You don't have to have a monopoly to be guilty of anticompetitive behavior, a monopoly simply means it's easier to be anticompetitive. Apple in the US has a roughly 50% market share.
The dissonant threshold is dominance not monopoly. But specifically willfully and intentionally conspiring to use that dominance to manipulate pricing, exclude competition, and otherwise distort cross market structure to their advantage.
The MSFT vs DOJ did in fact use their monopoly power in operating systems to enter a new commercial market, price anticompetitively (price a competitors commercial product at zero), bundle with their new product with monopoly product in a mandatory and exclusionary way, etc. The actions were willful and planned, had no other commercial consideration other than harming competition. Even so the action came many years too late and Microsoft had successfully destroyed Netscape and it took until Chrome before any competition surfaced.
You're right, in that Microsoft used their dominance in one market (operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (web browsers)
Apple or Google would have to be doing something similar, like using their dominance in one market (operating systems) to gain an advantage in a seperate market - for example, music streaming services (Apple Music, Youtube Premium) or web browsers (Chrome, as pushed heavily by the world's most prominent OS, Android)
To be clear: Android is not the entire reason Chrome is ubiquitous. My arugument is that Android is, pretty clearly IMO, a competitive advantage when pushing a web browser.
I think a key consideration is they created the entire platform inclusive of the market structure day zero. The law doesn’t protect against market dominance in one or more markets and they’re not leveraging one market against another - they created the markets and distribution channels.
It’s like claiming Amazon Kindle not hosting Nook bookstores is anticompetitive or Krogers not letting Whole Foods sell in their store or Peleton for not opening their bike to other fitness products. They built the platform and the distribution channels, are they obligated to host everything in any channel?
While side loading is a feature of general purpose operating systems not all operating systems offer it, and it’s only really coming to be an issue here because of the ubiquity of their product. But the lack of side loading isn’t new, and has never been offered. To that extent it’s more along the lines of market dominance alone, not using dominance to distort adjacent markets or willful anticompetitive behavior.
I suspect Apple and Google will not be forced to open their products in the US as it’s not clear their strategy runs afoul traditional interpretations of law.
> they’re not leveraging one market against another
I'm sorry, is your point that "Music streaming service" is not a market? Apple allows signups via every way one could access the application - mobile, web, and desktop. Tidal then has a choice: they can have the same advantage as Apple (a smooth flow with signup prompts available everywhere), or they can have the same pricing model as Apple (by not paying the 30% App Store cut). Tidal cannot have both.
How is this not Apple using their market dominance in app distribution (either due to OS dominance or Apple's exclusive app distribution channel, take your pick) to gain an advantage in the Music Streaming marketplace?
I can see your point, but prefer to stick to rock-solid, unimpeachible arguments (Apple Music for iOS, Google Chrome/Play Store for Android). I shy away from Safari/iOS because Apple is using iOS' dominance (in operating systems) to gain an advantage in web browsers - but that browser is only available for iOS and MacOS. They've steered very clear of using iOS' dominance to push for browser dominance in every other operating system not owned by them.
Going so far as to not even release a client leaves them with a relatively safe defence of only pushing for deep system integration with their own products, as opposed to market dominance in web browsers (as they're likely to be accused of).
I certainly think they would have been safer. Bear in mind though, at the time, Windows had 97% of the desktop market [0]. This wasn't a corporation with ~50% of the market (like Android in the US) trying to muscle in, this was a company with their hooks so deep in personal computers that any product they pushed became a de-facto standard that everyone was expected to at least have access to, if not use.
Hell, the most dominant companies on the planet today, including the literal trillion dollar ones, do not have that kind of market penetration. Google search, the closest I can think of, is still <92% [1]. And it's not that I think holding 92% of a market is good. Nor do I think Apple should get away with only allowing re-skins instead of real browser engines. But percentages are room to quibble, and re-skins can be spun as integration or security.
Whenever Apple's gilded cage comes up, there's backlash, whataboutism, and apologists - so as we start to force interop, openness, and more pro-consumer behavior, I stick to the unimpeachable arguments. Even if it's just till we break the inertia and get the ball rolling. I think you're right, and you make an excellent point. But first I want to convince even the Apple die-hards that this level of control is fucked up, because then we can all agree that something has to change.
It is also difficult to prove because a web browser, yes even Safari, is an open platform by design and it can can run 99% of the web successfully just like other browser. Yes that is true even for Safari. People like to call Safari the “new IE” but in reality today’s web works equally well in all major browsers including Safari.
