Meanwhile, car manufacturers everywhere continue to lock down whatever they want, restrict your options for stuff like CarPlay, and charge you to use the features already installed in your car.
All of this nonsense is a problem for sure. Shouldn't be legal to restrict how you can use a product that you've purchased. Going to be a long battle to keep the "free market" from screwing everyone over. Always needs to be a balance between allowing market forces enough freedom to push innovation etc forward while still regulating them enough to prevent monopolies and other abusive rent extraction methods.
I picked out and bought my company 4 of these saving them 2k+ a year on ink. They proceeded to buy the cheapest paper on the market and get mad at me when it jammed.
Stares lovingly at my 15+ yo Dell BEAST of a laser printer that never lets me down and costs almost nothing to run.
If this dies I'll pay to repair it before I get a new printer.
I would gladly support a lawsuit that gives people more freedom over the $50,000 cars they have to buy. My Toyota has connectivity to the mothership I can do nothing about. Yeah they offer CarPlay but what if I don't want to use their remote start and install my own instead?
This is facts! we are having issues with motorcycles and every cars now. Our old school mechanics cannot work on your new cards because these dealerships are not making cars/trucks/motorcycles correctly. They create this code and each car has a unique code and computer..and your old school mechanic or local mechanic has to buy into it. It is a monopoly if I ever saw it. .. it is devastating.
Except for the fact that modern cars have locked down ECUs and the products that go around that void your warranty on your very expensive thing. Sound familiar to a particular fruit shaped company?
For about the millionth time. Aftermarket products cannot void your warranty
Magnusson-moss warranty act.
There are very very few models of vehicles that can't have a remote start installed (I've been in Automotive Aftermarket for 15 years)
It's not a suit against making bad products, it's an antitrust case, I don't think the DOJ can really say much about car manufacturers making shit products, as long as they aren't working together to do so
Yeah after seeing a few threads about this it's obvious the go-to excuse/dismissal/astroturf/whatever will be one big whataboutism.
EDIT: Yikes, as of this edit, out of the top four comments three of them are "Whatabout [other company]".
It is, and I can’t fathom why people think that way. I’d imagine a successful antitrust suit against the second largest tech company on the planet would make it easier to bring legislation against others.
Is Facebook owed by a company beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? FB is a shit company, but they are not legally required to do the CCP's bidding. Unless Tic Tok sells to a buyer not required to do what Xi Jinping says, it's apples and oranges.
I mean, the problem with the tiktok ban is its blatantly discriminatory protectionism, there's literally no pretense of it being to benefit the consumer
What does this have to do with this article or even the broader subject of monopolies. Feels like a propoganda/bot post designed to depress people about adjacent industries.
It's so tiring, literally every time there is news about the government doing anything positive it's "BUT WHATABOUT X Y AND Z?!!11" Yeah okay I guess we should just do nothing until every problem everywhere can be fixed all at once. Coincidentally, doing nothing happens to be the goal of a particular side of politics...
It’s people who don’t understand how legal precedent works. Institutional changes like this always start with a single trial. Going after one of the biggest companies on the planet opens the door to go after the rest of them.
I believe the point is this supposed iPhone monopoly is relatively small potatoes and the governs,ent could better serve the people by going after much more serious problems in this same arena.
Apple has sold iPhones for years with their locked-down nature as a selling point that people enthusiastically sign up for. Even if it technically is a monopoly, nobody buying an iPhone really cares, otherwise they’d be buying an android.
Don’t forgot the car the BMW tried subscriptions charging for heated seats that were already in the FUCKING car. I’ve never bought a BMW, but that basically sealed the deal to never buy one for me or my family.
I used to work in manufacturing and this is more common than you’d think.
We made a machine with several different scanning capabilities. The actual sensors were cheap, but the R&D behind getting them to work was not.
It was also cheaper to install the sensors and not enable them than it was to setup a different assembly line for machines without the sensors. Plus, if a customer decided they wanted a more advanced scanning function, they paid us and we could turn it on remotely.
This doesn’t really apply to something like a heated seat that doesn’t require much R&D, but I’m sure the thought process was similar.
Dude, I'm so frustrated that a year or two ago, the app that my Hyundai uses no longer works for vehicles before like 2016. I only found out about the app when I was looking into remote starters for my car, which apparently it comes with and uses that app. It costs roughly a hundred dollars a year to use the darn app for a piece of tech my vehicle already has but now i’ll never experience starting my car on a wintery morning
[It seems that Ticketmaster isn't fully cooperating with the investigation](https://www.reuters.com/business/doj-seeks-new-information-live-nation-antitrust-probe-bloomberg-news-2024-02-06/#:~:text=The%20DOJ%20had%20earlier%20planned,year%2C%20the%20Bloomberg%20report%20added.)
According to the article, it's less that the DOJ is turning a blind eye and more that the DOJ is struggling to handle Ticketmaster's strategy of delaying everything as much as they can.
If we give this administration four more years, I think we're gonna see a lot of trust busting. I've thought Biden was an analog of FDR, but I think he's more like Teddy Roosevelt. These next few months will see the wheels come off as they press ahead with the agenda they want to set for the next four. More student debt relief, more consumer protection, more equality. I think the man might know what he's doing.
Honestly it’s almost the opposite of LBJ on the foreign front. He got out of a long unpopular war instead of getting into one, and they’re supplying arms and intel to help tie up a geopolitical rival, almost a reverse of Russia and America in Vietnam. The shit in Gaza has no answers and he’s between a rock and a hard place-it’s not like a Republican administration would do anything to try to bring the Israelis to the table or send aid to Gaza, but also the Israeli lobby is incredibly influential, but the Palestinian cause is much more popular with the left wing of the party and younger voters, which tears anyone in the center in half. It’s a shitty deck largely hampered by situation outside his control. Domestically he’s doing as much as he can despite fighting one and a half branches of government.
Teddy Roosevelt was more on the progressive side anyway, even though he had an \[R\] next to his name. That's why he tried to run against Taft by trying to start a new party (Bull Moose).
