accept that vendor lockdown of game consoles is ok either, especially at present. My understanding is that the original motivation was that game consoles were sold at a loss to encourage adoption (which I don't think is true anymore), and thus a cut of the game revenue was required to make the consoles viable. So the console developers and the game developers had a kind of mutual interest in that. In contrast, iPhone was never sold at a loss, always at a massive profit for Apple. 3rd party app developers never needed to sacrifice their revenue to encourage iPhone adoption.

It should also be said that Apple itself considered "sideloading" on iPhone before the App Store was introduced, as shown by the emails from the Epic Games trial. Scott Forstall even said that they implemented sideloading in an internal iOS build, which he discussed in an email to Steve Jobs. AFAIK it hasn't been revealed why Apple decided against it ultimately. https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/21043913-2008-may-...

What makes a phone a "general-purpose computing platform" that is also not true for game consoles? They seem the same to me: They both have general purpose processors which -can- run arbitrary programs, but the owners of their ecosystems choose to limit what is allowed to run on them. If one is a "general-purpose computing platform" then the other must be, and vice versa.

It's the design and marketing of the product. Game consoles are designed and marketed to play games. General-purpose computing platforms are designed and marketed to do almost anything (including but definitely not exclusively to play games). Apple says "There's an app for that", while console developers don't say that, nor should they, because it would be false marketing.

If game consoles were marketed and sold as general-purpose computing platforms, then consumers would be very disappointed with them, because they make crappy general-purpose computing platforms. If iPhone or Mac were marketed and sold as game consoles, consumers would be similarly disappointed with them.

Prior to the iPhone there was Palm, which I would certainly call a general purpose computing platform, where it was easy to download and install your own pdb with no vendor restrictions.

There existed general purpose computing platforms, but there’s also been just as many if not more completely closed platforms. Selling ringtones only existed because of how closed most phones were at the time.

Palm OS 1.0 was nothing close to a general purpose computing platform. They didn’t even add TCP/IP support until 2.0.

If anything the ability to lockdown Palm devices was a major selling point to many customers’s internal IT systems. That’s something I think people arguing for open platforms are ignoring, some customers really do want closed systems for various reasons.

The Commodore 64 also lacked TCP/IP. What's important is that programs doing a wide variety tasks could be programmed. Companies can and do lock down general purpose computing devices all the time, we don't need the manufacturer to decide beforehand.

That’s a personal preference. I do want the manufacturer to lock down the device when I am handing it to a young kid. Zero need for any administrative assistance is a major selling point. I can point to a ton of kid’s computers from the 90’s that included a basic interpreter and no permanent storage so a reboot fixed any problem, they where toys not general computing devices.

As to TCP/IP, a Commodore 64 included the capability to use external storage to exchange information. You don’t need both, but the capability to directly exchange information with similar devices is a major hallmark of “general purpose computing” unlike say calculators or other specialized devices. Palm 1.0 included an email application, thus TCP/IP was a core feature. Instead you need to go from palm > computer > palm, just like say an early iPod or USB stick.

Thus palm started as glorified terminals, and people still loved them.

> Phone has a market share of almost 70% in Japan, the location of the plaintiff. iPhone also has a market share of over 50% now in the United States, by the way.

Neither one of those market shares are monopolies.

> Historical revisionism. For more than 30 years prior to iOS, general-purpose computing platforms were mostly open with no vendor-controlled store.

If you don't like the iOS platform then don't develop for it or buy iOS devices. There is an endless kaleidoscope of Android devices you can choose from.

Of course it's monopolistic. What standard are you comparing to? You don't need to have 100% of the market to exert monopoly control.

Non-monopoly behavior would be users and developers having the choice to offer & install iOS apps outside of Apple's app store, but choosing the app store because the trade-off of fees is considered fair for the trust & platform convenience gained in exchange.

> What standard are you comparing to

A real judge saying that Apple isn’t a monopoly…

https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/resounding-vic...

1) The court did rule against Apple on the anti-steering provision.

2) The case is on appeal to the Supreme Court.

3) Apple paid out a settlement in another monopolist case: https://smallappdeveloperassistance.com/

I don't particularly care what the current case law says, antitrust has been eroded for four decades to the point of being a joke. We need to overhaul this around the world and tame megacorps everywhere.