(Wait for someone to comment that that feature XYZ does not work on Safari and therefor it sucks - yes but that is the nature of the web and browsers. Every Single Browser out there has something missing or added. That has not prevented anyone from building great websites that work in all of them. )
I see this point, and others similar to it brought up often, and I think it stems from misunderstanding what antitrust regulation is trying to solve.
By the way, I say this respectfully, not as a dig towards you.
From a US antitrust perspective, almost all commerce has anticompetitive characteristics.
Think about it: very few businesses will act in a manner beneficial to their competitors. Most will actively act against the interest of their competitors, but almost all will not go out of their way to facilitate their competitors (passive anticompetitive behavior, if you will).
Straightforward concepts to understand what I’m trying to say here are things such as Pizza Place A not selling stuff made by Pizza Place B.
Closer to home, another example would be a device manufacturer, like a smart thermostat, not allowing their competitors to create software and apps that replace their software.
Behavior like this can be found all across commerce, from small businesses and startups to big corporations.
So the legislators (to a lesser degree) and the courts, understanding that laws need to be applied equally regardless of who the parties are, recognized that if they’d purely penalized anticompetitive behavior in a general sense, it would severely impact commerce in general.
Even prevent competition to a degree by preventing new market entrants from making their products work exclusively for their own benefit.
Analogous to this is the idea of penalizing all monopolies.
The issue with that would be that so-called “organic monopolies,” sometimes also called “innocent monopolies” (i.e., companies that gained a dominant market share by merely being successful), would be punished for their success alone.
Instead of banning all anti-competitive behavior, and analogous to this, banning all monopolies, they came up with the idea that only those that leverage their market dominance to protect or increase their market dominance should be penalized.
There are a bunch of nuances to be had, but in a nutshell, this means that imposing something onerous is okay while you don’t have dominant market power, but doing it while you have dominance would be a no-go.
Subsequently, this also means retroactively penalizing particular behavior initiated before gaining market dominance is generally not done because it indirectly punishes success.
Circling back to the example of Safari (or WebKit, to be exact), when Apple imposed this rule, it had an insignificant market share and little leverage. Because they maintained this rule from the beginning, this would not be deemed an antitrust issue.
Had Apple not imposed this from the start, but instead, had they started imposing this after they gained market dominance, then it could be an antitrust issue because now you’re leveraging your market dominance against parties who may not be able to withstand this pressure due to a variety of reasons such as being dependent on the ecosystem.
Apple is very conscious of this, which is why it generally starts with a very restrictive set of conditions, and sometimes, along the way, it loosens the reigns because doing the opposite way is not an option for them from an antitrust perspective.
Two clear examples of this come to mind.
First is the App Store, and it's often derided commission. Apple started with a simple 30% commission fee.
Later, they provided a 15 percent point discount on recurring subscriptions after the first year, followed by the same discount for streaming services in the Apple Video Partner Program, followed later by the same discount for developers in the Small Business Program.
Had they done this the other way around, say they started with 15%, learned after gaining market dominance that the 15% wasn’t sustainable, and then tried to increase it to 30%, they would be opening themselves up to antitrust penalties.
Related to this are their guidelines that prescribe what kind of apps are needed to implement IAPs. It started with all apps that provide products and services that weren’t consumed outside the app (i.e., physical).
Then they added the so-called “Reader exception,” later, they exempted free apps that are a companion to specific online tools such as email and cloud storage.
Now that they allow game streaming services, they need to offer IAPs for services sold outside the app, at least for now, because they can always loosen the requirements but never tighten them.
The other example is their relationship with carriers. When Apple launched the first iPhone, and they were insignificant on the mobile phone market, they were only willing to partner with carriers that accepted their prohibition of installing bloatware on the iPhone.
A couple of years later, when they had gained a significant market share, Apple decided to implement Hotspot functionality, FaceTime, and FaceTime audio.
It stands to reason that Apple wanted all carriers to support this functionality on their terms (i.e., without impediments for users), but taking the same stand on this as they took on bloatware, something that would’ve been way easier now that iPhones were a hot commodity, could be seen as levering their market position.
The result is that carriers could do as they wanted with these functions by carrier profiles. In the beginning, a lot of carriers would turn off the hotspot functionality on some plans and would disable FaceTime use on the cellular network; later on, the carriers relaxed with FaceTime usage on their network, but many now put a data cap of sorts on hotspot usage.
