Would Apple be a monopoly if they did enter the 'search' business? Google at least can leave Android free, and people that ship it able to customize as well as customers able to switch search providers. Apple would have a very vertically integrated stack, and would they allow anyone else making a phone equal access?
While not perfect, MicroG [1] + Aurora [2] on LineageOS [3] is good enough to get by without Google Play. I've got every app I need running on it, and haven't run into any major issues.
You do not understand how it is not free: It's sold to OEMs in exchange for control of their devices and mandatory placements. In countries who have working antitrust law, Google now charges OEMs for Play Services access per device, where they cannot legally force the OEM to default to Chrome and Google Search. And you, as the consumer, pay for it with literally all of your privacy.
really? What cost? Is that public information? My understanding was that play services was no longer part of Android core because Google didn't want phone manufacturers mucking with it (creating an inconsistent and frankly worse experience on some devices), not because they were trying to charge a fee for it.
They're all an oligopoly. Together, they monopolized government and reserve bank money printers.
It's a scheme, people take loans to buy Apple shares, then future generations will take even bigger loans to buy Apple shares from the previous people for 10x the price, then repeat ad infinitum. They don't even need to do any productive work anymore. Just busy-work, like Bitcoin is doing using ASIC miners to burn electricity.
I used to think this way too but recent cases against the iPhones App Store have shown that some courts are willing to look at the iPhone as one market.
What that means is that Apple entering search doesn’t by default make them a monopoly nor anti-competitive. But if they then change iPhones to only support “Apple Search” with no option to change that default, then Apple could be liable for claims including abuse of monopoly.
DDG+Apple user here, in the past days there were several threads on poor/SEO-spammed search results on Google and DDG. Unfortunately DDG is not really better in avoiding SEO spam than Google, so another competitor (even if its Apple) might be beneficial to everyone. Especially since google does not really have broad competition. Another poster correctly commented on why Google's results have become so bad: "Google is not making money by presenting you with the best result, it is making money by keeping you searching".
Apple is a monopoly in tech just like Louis Vuitton is a monopoly in luggage, so no. Okay, maybe for US it's Samsonite but for the rest of the world Apple is more like Louis Vuitton - a premium brand that is one of the leaders in design that everyone else follows. Just being popular in some circles doesn't change the fact that they hold a minority share in the market. Maybe people in Orange County might believe that Louis Vuitton is a monopoly but it's not.
Apple do control the reach of search engines to their customers in a similar manner of LV might choose to allow Cartier sell bracelets in their shops instead designing and selling their own bracelets. The point is, people can always go to Chanel if that arrangement doesn't fit them.
At worst, it could be a situation where the clients of a company are not happy with the recent products and they need to start buying from another shop.
I don't see how regulators should intervene in this. If not happy, go buy Samsung or Google pixel.
Apple has 60% of the mobile market in the US[1], and more than double the revenue from their dominant stake in the mobile app distribution market than Google[2], both off which make up over 99% of that market.
Also, our layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[3]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process.
I would say, Apple is very popular in the US but I don't see how it can be a monopoly when you can just order another device from Amazon and that device being just good or maybe better. In many other rich countries, people are choosing Samsung, Americans can do that too if they want.
ok the discussion is about if Apple is a monopoly by the legal definition, if we followed your prescription it would mean we would be unable to have this discussion.
One of the most important discussions in tech has to do with what companies are monopolies, in essence you are saying Hacker News cannot have this important discussion!
I can't really comment more on this idea as I feel I would be compelled to violate HN guidelines.
We can have that discussion, fiction is a popular genre and I don't see why we can't have a lawsuit fiction. Just don't confuse it with reality.
Anyway, I don't like to pretend that we are in a court. Law is simply a system that countries find useful to deal with issues and it is its own thing that not always just and can change over time and need specialisation for doing correctly.
Just remember, Alan Turing was lawfully castrated back in the 50s. Let's not pretend that the lawful process is analogous to justice, it's simply a rules system where actors are executing the rules based on the available information and cannot be performed when rules, actors or information is missing.