The behavior is plainly monopolistic and anticompetitive on its face. That it does not suffer judgement as violating any laws about such conduct is a sad reflection of our government corruption and unwillingness to regulate the corporations that provide most political funding.

“I don’t care what the law or judges say. I know I’m right because Apple paid off a judge and the judge was corrupt”???

Who said any of that? I mean our elected government (US and Canada alike) is evidently unwilling to enact & enforce toothsome antitrust. And that's a source of a huge portion of our bigger problems. Outsized influence by a small number of voices, and a toxic cycle of using the proceeds to buy more deregulation via political donation.

> the judge cleared the Cupertino-based company of monopolistic malpractices

That does not appear to be anything like affirming that they are not a monopoly. One can be a monopoly without being guilty of anticompetitive monopolistic behavior. Likewise, Epic failing to make their narrow case is not a statement of absolute fact about Apple's market or industry position; it is a statement that Epic's specific argument was not valid or sufficient to confirm their claims.

So whose viewpoint should I believe in whether Apple did anything wrong, a real judge or a random commenter on HN?

Neither? Judges are also just random people chosen to interpret "the law". That doesn't mean their interpretation can accurately determine what is or isn't monopolistic. Judges make historically "wrong" decisions all the time.

So we shouldn’t believe judges because after looking at the law, the case being argued by Epics high price lawyers and multiple appeals, all of the judges got it wrong. But only contact9879 knows the “truth”

No. My point is that case law and judges only operate within precedent and an interpretation of law. That doesn't mean that the conclusions drawn are "truth"-ful. I'd even argue that case law can not determine a "truth". What constitutes monopolistic behaviour is subjective and case law is reflective of that. In fact, decisions are called "judicial opinions". They are a best effort to determine a truth given the tools and environment within which courts operate. That doesn't mean that the verdict is "correct" (whatever that means in the context of deciding monopolies).

>Of course it's monopolistic. What standard are you comparing to? You don't need to have 100% of the market to exert monopoly control

No, but control of your own platform is not considered a monopoly if you don't have a monopoly on the overall market.

> If you don't like the iOS platform then don't develop for it or buy iOS devices. There is an endless kaleidoscope of Android devices you can choose from.

I didn't say I don't like the iOS platform. I said there's one thing about it that I don't like. Smartphones are very complex devices with countless features, both software and hardware. It's absolutely absurd to say to people, "If you don't like [specific thing] about this hugely complex device, then buy another brand." Moreover, there is no perfect device out there, otherwise I would buy it. Everything is a compromise, with pros and cons. And yes, there are cons. But there are also pros.

One can like the iOS platform and still advocate for general-purpose computing. I don't understand why folks on Hacker News, of all places, defend walled gardens so vehemently.

What you call a "walled garden" someone else would call an openly opinionated, thoughtfully designed, and well managed platform with seamless integration and world-class support.

Again, if that's not your thing you're perfectly free to spend your money elsewhere.

> Again, if that's not your thing you're perfectly free to spend your money elsewhere.

You are in fact not, it's the whole problem. There's two actors colluding in the market, Apple & Google with very similar practices and rules ... and that's it.

Do you have citations to back up your claim of collusion?

The fact that the only change of pricing ever done was due to an anti trust lawsuit and copied straight over to start with? It's basically admission of guilt.

You can be opinionated, thoughtfully designed, and well managed without being a walled garden. Maybe once Apple is a primarily services company, they'll care less about their "walled garden" and let their devices play nice.

I honesty think that would be nice to see Apple loosen up in some ways.

But I really appreciate some of the ways in which they are strict. Developers really need to restrained from their own worst behaviors like slurping up private data, abusive advertising practices, not providing simple one-click cancelation of subscriptions, and so on.

Some people hack on computer systems, some people hack on markets.

Does Google have enough of the search engine market share to be considered a monopoly?

I think it's absurd to say something is a "monopoly" when clearly there are plenty of alternatives.

I'm old enough to remember the pre-Google internet and how the search engine crown passed between Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo! and probably others. Google did not come down from the heavens heralded by angels a fully formed tech hegemony all at once. The free market made it dominant over time because free people continue to freely choose Google. Google is not blessed with some form of immortality or invincibility either. It's dominance will only come to an end if people stop whining about it and try to outdo it instead.

For the record, I don't use Google services or products nor do I ever feel forced to as it is implied whenever someone whines about Google being a "monopoly."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com