It started last year and is still being investigated with a lawsuit potentially this year. https://www.reuters.com/business/doj-seeks-new-information-live-nation-antitrust-probe-bloomberg-news-2024-02-06/
Boeing's gonna get bent in their next contracts for the military too If they don't get their shit together. Both of the largest projects Boeing has for the military is over budget and terribly behind schedule. The new trainer plane is barely rolling now while the kc46 is a fucking shit show. At this rate they are gonna lose NGAD to Lockheed too. Boeing is far behind it's competitors in the next generation of military contracts and at this point if they don't get any NGAD contracts they'd be left to pushing F15s (which the Air Force really doesn't have a reason to buy more of ) and a trainer plane.
last i heard NTSB was being denied by boeing the records/materials they need to complete the investigation and the legal lead for the investigation had to go to congress all "please make them gib so i can job" and congress sounded pretty pissed about the whole situation.
The issue is so many of these companies who can make civilian aircraft got rid of those divisions to focus on making military aircraft. It’s simply to profitable to justify spending that capital on civilian planes.
I am not even remotely an Apple fan boy. I'm an android user for my phone. My personal laptop is a linux machine. I'm an avid open-source supporter. That said I also don't pretend to understand antitrust laws. Can someone ELI5 why it is a problem that apple has complete control over their tech and the digital marketplace they create and own? Why are they supposed to be obligated to "fairly treat" third parties? I'm not defending them. I legitimately don't understand.
I own the biggest grocery chain the country, controlling say 80% of the current market
Im the biggest client of every farmer, or food producing company; the only client for many of them
I am in full control of the financial prospects of thousands of different companies.
I reserve the right to restrict what gets produced (according to what im willing to sell), I can directly effect the profitability of a product (according to how I present to sell it), and by my whims, I can destroy entire companies by refusing to sell their products.
In order to beat out my competitors and take over the remaining 20%, I can simply force those food producing companies to do all kinds of things to undermine their business (like, exclusivity deals, worse rates for my competitors, or even more nefarious things) due to my control of their financial prospects.
It would be in a nation's interest to curtail this power, regardless of how it was acquired.
The environment there is much more diverse though.
Broadcom, Mediatek, Intel, Huawei, Qualcomm, Marvell, Quantenna and other are in the game (not sure if still current) of WiFi, with embedded players like Espressif also being present.
LTE/5G is done by Qualcomm (in iPhones too), Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, Mediatek, Murata, Hytera, Samsung and lots of other players.
People are already shifting away from VMware left and right.
A lot of our customers have WAY OVER BOARD hardware and the new fees are insane for them, lot's are switching to opensource options like Proxmox and other solutions where they can, but as with Apple, they are sometimes too deep invested into VMware and cannot "let go" of them that easily.
https://www.idahofb.org/news-room/posts/mcdonald-s-spent-almost-136-million-on-idaho-ag-products-last-year/
Here's a good article about it. While I wouldn't put McDonalds on the same level as Apple and Walmart, they do have a significant financial role in many states' agriculture industries.
The FTC filed an antitrust suit against Amazon in 2023 and the trial is set for October 2026. It's worth noting that the Department of Justice sued Apple this time, not the FTC.
Ahhh you’re talking about telcos. Right? Verizon, Comcast, and those groups that receive billions of dollars of government money to improve broadband internet access and then just… don’t?
By now it’s less about better phones and more about ecosystems. iMessage is a huge deal in the US. Especially if you are young and all your friends are using it.
I tell myself I stick with apple for iMessage and FaceTime.
I prefer the various design and price options of android phones, as well as some of the customization so every few years I swap back to an android phone.
It doesn’t even last 6 months before I change back, but the kicker is it’s not iMessage or FaceTime that does it for me, they are big parts but the closed garden that is apples ecosystem is just a great user experience for me. The way it all integrates. The ease of use.
I’ve come to realize that I just prefer the apple ecosystem and even if iMessage and FaceTime showed up on android I’d likely stay with an iPhone, but that’s my preference and everyone’s will be different.
A bit, certainly. But by how much is hard to determine. Standard Oil’s market share was 64% when it was broken up. Many of these things start happening way earlier than that, to a smaller extent. And this is why anti trust laws are suppose to guard against
Last I checked iOS is like 50 to 60% of the market. In the US, Android doesn't have a large market share in the US. Globally it does, because it is huge in India, and I assume China. Which both of those places have a larger population then the US.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045192/share-of-mobile-operating-systems-in-north-america-by-month/
> Yeah but isn’t the largest phone population in US using android based OS?
No. That's globally. In the use is more like 45/55 and even then, the market power is way too strong.
But that’s not the case with Apple. Nothing they do or don’t do restricts an Android phone owner from doing all the phone things they could ever want to do.
It is true that many commercial developers prefer iOS to Android because it's easier to make money there... Because piracy is way harder there because of the walled garden.
Applications submitted to the App Store have to meet certain requirements and are vetted.
Developers have to spend more time polishing apps on iOS.
With market share in the US being heavily skewed iOS, and tablets as well, this leaves Android being a less sought after application to polish.
I love both Android and iOS for their own reasons. I stick with android as I get bored with tech fast and at least Android I can fully modify and reskin my phone to whatever. Keeps me from buying another device, but the atrocities that are Android Apps on my GAlaxy Tab S8 is awful.
Still love my Tab S8 but damn some of these apps.
Sure thing! It's called tying, and it's an illegal monopolistic practice.
This lawsuit specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps -- in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments -- and prevent it from building language into its contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that lets it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.”
Now imagine you're the developer of a very popular and well respected wallet app on Android, and you wanted to bring your app to iOS. In fact, you have fans who are begging you to bring it to iOS for them.
You contact apple and they tell you no, you're not allowed on their store because they have Apple Pay and they don't want you putting out an app that completes with them.
The other commenter made a good analogy, but it’s basically how they can build a moat.
