Comment by alxlaz
5 days ago
Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:
> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. > > The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.
This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.
This is like arguing McDonalds has a monopoly over food sold in McDonalds outlets, when you have a choice to not go into McDonalds.
This is:
1. Not about any monopoly (in fact the word "monopoly" does not appear in the press release at all).
2. Nothing like McDonalds, whose business model is completely different from an app store's.
3. Not about Apple can do to consumers who aren't in the Apple ecosystem but about what it can do to developers who wish to sell their applications and services for Apple devices.
If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.
> If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.
Neither the App Stores or McDonalds have any control over what you do outside of them. That's your problem, individually and collectively.
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The whole point of the DMA is clarifying that from the point of view of the European Union, operating a digital market on a platform is not actually like going to a McDonalds.
There is no argument to be made by analogy here. The DMA always was clear regarding what constitutes a digital market and what the obligations of the companies operating them would be. If Apple is unhappy about that, they are free to stop operating the App Store in the EU.
The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU, with the closest being Spotify, which they somehow claim is not a gatekeeper in the music industry.
They aren't being a decent regulatory body on this one, given they have not reflected on why they are in this position, nor are they being fair with applying their rules. (The same comment can be made about the ludicrous variation in applying the GDPR).
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This metaphor doesn't quite work because McDonalds aren't a marketplace. But the closest I can think of is if McDonalds sold the best hamburger boxes that people want to use at home, but then added a mechanism that only lets you put a burger in that box if whoever made that burger bribed MacDonalds, regardless of what's good for you as the burger consumer.
McDonalds are not responsible for what people do outside of McDonalds. If the entire potential customerbase decides to show up at McDonalds and exclusively eat there for five years bankrupting everyone else and McDonalds had behaved legally throughout then how are they the problem?
As I mentioned elsewhere, just look at the idiotic way Europe embraced WhatsApp. They genuinely believed it was free, and a huge proportion of users still don't understand it's attached to Meta and Facebook. They are so susceptible to product dumping by tech companies because they are astoundingly cheap and short sighted, and they will not pay for an alternative when the "free" version exists.
Except that there are hundreds of other food options while there are only two realistic options for smartphones, neither of which is cooking at home. The tight control has benefits - Apple’s App Store is much safer than letting your parents install stuff they find on the internet - but there’s a real downside which needs regulation to balance.
So we want to punish people that choose that option?
Europe could easily have had a homegrown alternative to the Play Store on Android. In fact at one time it had several, only the users had no interest at all, and this was before Google went through their phase of locking things down more.
The vision for what became the Play Store was born from ex GetJar, and I was told by several Googlers at the time that they were amazed by the lack of serious competing stores that people were running. Many threatened to do so (including my employer) but it was, from the business side, pure bluffing.
In China the android market does not rely on the Play Store, so we have definite proof it can be done.
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