Clearly, Apple felt it might lead to antitrust issues if they told carriers to fully support these functions or not expect to be supplied any iPhones for them to sell.
This argument doesn't hold up to any scrutiny if you try to apply it to any other kind of portable software.
Spotify is a music player that uses the Electron framework and it doesn't run on iOS.
Outlook is a email client that uses the WinUI engine and it doesn't run on iOS.
Netflix is an applet that runs on the Microsoft Silverlight engine, and that doesn't run on iOS.
There is something that feels wrong about Apple's restrictions for browsers but different platform necessitating different, often fundamentally different, implementations isn't quite it.
Spotify's distinguishing feature is not "using Electron". Same for all of the other apps you mentioned.
Chrome's distinguishing feature is "not being Safari or Firefox". It has this distinguishing feature on all other platforms like Linux, Mac, Android and Windows. Only on one platform is this feature missing, and that is why it is emphasized so much.
Well even on iOS Chrome is a different app from Safari and Firefox. Mozilla has two different browsers — even on iOS where all browsers are "the same" Mozilla sees enough differences to have two separate ones.
You're just restating the premise. I think Outlook could make a case for just being a wrapper for Apple Mail. Valve could make the case that Steam's distinguishing feature is lacking on iOS. Again, there is some signal here but I've never heard anyone be able to really explain it.
Outlook could make a great case that Apple’s own email client has access to all kinds of great iOS APIs that are only available to Apple and not to third party email clients. Apple mail has deep OS integration that is impossible for third party email clients. Apple Mail can fetch in the background at will while Outlook has to build that on top of mediocre APIs.
the engine it’s running is the safari one, chrome on iOS is just an alternative interface with different syncing semantics.
that said, this thread of reasoning has started wrong, there is no market for web browsers on iOS just like there’s no market for phone diallers on your in-car stereo system.. What you get is what you get, and that’s always been the case and Apple products are the only devices that can run Safari…
if you keep thinking of apple devices as computers instead of like consoles or appliances, then you are going to get upset.
There is a market for web browsers as soon as Google is able to ship a “real” Chrome for iOS and half they start breaking things gently on the web for other browsers. Just like they did over the timespan of a decade.
Once Chrome can ship on iOS you will see everyone’s market share crumble and Chrome becoming the only browser.
That is anti competitive and not even addressed in any kind of way by the DMA.
On the contrary, it is the end game for the OWA, which is largely a front for “let’s make sure Chromium will dominate the web so that Google can push project Fugu down everyone’s throats.”
I find this difficult to reconcile with the case against Microsoft, which I understood to be about pushing IE on Windows.
Are you saying that the case against Microsoft wasn't based on anticompetitive attempts to dominate the market for web browsers, that the law has changed since then, or that Windows is somehow different from iOS legally?
Another distinction is that the EU has figured out something in between.
That the US has been waging an economic wars and used unconventional warfare techniques, corporate espionage, corruption, and weaponized the US dollar.
That US businesses have been lobbying and interfering with politics in the EU to provide themselves with competitive edges.
Lobbying is itself illegal in many EU nations hence done undercover, thus is plain bribery and corruption of government officials
EU has started retaliating, that's all. At least in using the justice system the way the US has instrumented its own to serve US businesses, helping them win certain markets, and fine competing foreign to the US businesses, fortunes, and ruining them whenever possible.
Still, not letting side loads, imposing to be an intermediary and payment gateway between all publishers and their audience, taking an outrageous commission rate, plus a fixed developer licensing fee, plus forcing all developers to build the published binaries exclusively on Apple made hardware, plus disallowing third parties to repair, plus circumventing the right to repair bill, altogether is without doubt abusing a position of dominance and deploying anti competition tactics.
Saying these are measures to keep users safe is a fallacy and an insult to educated consumers, all it says really is a reveal of how Apple considers its consumers at large.
This is also not true. Netscape destroyed Netscape. For anyone around at the time, they know that Netscape was a heaping pile of shit on every single platform it ran on.
In comp.sys.*.advocacy groups back in the day, it was a point of nerd pride how well your platform could handle a Netscape crash.
Microsoft got into trouble because they forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses for all of their computers sold whether or not they had Windows installed and they didn’t allow OEMs to install Netscape.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with entering new markets using the resources you have from your existing markets. Should Netflix never have entered the streaming business?
And it wasn’t Chrome, Firefox started chipping away at IEs dominance before Chrome.
