Comment by starbugs
2 years ago
Exactly. From my point of view, nobody needs to be a lawyer to see that this can't stand as it is. There are two major operating systems for each form factor. In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market. If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened. And this appears mainly to be due to network effects and the high complexity of the underlying systems.
You don’t need to be a lawyer to see that there’s a duopoly, but duopolies aren’t illegal. The DOJ has to prove illegal conduct, which is harder than just showing a lack of widespread competition.
> but duopolies aren’t illegal
They should be.
So if there are 3 competitors and one drops out, the other two are now guilty of something? In all my years studying economics and law, I never heard anyone suggest anything remotely this draconian.
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https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index
The term “HHI” means the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, a commonly accepted measure of market concentration. The HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm competing in the market and then summing the resulting numbers. For example, for a market consisting of four firms with shares of 30, 30, 20, and 20 percent, the HHI is 2,600 (302 + 302 + 202 + 202 = 2,600).
The HHI takes into account the relative size distribution of the firms in a market. It approaches zero when a market is occupied by a large number of firms of relatively equal size and reaches its maximum of 10,000 points when a market is controlled by a single firm. The HHI increases both as the number of firms in the market decreases and as the disparity in size between those firms increases.
The agencies generally consider markets in which the HHI is between 1,000 and 1,800 points to be moderately concentrated, and consider markets in which the HHI is in excess of 1,800 points to be highly concentrated. See U.S. Department of Justice & FTC, Merger Guidelines § 2.1 (2023). Transactions that increase the HHI by more than 100 points in highly concentrated markets are presumed likely to enhance market power under the Horizontal Merger Guidelines issued by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. See id.
>In the last ten years, no other vendor has been able to successfully place a new OS on the market.
How much of this is because of evil monopoly forces, and how much of it is because users prefer iOS and Android? It's not like the mobile device market snapped into existence overnight, both Android and iOS beat out Blackberry and managed to fend off Microsoft.
Most of it was because of the channels. People buy a phone from their carrier. They don't buy from an OS manufacturer. They don't even buy from a phone manufacturer. They get a plan and it comes with a phone. Carriers only distribute phones from a few proven vendors, and that decision involves a lot of games of golf and karaoke nights on company tabs.
Turns out the phone cartel is the phone company cartel in a trench coat.
Before either iOS or Android existed, you could get phones running Windows CE from carriers. Why didn't that stick around? Especially since those primitive smartphones gave carriers a lot more control over their app stores.
> If there wasn't a monopoly (or duopoly or oligarchy or whatever you wanna call it), then this would have happened.
I...don't think that's sufficiently self-evident to stand on its own.
Fundamentally, it's hard to have a world with more than a very small number of operating systems for the major form factors of device—unless those operating systems are mandated to interoperate in significant ways.
Creating a new operating system for phones also requires some things that are not at all easy to get:
1) You need hardware. This means that either you're creating an OS for an existing hardware platform (in this case, Android or iOS) or you're building your own phones. Given the legal frameworks that existed over the past decade and a half (as distinct from the particular dominance of one platform or another), that basically means you're building your own phones. Some people have tried to do that, but it adds hugely to the up-front cost of getting an OS going.
2) You need to get a critical mass of people using it. Until and unless this happens, what you've created has to live or die based on the apps and services that you build for the phone. No one's going to dedicate their own time, effort, and money to creating software for a phone that only 10,000 people have ever bought.
Now, I can see a pretty strong argument for a new legal framework that would make #1 much easier—specifically, requiring all hardware platforms (possible "all hardware platforms over X sales") to provide a fully-open specification for third-party OS makers to use (with appropriate clauses about dogfooding the open API to prevent the hardware maker from just using a bunch of private APIs to preference their OS). This would allow people to create their own OS for the iPhone without Apple's interference.
But that's not what we've had since 2007, so your bold but unsupported statement that the lack of third choices for mobile OSes in and of itself proves that Apple is a monopoly (or at least that Apple/Google together make up an abusive duopoly) does not hold up to scrutiny.
However, there are many unsuccessful mobile OSes. Perhaps dozens, depending on how you'd like to slice the pie.
I don't see how Apple and Android's competitors failing is any sort of fact about Apple or Google, at all.