Comment by supernova87a
5 days ago
Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.
Why is is against the law?
The EU's regulatory stance on antitrust does not require a monopoly, it requires a dominant position in a market meeting use of certain criteria marked as abuse. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... From there when they tell a company they are breaching criteria for abuse and the company doesn't change the EU issues according fines.
As for "why" this is against the law, I assume that more to mean "why did the EU make this against the law" (since the other answer is simply "because the EU law was written as so". The arguments are largely the same as for why monopolies should not be allowed to operate: to ensure free market competition by preventing a few dominating companies from unduly pressuring the market. There are, of course, some who feel the freest market is one with no governmental regulations at all but they are not the majority (at least in the EU).
But Apple doesn't have a dominant position in the EU.
They do, in several areas, at least according to the definitions of EU law. This may not meet your individual definition of dominant position of course (e.g., one might hold you need 50% market share in certain markets to be dominant, but the EU definition does not hold this requirement).
They also meet the definitions of a gatekeeper (as defined by the DMA) in several areas, which is the related law this fine actually came from.
Because EU law says they have let others into their club.
Apple has always allowed anyone into their club. You have to pay dues and follow some strict (but non-discriminatory) rules, but the result was a place which people liked going to.
Analogies aside, the REAL question is whether Apple is entitled to charge money for access to their developer APIs. Or whether Apple is entitled to place software license terms upon use of their intellectual property, e.g. when you link against Apple libraries which are then compiled into your binary.
We get up in arms about GPL violations, but also want Apple to suck shit. I don't think it's right to want it both ways.
I think the preliminary findings make this pretty clear. Read it straight from the Commission, rather than blog spam https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
The people of EU decided it will be law that Apple must allow for alternate app distribution means - you must be able to side load and/or install alternate app marketplaces. That is the law, like how other countries have different laws for parental leave, for example.
The EU regulators have found that Apple has not complied with this law because it makes using alternate app marketplaces purposefully unattractive and burdonsome for both developers and users. EU is clamping down on Apple's 'malicious compliance'.
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What if the exclusive club had one rule for owner operator and another for rest of the folks?
Would you say that's pretty discriminatory?
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