Comment by smoldesu

Android is a brand. It's trademarked by Google.

Apple sells over 60% of new smart phones in the US.

iPhone is not a monopoly since z lot of companies sell phones, and with significant market share.

iOS is not a monopoly since at least one other major operating system exists, with significant market share. (Whether Linux is or isn't a competitor is irrelevant.)

A monopoly by itself is not a problem. Only behavior ancillary to that monopoly is. But to get there you have you have a monopoly. I don't see how you make the case. Clearly consumers have choice.

Now, there's a case to be made for bad behavior, but its weak. Apple will argue that consumers have choices.

But I am not a lawyer, so I'll leave it up to the lawyers on both sides to earn some fees discussing it.

In their App Store they absolutely have pricing power. They take a high tax, which is higher than most actual taxes, on nearly every single application installed despite doing basically nothing. Things like denying a application the ability to even mention services can be bought elsewhere are the worst offender of their misconduct and other offenses would be forcing apps to use their payment system, again with an extremely high fee, even on recurring subscription charges. Normally a payment processor takes 2 to 3 percent, not 30 %.

Not a lawyer (let alone one specializing in antitrust law), but it looks like the relevant legal standard is "dominant position". Basically, it's legal to have a dominant position, but that position can be abused through certain categories of actions. By contrast, under the Sherman Act it's nominally a felony to even attempt to become a monopoly (although the application of this by courts has apparently been both complex and contentious).

This is exactly the same argument Epic made, and lost.

Just like you have an illegal monopoly of 100% of the market of people posting on HN with the username "InsomniacL".

Given the discovery both Apple and Google went through in their Epic trials, I would think that any collusion would have been documented by now. You don’t need collusion to have price convergence, just market forces. Are you arguing that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are conspiring to fix the prices of console video games? All of them have fairly similar licensing requirements.

Anticompetitive != monopoly.

Edit: I give up trying to help people

That's still the case. Its still almost impossible to buy a Linux laptop from one of the big vendors. Even the rare models that they do sell, like the Dell XPS Developer edition, are hidden so deep in their website that they're almost impossible to find unless you're sure it exists.

A whole generation of people who don't know how horrible Microsoft was. Two decades later, people are still bitter. The amount of great tech that got stifled.... SMH.

The user is choosing the Apple ecosystem and is happy to make these rules. They allow games because some people like to spend their battery power on games.

I’m not saying I think they should be able to, I’m saying this is unlikely to be proven as an antitrust violation under the Microsoft precedent.

I think Apple’s argument would be that making choices as to what you sell and for what price more or less is the core of what running a company is. If users don’t like the choices they make, they can shop elsewhere. That’s capitalism 101.

That brings us back to the question whether they’re a monopoly. The justice department seems to say they have a monopoly on iOS, so that users cannot shop elsewhere.

If such a thing can exist, of course they have a monopoly on iOS, just as Coca Cola has one on Coca Cola, Mercedes has one on Mercedes cars, etc. Next question would be whether they misuse that monopoly.

Apple will argue that ‘a monopoly on iOS’ doesn’t make sense as a concept and that, if you want to run Firefox or Chrome on a smartphone, there’s plenty of choice in the market, and even if there weren’t, there’s no obligation for them or any company to make a product that users want.

In the end, the outcome of this will depend less on logical arguments than about what ‘the people’ want. Laws and their interpretation will change if the people want that. That, I think, is what Apple should be worried about.

The argument would be that they didn’t want iPhone users, especially with early models, to end up choosing other engines that were much worse on battery life and that would hurt the image of the iPhone. Back then, there was no battery settings where you could see what was eating your battery. It was all opaque and could make people think the device had lousy battery life.

And yeah, I think it’s unlikely someone could have made a more efficient browser than Apple since they didn’t give public access to all of their functionalities. And that might have been partly for security reasons, if there were less-secure aspects to hidden functions, for example.

The counter-argument is that they should have opened everything up, but Apple will say they were going as fast as they could responsibly go, and that’s why there were limitations that have been relaxed over time.

Battery life is more of a concern on mobile devices because if your phone dies you can't call 911, get an uber, navigate with maps, or message a friend. There's more reason to protect mobile batteries than laptop batteries.

This is an artificial distinction. A browser normally comes with its own rendering engine.

In my experience, Firefox does not work as well on the iPhone as does Safari. It's obviously a rendering issue, because large pages will reload on their own over and over again while I'm trying to read them. My guess is it's a sneaky broken part of webkit which Apple knows how to fix in Safari and deliberately leaves broken for the other browser makers to suffer the consequences. Because, that's just the kind of bullshit which Apple is down for.