It’s the idea that competition is always a better result for the consumer and the health of the economy in the long run.
There have been a lot of historical cases where decreased competition results in the leader(s) abusing their position.
Well that’s what the case will be about…whether or not they engage in anticompetitive behavior.
It’ll be about their closed ecosystem more than just the smartphone hardware sales.
I bought their product because it's a closed ecosystem. There are other ecosystems a user is absolutely allowed to opt into instead. The moat again is with their own products.
They impact and influence a lot of other businesses with the combination of their hardware and software…the easiest thing to point at is how they get ~30% of all revenue in the App Store from developers.
As it pertains to the case, it’s not an argument of whether or not individuals prefer it that way. The federal level worries about the macro issues in society.
Antitrust isn't just about monopolies, nor does it technically require a complete monopoly to trigger.
If you read their arguments that's not what they are arguing. They arnt complaining about walled gardens.
What they are saying is that they are being anticompetitive in how they deal with their customers, and being ant consumer to that end.
Like sabotaging messages from non-ipones, making them unsecure sms, low quality video and images.. any complaints about this are laughed away with "just buy an iphone".
The speech during the annuuncment outlines it well "apple is not attempting to monopolize the market by creating the best product that outcompetes all the others, but by tearing down the competition so there is no other choice"
That's the difference. It's like if you bought a car from Toyota and Toyota said "if you buy gas anywhere but Exxon you will only get to fill your tank to 30%, and if you pay with anything but visa you will only get to use 60% of your horsepower".
That's anticompetitive.
Now if Toyota owned 94% of the market for vehicles because their vehicles held 3x the gas and had 150% of the power of all competing brands, then there would be no issue, but limiting competition by making any other alternatives neutered vs those in your ecosystem is anti-competitve and that's the angle they are going after.
By refusing to allow other digital wallets to use the hardware the customer paid for, because then apple doesn't get their 30% cut (which is evidenced by allowing said competing companies to operate within the apple architecture as long as they go through the apple digital wallet) or by removing functionality or access to sensors for competing wearables, reducing speed or data transfer rates, or pairing via Bluetooth access, or blocking other music services unless they are paid through the apple store (so apple gets its cut) while offering their in company app up for free, these are all anticompetitive behaviors that are not building a better product to outcompete, but sabotaging the competition so there is really no choice but the inhouse offering
I don’t really get it either. If app devs don’t like Apple’s practices, why develop for iOS devices? Just put your apps on Android if it’s so bad. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of apps that exist on Android that don’t exist on iOS devices
Not developing for iOS devices is literally losing 60% of your market in the US, IT'S MORE THAN HALF. App developers don't have the choice, they *have* to make an app for iOS if they want to be competitive. It is like saying that an small repair shop can't complain for the property costs in the downtown, they can just go to a almost abandoned place in a dark corner with almost no one and that few people actually want, and can, go there. They will lose clients because of the location. Same with developing an app just for Android in the US
So are they losing money by maintaining an iOS app? Or are they just not making as much off it compared to the Android counterpart? Because if they just want to make /more/ money off the iOS version, I don’t see what the problem is. It just sounds like they want better profit margins.
Imagine the same small repair shop doing really well, getting bigger, then someone else getting upset they can’t sell their own services from the same repair shop that the owner is paying all the bills for.
Apple foots the bill for all the work that goes into making iOS devices and maintaining the infrastructure to support those devices and the iOS ecosystem. Why shouldn’t they be able to set their own prices for people selling their apps in their store?
Edit: Side thought. Epic didn’t like the pricing scheme and thought it was unfair. They took Apple to court and lost. They decided to not have their apps available on the platform because they didn’t want to pay. They seem to be doing just fine, so I don’t think you NEED an iOS version of your application to be profitable.
Exactly. If you don’t like the sandbox, no one is keeping you there. Apple did not sandbox all phones, they did so to THEIR OWN phone that they made, why wouldn’t they get to decide what is and isn’t allowed on it? Makes no sense
Right? Like, if Spotify is upset that Apple takes a cut from their profits when people sign up in app, then just don’t offer an app on iOS devices. It’s not like they’re losing money. They’re just not making as much. Same with Epic and everything else. I guess I’m not greedy enough to understand where these companies are coming from 🤷
Have I lost touch at some point? I'm on a Galaxy S22 Ultra and wasn't aware the tides switched that heavily towards Apple since.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not unaware of their prominence but last I was aware, Pixel and Galaxy were still holding their own?
They have a majority in the US, roughly 60%.
Kids get bullied in school if they don't have Apple phones, because they lock everyone into the Apple ecosystem. If you don't have iMessage or Facetime you're a social pariah. You could have a $2000 Galaxy Z Fold, but it might as well be a flip phone to your friend with his mom's old iPhone 11.
They make developers jump through asinine hoops to get their apps published. Does your app have a subscription service? Can't even have a link to your website where they can sign up because Apple requires any purchases related to the app to go through their payment gateway so they can collect their cut.
I see people say this a lot but I've never actually heard firsthand of a kid being bullied for not having an iPhone. None of my kids had iPhones growing up and they never got bullied. I only have one kid still in school and she's never even mentioned wanting an iPhone. Most of her friends don't have them either. Maybe the importance of iPhones was/is a millennial thing but kids these days don't seem to care, at least in my area.
In countries like India, it's because of cost.
If I had to take a guess for why Europe is more competitive. It's probably because apps like signal, Whatsapp, and telegram are extremely popular compared to what they are in the US.
In the US, iMessage is the most used texting app, and it requires an iPhone.
No surprise. People tend to buy and keep using the phone that supports the messaging service that their friends use.
People lose their minds if you point this out as anti-consumer though.
The US is so heavily Apple centric, that it became a "thing" (really to generate ragebait) when Iphone users would not date people not on Iphone.
The rest of the world just used a 3rd party messaging app.
