I'm going to guess that the antitrust lawsuits don't stick because iOS has a 27% global marketshare, and because Apple has a very well-paid legal department.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges
There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct.
We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved.
People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is.
But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
> Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly"
Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position.
Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
The Brown Shoe Company merger in the 1960s was shot down, even though it would only control around 7% of the nation’s shoe supply.
It’s important to not just consider the quantitative impact of the monopolist (percent of market share) but also the qualitative components (is it vertically integrated? is it hurting consumers?).
I’m not sure whether or not Apple is a monopolist, but I certainly think there are some arguments.
US Antitrust law generally is about pricing, collusion (over pricing or market access), and competition more so than just monopoly power. It is straight up not illegal to be a monopoly, only to abuse the position.
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts. You can buy a Brother printer and not have to buy paper or toner from them, why should I have to buy my apps from Apple? And to be clear, that is precisely how Apple thinks of the relationship between the user and the app. Apple owns that relationship. They mediate. They manage. They facilitate. No one else. Users don't buy apps. Users pay Apple. Apple pays the app developers.
> I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts.
Epic tried to make this argument in court and failed, mostly because tying is generally not illegal if the consumer is aware of the tie when purchasing and has the option to purchase an alternative product without such a tie.
In other words it would be absolutely legal for Brother to sell a printer that only uses Brother-branded paper and toner, because if you don't like those restrictions you can simply go and purchase a non-Brother printer instead.
The real answer is just don't use apples stuff. The fact that you can fairly trivially just get an android phone and a windows/Linux computer and do pretty much everything demonstrates that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on anything.
I was an iPhone guy. Switching to Android was honestly trivial.
Apples biggest crime IMO is doing everything possible to hide the 30% tax from common knowledge, not that they charge it.
> Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices.
Market share is irrelevant, though. As we can see in this article, the ability to force an unrelated business to transform its business model to fit your needs is monopoly power.
How is that insulting to the judge? If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market and exercise monopoly-like control. Especially considering all the colluding occurring.
* If you have 27% you could be the single biggest player in a given market*
Not if your competitor, android, controls 70% of the market.
That's what I meant about being insulting. In court, when we're making these kinds of claims, we shouldn't talk about what could be, we must talk about what is.
Google's legal department is also very well-paid, but they've lost both the Epic lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit. In some markets (e.g. search) they have dramatically more market share, but 27% of phones is still high enough to have some market power.
Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android.
But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist.
As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does.
[0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use.
[1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation.
[2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.
[3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
> Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition.
Not sure how this myth keeps getting perpetuated. The antitrust laws that are relevant to the lawsuits against Apple (specifically Epic's and the DOJ's) absolutely care about market share for the purposes of proving monopolization or attempted monopolization under the Sherman Act.
(Yes, technically it is true that some antitrust violations can occur with low levels of market share, such as price fixing, but those are not really relevant to the lawsuits against Apple.)
I'm not going to fall all over myself defending Apple, but it's not as cut and dry as being a price gouge. Apple spent mountains of money on R&D to create wildly popular consumer devices, build and maintain the systems, build and maintain infrastructure, security systems, app distribution systems, and operate payment systems.
There's no reason Patreon must use Apple's store. They could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site. iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content, and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if the services Apple is offering do have value, and people are just arguing about the bill.
I don't have an explanation from Patreon as to why they didn't ship a webapp, but I can at least provide some plausible explanations.
The thing is, while iOS is only 27% of the global phone market, that percentage increases when you look at high-value customers. That is, the people with disposable income to spend on fancier phones[0], the people who pay for apps, and the people who would, most critically, donate to an artist's recurring crowdfunding campaign. This isn't even something I made up, it's specifically one of the allegations in the DOJ's lawsuit against Apple.
Now, you are a counterparty to this $3tn megacorporation[1] who owns all your customers. Said corporation is altering the deal: you either bill through our royalty-bearing[2] payment processor or we kick you off the platform. You have two options:
- Upend large sections of your business model to comply with Apple guidelines, including killing an unusually quirky billing model some fraction of your creators make use of, or,
- Leave the platform where all your creators' customers are, hope said creators can get people to follow along through Apple's convenient and extremely discoverable six-step process[3] to install a PWA, and enjoy degraded access to push notifications[4], having to fight Google SEO spam for discoverability, and the ongoing business risk of Apple having complete and total editorial control over how your webapp works on iOS[5].
I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
[0] To be clear, high-end Android phones cost more than iPhones now, but iPhone is still a status symbol.
[1] Incidentally, this is about half the current budget of the US government.
[2] Apple's argument in the Epic lawsuit was that the 30% is a copyright royalty for the use of iOS, which doesn't quite make sense but the judge bought it.
[3] Navigate to the website, press the Share button, scroll down to "Add to Home Screen", fill out the form to name your new home screen icon, tap "Add", relog into the PWA again
[4] Yes, I know iOS added push notification support. I'll believe it when the Google Fi PWA actually notifies me about text messages on my iPad.
[5] Yes, this risk is higher for webapps. Apple can't modify submitted apps after-the-fact (just refuse to host them), but they can modify webpages behind your back by changing Safari. To quote Cory Doctorow: "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." If users can block ads, Apple can block whatever else they want, too.
> I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
This is just hand-waving away my point, though: they can absolutely be on iOS through the browser and nobody has to pay Apple a dime. The fact that they've done the math and decided they must be a distributed iOS app in the Apple App Store means it offers undeniable value. Whether or not it 'screws over creators' is incidental to Patreon, their business model is extracting revenue from creators. Of course they're going to chafe at competition and make sure creators blame Apple for the business expense Patron is passing on to them.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.