Comment by zmmmmm
2 years ago
You seem to totally misunderstand the whole concept of what the competition law is about.
It's not about whether people can choose not to buy an iPhone, really at all. It's about once they do choose iPhone, is Apple unfairly using their control of the platform to influence whether they choose Apple's product vs a competitor for future things they buy.
Seems to me that if I already own an Android device and am in the market for a tablet, I would probably choose Android again because a lot of the apps that I have bought & paid for include a tablet version as well. Not sure if most would consider that anti-competitive.
I just bought Garmin GPS Watch. I'm appalled that it only let's me download apps from the Garmin watch app store. It's unfair that I can only install Garmin's OS on it. I bought the watch. I should be able to do anything I want to it. I need Garmin's software engineers to develop open solutions so that anyone can do anything on the watches they sell.
Do you see what the problem is with the above statement? How far does the government go? Shouldn't all products (electronic or not) be "open" if Apple loses?
This maybe sounds smart until you take a few seconds and notice the crazy amount of work these companies put into doing the exact opposite of your premise: preventing you from installing alternative operating systems and preventing you from using alternative marketplaces. When Apple claims they have to do extra work to make their devices support alternatives that is them lying to you and you are apparently eating it up :/.
It's far more work to create a free for all platform (what US & EU governments want) than a single product that has no external specifications.
Let's say there is an emergency breaking fix that is needed to make NFC payments reliable. Instead of just pushing the fix asap for Apple Pay, Apple would need to comply with these regulations and have to make sure other companies who implemented an Apple Pay competitor also have time to do the fixes. Imagine spending Apple employee hours coordinating this without any compensation to Apple. You'd have to beg 3rd party implementations to update their payment setup asap. Otherwise, the government/media might accuse Apple of unfairly favoring their own.
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If you have above X% market share, yes (e.g. 20%).
What company do you work for or have you worked for? Let's see if we can get your company's market share to 20% using some arbitrary definition of the market. We'll then force your company to spend time and resources to open it up to competition.
Let's do the exercise.
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