Even if we were judges, how are we supposed to execute the legal process without collecting the necessary data, have the claims and defences? Therefore, the legal definition is irrelevant and it's actually wrecking the discussion by pushing it to a position where we don't have the tools to work on.
That's just it; I don't think you can speak of a monopoly as long as you have a reasonable choice. Which, in the US, you DON'T have for a lot of things like internet.
> As we are not in a court in here, only the laymen opinion is relevant as it is impossible to make a strict legal discussion without having a strict legal process.
I would love to make this argument the next time vaccines are mentioned. Remember vaccines cause autism and turn the frogs gay. Any attempt to correct this using medical jargon or methods is literally out of scope for the average hacker news commenter and should be avoided.
For legal process we need to have Apple, Google and others provide us with their documents and arguments - which is not happening. We can't even have well educated guess as these things need cooperating parties or enforcement power to obtain.
On the other hand, when discussing vaccines and viruses there are numerous research in the open that we can use to build on. Any use of correct medical jargon or methods is fine as it is not a protected information. Of course you can misunderstand it but you can also understand it properly since the research and data is in the open.
Discussing what's just based on information and observations we have is like discussing vaccines and viruses based on the research and observations we have access to.
Discussing the legal process is like discussing the FDA application of a drug. It can happen only if you are part of the process or after it comes to a conclusion and information used in the ruling is made public.
If you’re not happy with Apple and Google behaving monopolistically “buy Google Pixel” doesn’t seem like a great solution. Nor does buy a phone running Google’s operating system feel like a great answer.
If you are not happy with the competition too, I guess you can watch Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to cheer you up or go make your own device.
The allegation is these companies are not competing with each other, they are working together. This includes working together to prevent competitors making their own devices. There are very limited alternatives if you want to avoid Google and Apple completely.
I'm not familiar with the Eurovision show you mention, so not sure of the relevance.
Each of those countries could easily bring suit. They wouldn't care at all that in some other country Apple is not the largest player.
Louis Vuitton is a bad example as their market share is tiny. AFAIK there is no clothing brand with a market percent as large as Apple's mobile market percent. Maybe Luxotica in eyewear but some articles claim their market is only around 20%
That's hardly a monopoly, there's hardly any absence of competition. Even if it was a monopoly it would't be illegal by default but it's not a monopoly anyway. It's more like %50 to %70 of the people in US/JP/UK have chosen to purchase the products of that company but they could have chosen any other brand that is available to them. In fact, people in countries of similar affluence have chosen the other way around with France %63, Netherlands %54, Germany %58, Spain %78 Android and there's nothing stopping the UK/US/JP do the exactly the same as the alternatives are available and competative.
It looks like Apple managed to design devices that Americans like more than the ones the other brands designed and there's nothing wrong about it.
Can Apple abuse it's position position in the market, even the smallest company can do that but the key is that if that happens people do have the option to do purchases from somewhere else.
In the UK a market share of 40% is enough for the competition authorities to investigate a company for monopolistic practices. It's less about market share and more about if the company is using its position in one market to create an unfair advantage in another. iOS and Android are both in a position with market power in many countries.
> So do you feel that anything other than 100% market share counts as a monopoly?
No I did not say that. I say, there's a healthy competition and there's no monopoly as people have viable alternatives and in many other countries people choose these alternatives and people where Apple is dominant do have the same alternatives to choose from.
There's no such thing as "right of minimum market share" that Apple violates by selling too many devices.
People do have the options and if they still buy Apple that's not monopoly, that's success.
No, I'm very annoyed by Google as their product quality keeps declining year after year and I do not have a real choice.
In fact, I have no practical ability to change my e-mail address as I'm using it since 1st of April 2004 and Google does not offer me to keep the address if I want to switch to another provider.
My arguments are in defence of Apple, not Google. I can move away from Apple at any time but I can't do the same with Google.
iMessage: WhatsApp, Signal, SMS etc. No One uses iMessage outside of the US, alternatives are very good and available on all platforms. You don't lose access to your social circle by switching away from iMessage.