At the time IE was horrific and basically didn’t exist. Microsoft reallocated the entire focus of the company R&D towards development of the next version of IE - a colossal investment of resources that outstripped all of Netscape’s revenues for all of its history just on developing a free browser to put it out of business. So, yes, sure. It was incredibly better. But it was anticompetitive to develop it in that way. With the same resources, could Netscape have done it? Would Microsoft have done it if there was any commercial considerations?
Netscape made a product that ran on over 20 operating systems and promised a future where the operating system was a detail for how to launch a web browser. Microsoft saw this as an existential threat and crushed Netscape under a mount of money that was spent to ensure the only meaningful browser was a feature of their operating system.
After their Pyrrhic victory, IE decayed with very little investment. As you would expect in something that was developed only to destroy.
So it’s “anticompetitive” to use your resources to make a better product to compete in a new market? Was it anticompetitive for Google to give Android away to crush all of the competitors beside Apple? Was it anticompetitive for Netflix to use its profits from its dvd by mail business to create a streaming service? Apple to create iPods and then iPhones? Amazon to start AWS?
Netscape did run on a lot of platforms - and it sucked on all of them.
No, and there were thousands upon thousands of pages filed on both sides arguing both sides with hundreds of pages of written opinions explaining why this behavior is different than normal competition. A lot of it was Microsoft leaderships very specific motive, which was not about creating more competition but in specifically eliminating all competition. It’s not illegal to compete in a market or create new markets. It’s illegal to use market dominance in one market to destroy all competition in another.
How exactly do you think companies that survive and don’t suffer from the “innovative dilemma” manage to survive if they don’t use their dominance in one market to get into other markets?
What Microsoft did was much more nuanced than spend money to get into other markets - it involve pressuring OEMs not to work with competitors among other things. BTW, this is the same thing that Google has been fined for repeatedly.
Apple has excluded all other browsers on iOS, requires you to buy more apple hardware to produce software for iOS, and has all of their rules around IAP and not allowing you to even link to an alternate store in many cases.
If iOS had a 90% market share in the US, I bet they'd have a lot more legal troubles
This actually is illegal in many countries as it is a violation of net neutrality.
I don’t remember what the current net neutrality status is in the United States but if the FCC is currently requiring net neutrality then things like zero rating would be illegal.
I mean, every business is anti-competitive. The only time the authorities step in is when they dominate markets to a degree where competition no longer functions. iOS market share is strongest in the states I believe at 57%, which is certainly high but not even remotely approaching a monopoly.
>iOS market share is strongest in the states I believe at 57%, which is certainly high but not even remotely approaching a monopoly.
Ackchyually you don't need to be a monopoly to warp the whole market in your favor.
Windows was a monopoly back in the day with ~95% market share, but users could easily install any other apps and any other browser besides IE. The issue was many users stuck with IE because it was the default, but Microsoft wasn't blocking them from installing other browsers than IE or other apps not sold through their channels.
Meanwhile, Apple might have only 57%-60% market share instead of ~95%, but unlike Microsoft, it's actively blocking users form installing any other browser that's not Safari based and any app that's not on the AppStore, therefore doing even more damage than Microsoft was doing back in the days.
And speaking of iPhone market share, despite being it 57%-60% of the US right now, it's also the most wealthy and influential of the market, and looking at the demographics, it's at 87% amongst US teens, so it's safe to assume those teens will stick to iPhone when they grow up due to inertia and network effects, and then iOS market share will be close to 90%, therefore a guaranteed monopoly.
> Meanwhile, Apple might have only 57%-60% market share instead of ~95%, but unlike Microsoft, it's actively blocking users form installing any other browser that's not Safari based and any app that's not on the AppStore, therefore doing even more damage than Microsoft was doing back in the days.
Okay so like: humor me. What is the damage incurred by the user's inability to install, for example, a true Firefox on iOS that uses their Quantum engine? I'll fully cosign that iOS' Safari has quirks that make it kind of annoying, very occasionally, like once every few months I'll find something that it does in a bizarre way that others don't. But I swear every time the topic of iOS' dominance comes up, there is a detachment of users out there who are simply furious that they can't install a web browser that doesn't use Apple's WebKit on an iOS device and I just... I do not get it. At the absolute worst I have never given even 10% of the shit required to where I would upend all my stored passwords and whatnot for the ability to even use a different WebKit based browser.
Now, granted, if this was the situation on the Mac, oh hell yes, I would absolutely be right there with everyone else and grabbing my own pitchfork. But on my phone? On my tablet? I dunno, am I weird for just not really caring?
