Comment by simondotau
3 hours ago
As an Aussie, I hope Apple maliciously complies to the greatest extent possible until the same rules are applied to all companies equally. And I mean ALL. Every single computing platform with any kind of loadable software developed by any third party should be similarly unlocked.
If the rules are good enough for Apple, they are good enough for everyone.
This might sound like a defence of Apple, and to a small extent it is. But actually, I’m being deadly serious. I think the world would be a better place if these rules applied to everyone.
“But poor Nintendo” rings as hollow to me as “but poor Apple” probably does to you.
This is a good point.
I think the legal side of it is, once a precedent like this stands, the cost of going after others reduces significantly. One could argue Nintendo created a closed market for Nintendo apps and abuses their monopoly power in a completely analogous way, and ask the court for completely analogous recourse.
A _better_ solution though would be legislation around freedoms and rights for general purpose computing on any general purpose computing device, rights to repair owned hardware, rights to "own" software paid for, etc. Then you wouldn't need to rely on any monopoly-abuse arguments. The powers that be would have to give up their control (e.g. governments like the notorization thing because they can ask Apple to stop something they consider harmful from being distributed easily, but the requirement to seek notorization clashes with what I perceive as my right to run any program I want on any computer I own) and to be fair having some way to protect the (non-techie) public from malicious software is a reasonable goal (where we could argue over different solutions).
I'd be happier if Apple willingly complied, and the rest of the companies were brought to heel next. It sets a cleaner precedent for smaller antitrust cases.
I’d be happiest if they were all brought to heel at exactly the same time. We don’t need precedent, we need legislation.