Apple Watch: Just another device that has numerous alternatives. Many excel in some way, not crappy alternatives.
iCould: There are numerous alternatives, free and paid and work very well.
So, if you like to get rid of Apple, you simply tell the people you care that they can reach you from WhatsApp or your favourite alternative. Buy the new device, follow the transfer data and setting instructions, erase your iPhone&watch, give them away or sell them and you are done.
Same things can be said about your email address at Google. I moved to an alternative within a year, manually, by changing all services one after another. It was hard but worth it.
> However everyone agrees that Apple created a walled garden which is hard to escape.
An obviously false statement.
> Try to use their watches without an iPhone.
Their watches are an iPhone accessory advertised as requiring an iPhone in order to work.
Anyone who buys one thinking otherwise has been misinformed by someone other than Apple, and can return it to the store for a full refund. Then they can buy one of many Android wear or other smartwatches instead.
From my second link: "Apple iOS and other mobile devices, which are restricted to running pre-approved applications from a digital distribution service." If you find The Guardian and Time references unsatisfactory, consider this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191.
I really don't understand why you are so much defending Apple.
Except there is already precedence regarding their App Store. So if Apple defaulted to their own search engine and didn’t allow a way of changing that default then the courts might well find that anti-competitive too.
You don't need to disallow changing the default search engine because the average user doesn't even know or bother how to change it. That is the reason Google pays everyone (Apple, Mozilla, Android OEMs through GService allowance) a buttload of money to be the default.
While that is true, offering the option to change the default might still be enough to avoid any anticompetitive claims (which I think was the point the GP was making).
That said, Microsoft were still forced to present a randomized list of browser options to the user upon first install so there is also precedence of changeable defaults not being enough to satisfy complaints of anticompetitive business.
This is all hypothetical though because it's still far from clear that Apple have ever wanted to enter the search market, let alone got paid not to, let alone what might happen to the iPhone if they did.
Apple is a OS monopoly on the Apple hardware platform which affects millions of people with marked effects which can make switching away from it costy and hard.
It abuses this Monopoly position to force through other products, like it's app store, and give major advantage to it's services over the competition. Sometimes outright debiting l denying it's competition marked entry.
Even if we only look at a while phone OS marked it's a dis dual pool with Google (all attendings a minor enough to not matter). And both abuse this close to Monopol position, though one more then the other.
Sorry you're being downvoted but this is HN and it's common to give Apple benefit of the doubt.
You are right, and the term is monopolistic power, which is different from monopoly. Monopolistic power involves platform abuse which is what you're describing.
Additionally they use their position to enforce their own services, so their forced rollout of Apple Login was an example. Another example is all browsers being forced to use Safari under the hood. It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
> It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it.
Is it though? Safari seems to be pretty close to the HTML standard and at least not implement any proprietary features. Sure there may be bugs or they may lag behind but they are making an effort to be compliant.
I'd say Google seems to be the one leading a lot of decisions regarding to standards and implement them the way they want before they are actually standardizes and because they have the biggest market share Apple and Firefox just have to follow their decision.
Ideally Apple would allow third party browsers on iOS, but I think it's beneficial for users that they don't. I do believe that without it Chrome would have a much bigger market share and developers wouldn't be forced to support browsers other than Chrome and Google would have even more power over web standards than today. I guess Chromium being open source would make it a bit better.
- Missing features, supper buggy to a absurd point where you need to wonder if Apple isn't intentionally
crippling it. But hey, because some many people in management use it companies tend to work around all this bugs spending millions on it.
For users Chrome is like IE in the past.
- Having all kind of new features no one else has and people developing sites which only work for it correctly.
Still that has little to with the original comment.
I mean how is Apple outright banning competition (for example like Steam) from a marked coverying hundreds of million of people not a massive abuse of power which needs to be stopped for all the same reasons a monopoly is bad.