It's not directly affecting you the user, it's affecting the market of app and web developer which have no choice but to dance to Apple's tune as they control a large chuck of a very lucrative market.
Why should you, the user, care? For the same reason users care when Micros ft was a monopoly on desktop.
How is that different than web developers being required to dance to the tune of basically every major browser? They all have little oddities that have to be taken into account, speaking as someone who has done quite a bit of web development, every major browser has it's deviations from the standard, intentional and often otherwise, that require little tweaks to one's code.
And to be totally honest with you, a lot of Safari iOS's quirks are unambiguously good, pro-privacy practices that frustrate the shit out of surveillance marketing firms and I quite hope Apple keeps it up.
> ..to be totally honest with you, a lot of Safari iOS's quirks are unambiguously good, pro-privacy practices that frustrate the shit out of surveillance marketing firms and I quite hope Apple keeps it up.
I don't want to repeat all the arguments already said by others in this thread so all I had to add is that any monopoly can and does eventually end up abusing it's power for profit. Now it's towards developers and competitors, tomorrow it could be towards users aka you.
The fact that you don't see a problem with that is the issue because you seem to assume that Apple is and will always be on your side and looking after your best interest.
The fact that the most popular option in a demographic where someone else pays for the phone is the most expensive option says almost nothing about what those users will do when they have to spend their own money on an option. I highly doubt 87% of the population will be buying a luxury brand with their own money. Convincing mommy and daddy it’s socially isolating to be on Android sure. But their own money in their 20s I doubt it.
> I highly doubt 87% of the population will be buying a luxury brand with their own money.
You're making it sound like they're Lamborghinis or Patek watches. Maybe in developing countries iPhone is a luxury brand, but in no way is it in any western developed countries, especially the US, the wealthiest of them all.
Yes they're expensive as in that's a lot of money compared to a 600 Euro Pixel 8 or a 350 Euro Samsung A54 which do more or less the same shit as an iPhone does, but they're not unaffordably expensive in order to be a luxury good.
>But their own money in their 20s I doubt it.
Credit, installments and carrier plans, make it that anyone can afford an iPhone. I live in a central EU country where average income is less than the US, and even the pizza delivery courier here can get an iPhone.
Let's do some napkin math: The iPhone 15 Pro is ~1200 Euros with tax here. A full time supermarket "wagie" with no education takes home nearly 1800 Euros per month after taxes. Subtract 600 Euros rent, 400 for eating, 200 for utilities and bills, and you're left with about 600 a month to spend as you please.
So you can buy the latest iPhone after saving for 2 months, or instantly by walking in to any carrier shop and signing a 3 year contract for a plan which you need anyway.
How is that "luxury"? Yes I know, this lifestyle is probably luxury compared to how average people live in some nations from Africa, Asia, LATAM and Middle East, but definitely not in the developed west. Otherwise Apple wouldn't be selling them by the boatlaod.
Surprisingly, iOS is a bit more popular in Japan than it is in the US, where it has ~68% marketshare. That market usually favors local manufacturers (Sony among other local companies still make Android phones), but that for some reason doesn’t apply in this case.
In the US, Apple is a minority player. I have no clue why Wall Street values them as a $1T company, when all they do anymore is make a bunch of phones that are under-competitive and over-expensive.
The only time in the past few years that iPhones out sold Android phones in the US (the only market which Apple is a major player in; any of the global markets, they're virtually a nobody) was a glitch in 2021, most likely due to being pandemic-inspired. Never before nor since have they broken the 50% barrier.
Although I 100% agree with what the EU is doing to Apple (and I hope they keep going), I don't understand why they're bothering with such a relative small fry, when Google doing the exact same thing on the Google Play Store is right there, and Google has far more capability of paying fines than Apple does.
Apple has 61% mobile market share in US, and in 2023 it shipped worldwide more phones than Samsung. Having a hefty margin on each device, avg price being way bigger than average Android; on top of that, their % share of total revenue coming from services (app store, subscriptions etc) compared to hardware shipments keeps growing every year.
Apple is a $1T company—actually, $2.8T—because it brings in over $100bn a year in operating income, and was literally the world's single biggest seller of smartphones globally in 2023.
The overall Google ecosystem is obviously more popular worldwide – but the idea that Apple only "makes a bunch of under-competitive phones", are "virtually a nobody" in the global market, or are a "small fry" is low-effort trolling.