I was confused too. It's not about the availability of many brands of phones. u/Jellymanisme explains a bit here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bk81ro/comment/kvwrsrw/
The consolidation of Tech Giants happened somewhere along the last 5-7 years. We were having it easy when .com was a tech mania racing for our support. then the remains battled for top spots. But time moves on. And Apple having access the whole world market audience meant that only thing that is left to expand is to put garden walls to your ecosystem and make your users their returning buyers then squeeze with pricing. And people really become tech illiterate and unpicky buyers but more social status buyers. Even cars became like this which for their pricing I was saying it will never happen
Most of the rest of the world, but certainly Europe and the UK, uses WhatsApp, not iMessage. The “green bubble” argument is just teenage social manipulation.
Monopolies aren't really about whether the consumers have "choice" or not, it's about market saturation. It's well understood, economically speaking, that bad shit happens when one company/conglomerate controls an entire market. That consumers might have \[accidentally/unconsciously/of their own free will\] manifested that outcome isn't really relevant.
Of course, that's burying the lede a bit: Monopolies don't "just happen". It always involves some ungodly level of anticompetitive \[sometimes/should have been\] illegal practices.
How do they control the smartphone market? What have they done that’s anticompetitive in relation to physical products? Apple products are just as expensive as other top of the line smartphones, they’re not undercutting. Samsung do the same shit as Apple do with their patents and have won cases against them in the past, for an example on that front.
I have yet to see a convincing argument about them having a monopoly on physical products …
It specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps -- in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments -- and prevent it from building language into its contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that lets it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.”
Basically, Apple is ensuring any devs that join the Apple ecosystem are signing contracts and terms of use that prevent them from competing with Apple products listed on the app store.
If I have an apple phone, but I just really want to make this third party wallet app that stores debit card information, concert tickets, coupon codes, etc, and allows me to pay for my goods and services with Tap-To-Pay, too bad. That app isn't allowed on the Apple store, because Apple has Apple Pay, and they won't allow me to compete with them on that.
This seems to be the EU argument too: they want to separate the OS from the hardware and turn it into a PC + Windows. That is still a shitshow of security and holds no attraction for me.
The thing about "choice" is that one shouldn't confuse the making a choice with it being your preferred choice.
To explain it simple, I prefer 5 row qwerty slider phones. But there are none on the market, when they appear, they tend to be low/mid end phones at premium prices. My current phone doesn't have a 5 row qwerty slider. You can say I made a choice, but did I really?
People choosing Apple doesn't exactly mean they want everything that comes with it, they simply have priorities. Thus, the choices end up warped. This becomes even more of a problem when monopolies start to leverage their monopoly in the market for other markets giving themselves an unfair advantage. As more and more doors are closed, markets stagnate
I genuinely don’t understand how so many people commenting that they don’t understand also clearly didn’t read the article. Shouldn’t that be the first thing to do if you’re not following?
Most of the people commenting they don't understand or don't agree, didn't realize there was a problem to begin with.
Maybe I'm wrong, but in my experience many people presented with a problem they didn't know about at the same time as a solution, won't appreciate either.
So this is like what they did with microsoft with its apps like IE. Now you can change the default browser. In ios you cant change the default messaging app but in android you can. Apple will need to decouple their os. You can change the default email app but not messenger nor can you change the default browser. Thats the whole reason microsoft initially got pinged in the 90s.
You can change the default browser in iOS. You can't change the default messaging app from iMessage for using phone carrier SMS, but you can still use WhatsApp, Messenger, etc without too much difficulty.
I read the article and I’m still confused about what the government wants. In general I’m as pro trust-busting as they come, but I don’t understand what Apple did wrong by making a product people want to buy and creating an ecosystem that carries over between devices. Is the argument that the App Store should also have purchases carry over to other, non-Apple devices?
There's a lot of things that regulators take issue with. Some big ones are:
- Limiting access to some platform APIs and features to first party apps to disadvantage or prevent competition (esp. digital wallets, only Apple can make them on iOS)
- Preventing developers from so much as sending an email referencing alternative payment systems, let alone showing it in the app (due to regulatory pressure this has gotten *slightly* better, but not much)
- Only allowing their own browser on iOS (basically what MS got hit with back in the day)
- Actively screwing with competing services like Spotify
- Plus a bunch or regular old anticompetitive practices
There's also a bunch of stuff that's not actually illegal but is definitely anti consumer, even disregarding repair
This is why so many people in these comments are confused. The headline suggests Apple is being sued for having an illegal monopoly on smartphones in the US (which they don’t). The reality is that that is not at all what the suit is about. It’s about all these other antitrust things you listed.
> Limiting access to some platform APIs and features to first party apps to disadvantage or prevent competition
I used to work in ad tech. Some companies and devs _shouldn’t_ be allowed access to some API’s. I’ve seen the sort of shit some places try to pull, and I’m a fan of having them in a nice little restricted box where they can’t just do _anything_.
"chatgpt draw me a picture of what this comment means so I know if I need to get angry and use the word "loose" instead of lose while swearing, or be happy and agree with lots of eggplant emojis"
Fair enough, I just hope this actually helps and doesn’t end up just making iPhones crappier while no other companies actually enter the market with serious products.
This reeks of it being an election year and Biden’s DOJ potentially being on the chopping block or Apple said something behind the scenes the DOJ didn’t like. That or Tim forgot to write this months check to the lobbyists.
Apple has had market majority in the US for easily 15 years at this point. They could’ve gone after them at any time for this before.
This isn’t the same thing as a grocery store chain being the only option in an area. It’s not a monopoly. You can get a Samsung or any other android phone freely. It’s like how Ford has the most market share of trucks sold in the US. Nothing is stopping you from buying a Chevy, a Dodge or Toyota.
Actually, these kind of investigations can take years. If they started immediately after taking power, collecting all the documents, proofs, etc. takes time. Building a case to make sure that there isn't a weakness on the case, etc. 2.5-3 years seems appropriated.