To just name one point (((there are other like absurd cuts for something which is just a payment service (in-app payments after paying for an app), often abusive/absurd behaviour on publishing apps, stiffing innovation (if not made/controlled by them), intentionally hindering repeatability and repair-ability regulation, including creation of an repair program where they pretend to help but actually just make sure you can't provide a proper repair service under it (let's see what will happen with the more recently announced program), intentionally vendor lock-in for developer all through their eco-system, surprisingly bad software quality for many parts facing developers at least parts which are not iOs, a whole bunch of subtle things which forces people to write apps instead of e.g. just providing a website or similar service, etc. etc. etc.))) Oh did I forgot to mention how they use the marked power to push down the prices of suppliers that they basically only can make profit by employing bs. like inhuman working conditions
or resources mined with child labor and similar and then pretending it's not their problem because they also forced the supplier to sign a contract that they don't do that.
Just because it's "per definition" not a monopoly doesn't mean it hasn't the same bad effects and other equally bad, not monopoly specific effect.
Also tbh. the problem with Safari isn't that it's slow in adapting standards Google forces through. The problem is that it's complete unreasonable buggy including on many old features with absurd bugs sometimes, and that they also lack behind on features which widely agreed to not "have been forcefully pushed through by google", like WASM. Often they support this things on paper but so buggy that it's unusable/very expensive to support them. And guess what most of this problems are focused on more "web appish" features instead of classical "web siteish" features, but that is surely a coincidence that this greatly benefits them by forcing people into the app store.
"Apple has been the biggest profit and revenue generator in the handset business. In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments."
And those are global numbers. Now what do you think their US numbers look like, or their app store numbers? They hold plenty of monopolistic power to enable abuse, and that's enough to be regulated if the government was so inclined.
And, this lawsuit isn't just about Apple, it's about Google too. Certainly you don't have any doubts about their monopoly status.
> I don't see how regulators should intervene in this.
TFA proposes some remedies in very broad strokes. Looks good to me. Unregulated monopolies and oligopolies extract excessive profits from consumers and limit choice through anti-competitive practices. You might be fine with that. I'm not.
Making more money by selling less implies large margins and I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly.
Actually, it means that their customers are so happy with the Apple product that they are willing to pay a premium to have it. Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch.
You can verify that people are not paying Apple more because they don't have an option not to do so by by checking the shops for availability of other brands(they are available) and their viability(They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple).
> I don't think that having better margins than the competitors says anything about being a monopoly.
> Apple's large margins are merely an opportunity that no one was able to fetch.
In a functioning free market, competitors would have picked up the slack long ago (iPhone is 14 years old now), and cashed in on those high profit margins too.
Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices.
That doesn't deny the popularity of Apple's products, by the way. Believe it or not they can be both genuinely popular and monopolistic / anti-competitive, with both of those factors contributing to insanely above-market profit margins.
"You can buy LG" just shows that you don't understand the distinction between concentrated market power power, anti competitive business practices, and actual monopoly, nor the fact that antitrust regulations do not require their target to be an actual monopoly with zero competitors available for sale (and for good reason).
> They are viable, in fact, many reviewers and techies say that Samsung/Google/LG/Whatever are much better than Apple
Bing and DDG are also available and viable, and "[some] techies say" that they're better than Google. So what. This metric is utterly irrelevant.
> Now, you can choose to believe that literally every multi billion dollar tech company in the world is so stupid and incompetent as to be unable to replicate Apple's "premium user experience" to capture similar profit margins, or you can look for simpler explanations, that inevitably generalize as anti-competitive practices.
The simpler explanation is they are not willing to invest the cash needed to create the Apple premium user experience.
See Microsoft pulling the plug on Windows phone and Microsoft stores. They decided to rest on their laurels (licensing fees for Excel almost pure profit and Azure rather than plow tens of billions into creating quality hardware and software and a retail experience for customers.
No, MSFT (and others) failed at mobile because there is no amount of money you can invest to break into that industry anymore, due to all the moat the duopoly has built up. It's literally impossible. Google started early and got on the last train with Android. Windows phone started when iOS App Store already had ~300K apps, and Play store had ~100K apps. That was a couple years too late. The duopoly was always an order of magnitude ahead of MSFT, and in this kind of market that's what matters.