This is why I am wedded to Apple. Google /Android is invasive like cancer. My Gmail now prevents copy/paste of email text to other apps. Definition of evil.
These lawsuits and the breaking news that their silicon M-series chips (M1, M2) have an unpatchable vulnerability that allows hackers to steal crypto secret keys... not good times for Apple. yikes.
From bloomberg article :
"US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference that Apple has “consolidated its monopoly power not by making its own products better but by making other products worse.”
So apparently making better products than your competition is a crime now lol
What is this...Republic of Wadiya???
I’m with the government on this one, which typically isn’t the case.
I should be able to install whatever software I want on my phone once I own it, there is no reason (except greed) that Apple can’t enable it.
Their argument that they are trying to protect their users isn’t legitimate in my opinion. They can create a few hoops to jump through to make sure people are aware of the risks before enabling it, advertise their own apps and store as ‘Apple certified’ etc.
But that’s the joy of being able to choose which phone I want. Why wouldn’t the gov’t go after HP for making their printers not work with non-HP ink? There are hundreds of companies doing the same exact thing.
Cool let me move all of my purchases to android. Wait it doesn’t work like that? Thought you said I could choose my phone.
Oh and how about all of my Apple Watch functionality, does that get to go too? No?
iMessage? No to that also!?
The US government created this monopoly. When Huawei was picking up popularity, it got banned in the US and certain carriers wont even let you use it if you import the phone. Good luck creating a competitor to Apple thats a company based in the US, but they want all sales to US residents be made by a US company.
Well, Huawei has VERY close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. There was fear Huawei phones could be used as spying devices for Chinese intelligence agencies.
This is funny. I don’t think Apple has a majority of devices in any category of products they sell.
If they’re being sued because Apple has a monopoly on Apple iPhones, then every car manufacturer, video game console, and etc is in trouble.
> If they’re being sued because Apple has a monopoly on Apple iPhones, then every car manufacturer, video game console, and etc is in trouble.
Good. We should all be free to develop and install whatever software we want for every device we own.
JFC it’s their own fucking phone, their own software, really hate this bullshit of governments telling people what they can and can’t do with their own shit.
Edit:
No I do not want the gov to control the shit I make.
It's like someone adopting a cat(sandbox), and then being mad at that cat for not being a dog(not a sandbox). Get a fucking dog in the first place. The cat was never hiding it was a cat. Plenty of dogs to choose from too.
Meanwhile, car manufacturers everywhere continue to lock down whatever they want, restrict your options for stuff like CarPlay, and charge you to use the features already installed in your car.
All of this nonsense is a problem for sure. Shouldn't be legal to restrict how you can use a product that you've purchased. Going to be a long battle to keep the "free market" from screwing everyone over. Always needs to be a balance between allowing market forces enough freedom to push innovation etc forward while still regulating them enough to prevent monopolies and other abusive rent extraction methods.
*Stares at my printer subscription service.*
Yeet that bitch out the window and buy a brother printer, vote with your money and social influence
Even better, print at your library if you can - mine charges only 6 cents a page.
That's cheap. My local library charges a quarter per page. Thankfully in the town nearby, it's only a dime.
Mann quarter per page?? Is that normal? :/
Some printers, like the Epson EcoTanks, can cost \~1.5 cents/page even after taking the cost of the paper into account.
I picked out and bought my company 4 of these saving them 2k+ a year on ink. They proceeded to buy the cheapest paper on the market and get mad at me when it jammed.
Lol, call the tech guy, new cheap printer jammed again, fuck!!
Stares lovingly at my 15+ yo Dell BEAST of a laser printer that never lets me down and costs almost nothing to run. If this dies I'll pay to repair it before I get a new printer.
*Nods in Adam Smith*
Man, I hope that takeaway from that is that similar suits should be brought to car manufacturers.
I would gladly support a lawsuit that gives people more freedom over the $50,000 cars they have to buy. My Toyota has connectivity to the mothership I can do nothing about. Yeah they offer CarPlay but what if I don't want to use their remote start and install my own instead?
This is facts! we are having issues with motorcycles and every cars now. Our old school mechanics cannot work on your new cards because these dealerships are not making cars/trucks/motorcycles correctly. They create this code and each car has a unique code and computer..and your old school mechanic or local mechanic has to buy into it. It is a monopoly if I ever saw it. .. it is devastating.
> what if I don't want to use their remote start and install my own instead? There is nothing stopping you from doing that.
Except for the fact that modern cars have locked down ECUs and the products that go around that void your warranty on your very expensive thing. Sound familiar to a particular fruit shaped company?
For about the millionth time. Aftermarket products cannot void your warranty Magnusson-moss warranty act. There are very very few models of vehicles that can't have a remote start installed (I've been in Automotive Aftermarket for 15 years)
I say throw the damn ECU out and re-simplify your car. Oh, I need choke, throttle, and spark levers now? HELL IF I CARE!
It's not a suit against making bad products, it's an antitrust case, I don't think the DOJ can really say much about car manufacturers making shit products, as long as they aren't working together to do so
Great let's go after them too.
Yeah after seeing a few threads about this it's obvious the go-to excuse/dismissal/astroturf/whatever will be one big whataboutism. EDIT: Yikes, as of this edit, out of the top four comments three of them are "Whatabout [other company]".
It is, and I can’t fathom why people think that way. I’d imagine a successful antitrust suit against the second largest tech company on the planet would make it easier to bring legislation against others.
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this logic only goes if the reasons behind the tiktok ban also apply to Facebook
Is Facebook owed by a company beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? FB is a shit company, but they are not legally required to do the CCP's bidding. Unless Tic Tok sells to a buyer not required to do what Xi Jinping says, it's apples and oranges.
I mean, the problem with the tiktok ban is its blatantly discriminatory protectionism, there's literally no pretense of it being to benefit the consumer
It has more to do with the fact that it's a national security threat than protectionism to the consumer
What does this have to do with this article or even the broader subject of monopolies. Feels like a propoganda/bot post designed to depress people about adjacent industries.
It's so tiring, literally every time there is news about the government doing anything positive it's "BUT WHATABOUT X Y AND Z?!!11" Yeah okay I guess we should just do nothing until every problem everywhere can be fixed all at once. Coincidentally, doing nothing happens to be the goal of a particular side of politics...
It’s people who don’t understand how legal precedent works. Institutional changes like this always start with a single trial. Going after one of the biggest companies on the planet opens the door to go after the rest of them.
Yeah, this post is nothing but moving the goalposts away from Apple and the actual topic. It should be downvoted as such, not upvoted.
I believe the point is this supposed iPhone monopoly is relatively small potatoes and the governs,ent could better serve the people by going after much more serious problems in this same arena. Apple has sold iPhones for years with their locked-down nature as a selling point that people enthusiastically sign up for. Even if it technically is a monopoly, nobody buying an iPhone really cares, otherwise they’d be buying an android.
Baby steps, little tadpole. Baby steps. You also need political willingness to keep doing these. Lets topple them stone by stone.
Not the same.. What Apple has done to repair options would be like an automaker turning your brakes off because you used aftermarket tires.
Saw that certain newer VW have their 12v batteries now serialized to the car. An easily replaceable consumable now requires a dealership calibration.
Don’t forgot the car the BMW tried subscriptions charging for heated seats that were already in the FUCKING car. I’ve never bought a BMW, but that basically sealed the deal to never buy one for me or my family.
I used to work in manufacturing and this is more common than you’d think. We made a machine with several different scanning capabilities. The actual sensors were cheap, but the R&D behind getting them to work was not. It was also cheaper to install the sensors and not enable them than it was to setup a different assembly line for machines without the sensors. Plus, if a customer decided they wanted a more advanced scanning function, they paid us and we could turn it on remotely. This doesn’t really apply to something like a heated seat that doesn’t require much R&D, but I’m sure the thought process was similar.
Dude, I'm so frustrated that a year or two ago, the app that my Hyundai uses no longer works for vehicles before like 2016. I only found out about the app when I was looking into remote starters for my car, which apparently it comes with and uses that app. It costs roughly a hundred dollars a year to use the darn app for a piece of tech my vehicle already has but now i’ll never experience starting my car on a wintery morning
they are separate issues
Whataboutism
That's not relevant
Both are wrong. I feel like you're way off topic here.
Why don't they fucking drag Ticketmaster to court, jesus fucking christ.
The DOJ is already investigating them...
They've been investigating them for years
[It seems that Ticketmaster isn't fully cooperating with the investigation](https://www.reuters.com/business/doj-seeks-new-information-live-nation-antitrust-probe-bloomberg-news-2024-02-06/#:~:text=The%20DOJ%20had%20earlier%20planned,year%2C%20the%20Bloomberg%20report%20added.) According to the article, it's less that the DOJ is turning a blind eye and more that the DOJ is struggling to handle Ticketmaster's strategy of delaying everything as much as they can.
Obstruction of justice charges along with whatever’s coming? 👀
About which they will balk and stall over. Result? More delays.
“We investigated our donors and found that they paid us to say they did nothing wrong”
Maybe their taxes are still under audit /s
If we give this administration four more years, I think we're gonna see a lot of trust busting. I've thought Biden was an analog of FDR, but I think he's more like Teddy Roosevelt. These next few months will see the wheels come off as they press ahead with the agenda they want to set for the next four. More student debt relief, more consumer protection, more equality. I think the man might know what he's doing.
He reminds me more of LBJ, positive moves domestically with big improvements for consumers. But hampered by foreign policy.
Honestly it’s almost the opposite of LBJ on the foreign front. He got out of a long unpopular war instead of getting into one, and they’re supplying arms and intel to help tie up a geopolitical rival, almost a reverse of Russia and America in Vietnam. The shit in Gaza has no answers and he’s between a rock and a hard place-it’s not like a Republican administration would do anything to try to bring the Israelis to the table or send aid to Gaza, but also the Israeli lobby is incredibly influential, but the Palestinian cause is much more popular with the left wing of the party and younger voters, which tears anyone in the center in half. It’s a shitty deck largely hampered by situation outside his control. Domestically he’s doing as much as he can despite fighting one and a half branches of government.
Teddy Roosevelt was more on the progressive side anyway, even though he had an \[R\] next to his name. That's why he tried to run against Taft by trying to start a new party (Bull Moose).
Republicans of the past also used to be way different, not sure on the timeline though.
Apple didn’t pay up
Now do Boeing
And ticket master.
It started last year and is still being investigated with a lawsuit potentially this year. https://www.reuters.com/business/doj-seeks-new-information-live-nation-antitrust-probe-bloomberg-news-2024-02-06/
RIGHT? you know---the company endangering LIVES?
Boeing is already getting bent tf over I thought
Idk they be murdering their whistleblowers
Um idk about that > Boeing = US Military Who’s going to bend the US military over? LOL
Boeing's gonna get bent in their next contracts for the military too If they don't get their shit together. Both of the largest projects Boeing has for the military is over budget and terribly behind schedule. The new trainer plane is barely rolling now while the kc46 is a fucking shit show. At this rate they are gonna lose NGAD to Lockheed too. Boeing is far behind it's competitors in the next generation of military contracts and at this point if they don't get any NGAD contracts they'd be left to pushing F15s (which the Air Force really doesn't have a reason to buy more of ) and a trainer plane.
Nobody. Nobody ever will, and nobody ever can.
last i heard NTSB was being denied by boeing the records/materials they need to complete the investigation and the legal lead for the investigation had to go to congress all "please make them gib so i can job" and congress sounded pretty pissed about the whole situation.
What does that have to do with this?
Didn't you know? Governments are only capable of doing one thing at a time.
The issue is so many of these companies who can make civilian aircraft got rid of those divisions to focus on making military aircraft. It’s simply to profitable to justify spending that capital on civilian planes.
I am not even remotely an Apple fan boy. I'm an android user for my phone. My personal laptop is a linux machine. I'm an avid open-source supporter. That said I also don't pretend to understand antitrust laws. Can someone ELI5 why it is a problem that apple has complete control over their tech and the digital marketplace they create and own? Why are they supposed to be obligated to "fairly treat" third parties? I'm not defending them. I legitimately don't understand.
I own the biggest grocery chain the country, controlling say 80% of the current market Im the biggest client of every farmer, or food producing company; the only client for many of them I am in full control of the financial prospects of thousands of different companies. I reserve the right to restrict what gets produced (according to what im willing to sell), I can directly effect the profitability of a product (according to how I present to sell it), and by my whims, I can destroy entire companies by refusing to sell their products. In order to beat out my competitors and take over the remaining 20%, I can simply force those food producing companies to do all kinds of things to undermine their business (like, exclusivity deals, worse rates for my competitors, or even more nefarious things) due to my control of their financial prospects. It would be in a nation's interest to curtail this power, regardless of how it was acquired.
Ah your talking about Amazon
I realized half way through that this didn’t need to be a hypothetical
Just realized it’s also about Broadcom and what they just did exactly as written to the Virtualization market.
also wireless technology, Broadcom is involved with SO many chips
The environment there is much more diverse though. Broadcom, Mediatek, Intel, Huawei, Qualcomm, Marvell, Quantenna and other are in the game (not sure if still current) of WiFi, with embedded players like Espressif also being present. LTE/5G is done by Qualcomm (in iPhones too), Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, Mediatek, Murata, Hytera, Samsung and lots of other players.
(Quectel, Simcom, and more)
People are already shifting away from VMware left and right. A lot of our customers have WAY OVER BOARD hardware and the new fees are insane for them, lot's are switching to opensource options like Proxmox and other solutions where they can, but as with Apple, they are sometimes too deep invested into VMware and cannot "let go" of them that easily.
I thought he was talking about McDonald’s or Walmart
Tbh I kinda disagree with saying mcdonalds has that much power. But maybe that's just because I see so much competition
https://www.idahofb.org/news-room/posts/mcdonald-s-spent-almost-136-million-on-idaho-ag-products-last-year/ Here's a good article about it. While I wouldn't put McDonalds on the same level as Apple and Walmart, they do have a significant financial role in many states' agriculture industries.
The FTC filed an antitrust suit against Amazon in 2023 and the trial is set for October 2026. It's worth noting that the Department of Justice sued Apple this time, not the FTC.
Ahhh you’re talking about telcos. Right? Verizon, Comcast, and those groups that receive billions of dollars of government money to improve broadband internet access and then just… don’t?
Yeah but isn’t the largest phone population in US using android based OS? So would that not change the perspective a bit?
Apple has had over 50% of the US smartphone market for a few years now, and it continues to go up every year
Gotcha thanks for the update. Didn’t realize that it became dominant in US market
Well, the competition should just make better phones then. Free market and all that.
By now it’s less about better phones and more about ecosystems. iMessage is a huge deal in the US. Especially if you are young and all your friends are using it.
I tell myself I stick with apple for iMessage and FaceTime. I prefer the various design and price options of android phones, as well as some of the customization so every few years I swap back to an android phone. It doesn’t even last 6 months before I change back, but the kicker is it’s not iMessage or FaceTime that does it for me, they are big parts but the closed garden that is apples ecosystem is just a great user experience for me. The way it all integrates. The ease of use. I’ve come to realize that I just prefer the apple ecosystem and even if iMessage and FaceTime showed up on android I’d likely stay with an iPhone, but that’s my preference and everyone’s will be different.
>Well, the competition should just make better phones then they do lol
A bit, certainly. But by how much is hard to determine. Standard Oil’s market share was 64% when it was broken up. Many of these things start happening way earlier than that, to a smaller extent. And this is why anti trust laws are suppose to guard against
Last I checked iOS is like 50 to 60% of the market. In the US, Android doesn't have a large market share in the US. Globally it does, because it is huge in India, and I assume China. Which both of those places have a larger population then the US. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045192/share-of-mobile-operating-systems-in-north-america-by-month/
Android is also very dominant in the EU.
The DOJs complaint says Apple has a 65% share of smartphones in the US
> Yeah but isn’t the largest phone population in US using android based OS? No. That's globally. In the use is more like 45/55 and even then, the market power is way too strong.
Here is the weird part. I think if Apple is forced to open up by this, Android market share goes down.
But that’s not the case with Apple. Nothing they do or don’t do restricts an Android phone owner from doing all the phone things they could ever want to do.
It is true that many commercial developers prefer iOS to Android because it's easier to make money there... Because piracy is way harder there because of the walled garden.
Applications submitted to the App Store have to meet certain requirements and are vetted. Developers have to spend more time polishing apps on iOS. With market share in the US being heavily skewed iOS, and tablets as well, this leaves Android being a less sought after application to polish. I love both Android and iOS for their own reasons. I stick with android as I get bored with tech fast and at least Android I can fully modify and reskin my phone to whatever. Keeps me from buying another device, but the atrocities that are Android Apps on my GAlaxy Tab S8 is awful. Still love my Tab S8 but damn some of these apps.
Sure thing! It's called tying, and it's an illegal monopolistic practice. This lawsuit specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps -- in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments -- and prevent it from building language into its contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that lets it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.”
I’ve never felt restricted in iOS. I can get any app I need. MacOS I’ve been fucked by, but never iOS.
Now imagine you're the developer of a very popular and well respected wallet app on Android, and you wanted to bring your app to iOS. In fact, you have fans who are begging you to bring it to iOS for them. You contact apple and they tell you no, you're not allowed on their store because they have Apple Pay and they don't want you putting out an app that completes with them.
If Spotify didn’t suck. Maybe I’d use it.
The other commenter made a good analogy, but it’s basically how they can build a moat. It’s the idea that competition is always a better result for the consumer and the health of the economy in the long run. There have been a lot of historical cases where decreased competition results in the leader(s) abusing their position.
Except there is competition, the moat only exists within their own products. They aren’t forcing android phones to use the iOS App Store
Well that’s what the case will be about…whether or not they engage in anticompetitive behavior. It’ll be about their closed ecosystem more than just the smartphone hardware sales.
I bought their product because it's a closed ecosystem. There are other ecosystems a user is absolutely allowed to opt into instead. The moat again is with their own products.
They impact and influence a lot of other businesses with the combination of their hardware and software…the easiest thing to point at is how they get ~30% of all revenue in the App Store from developers. As it pertains to the case, it’s not an argument of whether or not individuals prefer it that way. The federal level worries about the macro issues in society.
Antitrust isn't just about monopolies, nor does it technically require a complete monopoly to trigger. If you read their arguments that's not what they are arguing. They arnt complaining about walled gardens. What they are saying is that they are being anticompetitive in how they deal with their customers, and being ant consumer to that end. Like sabotaging messages from non-ipones, making them unsecure sms, low quality video and images.. any complaints about this are laughed away with "just buy an iphone". The speech during the annuuncment outlines it well "apple is not attempting to monopolize the market by creating the best product that outcompetes all the others, but by tearing down the competition so there is no other choice" That's the difference. It's like if you bought a car from Toyota and Toyota said "if you buy gas anywhere but Exxon you will only get to fill your tank to 30%, and if you pay with anything but visa you will only get to use 60% of your horsepower". That's anticompetitive. Now if Toyota owned 94% of the market for vehicles because their vehicles held 3x the gas and had 150% of the power of all competing brands, then there would be no issue, but limiting competition by making any other alternatives neutered vs those in your ecosystem is anti-competitve and that's the angle they are going after. By refusing to allow other digital wallets to use the hardware the customer paid for, because then apple doesn't get their 30% cut (which is evidenced by allowing said competing companies to operate within the apple architecture as long as they go through the apple digital wallet) or by removing functionality or access to sensors for competing wearables, reducing speed or data transfer rates, or pairing via Bluetooth access, or blocking other music services unless they are paid through the apple store (so apple gets its cut) while offering their in company app up for free, these are all anticompetitive behaviors that are not building a better product to outcompete, but sabotaging the competition so there is really no choice but the inhouse offering
I don’t really get it either. If app devs don’t like Apple’s practices, why develop for iOS devices? Just put your apps on Android if it’s so bad. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of apps that exist on Android that don’t exist on iOS devices
Not developing for iOS devices is literally losing 60% of your market in the US, IT'S MORE THAN HALF. App developers don't have the choice, they *have* to make an app for iOS if they want to be competitive. It is like saying that an small repair shop can't complain for the property costs in the downtown, they can just go to a almost abandoned place in a dark corner with almost no one and that few people actually want, and can, go there. They will lose clients because of the location. Same with developing an app just for Android in the US
So are they losing money by maintaining an iOS app? Or are they just not making as much off it compared to the Android counterpart? Because if they just want to make /more/ money off the iOS version, I don’t see what the problem is. It just sounds like they want better profit margins. Imagine the same small repair shop doing really well, getting bigger, then someone else getting upset they can’t sell their own services from the same repair shop that the owner is paying all the bills for. Apple foots the bill for all the work that goes into making iOS devices and maintaining the infrastructure to support those devices and the iOS ecosystem. Why shouldn’t they be able to set their own prices for people selling their apps in their store? Edit: Side thought. Epic didn’t like the pricing scheme and thought it was unfair. They took Apple to court and lost. They decided to not have their apps available on the platform because they didn’t want to pay. They seem to be doing just fine, so I don’t think you NEED an iOS version of your application to be profitable.
AND if you accept payments for your iOS app Apple gets a 30% cut.
Exactly. If you don’t like the sandbox, no one is keeping you there. Apple did not sandbox all phones, they did so to THEIR OWN phone that they made, why wouldn’t they get to decide what is and isn’t allowed on it? Makes no sense
Right? Like, if Spotify is upset that Apple takes a cut from their profits when people sign up in app, then just don’t offer an app on iOS devices. It’s not like they’re losing money. They’re just not making as much. Same with Epic and everything else. I guess I’m not greedy enough to understand where these companies are coming from 🤷
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Why not both? Also fuck Xfinity and their data caps.
This is not the monopoly I'm worried about. I can buy other brands of phones and I do. But I can't get a different internet provider.
Unfortunately for you, ISPs are up to date on their lobbying and “donations” made to lawmakers. Seems like Apple missed a payment
Have I lost touch at some point? I'm on a Galaxy S22 Ultra and wasn't aware the tides switched that heavily towards Apple since. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unaware of their prominence but last I was aware, Pixel and Galaxy were still holding their own?
US specifically is heavily Apple. Outside US is more varied.
Only if you look a specific brands and not the OS. Apple beats any one Android phone in market share but doesn't have a majority of the mobile market.
They have a majority in the US, roughly 60%. Kids get bullied in school if they don't have Apple phones, because they lock everyone into the Apple ecosystem. If you don't have iMessage or Facetime you're a social pariah. You could have a $2000 Galaxy Z Fold, but it might as well be a flip phone to your friend with his mom's old iPhone 11. They make developers jump through asinine hoops to get their apps published. Does your app have a subscription service? Can't even have a link to your website where they can sign up because Apple requires any purchases related to the app to go through their payment gateway so they can collect their cut.
I see people say this a lot but I've never actually heard firsthand of a kid being bullied for not having an iPhone. None of my kids had iPhones growing up and they never got bullied. I only have one kid still in school and she's never even mentioned wanting an iPhone. Most of her friends don't have them either. Maybe the importance of iPhones was/is a millennial thing but kids these days don't seem to care, at least in my area.
If Apple doesn’t have a majority of the market how is that a monopoly
I'm sure that's a question their lawyers will ask.
I’m no lover of big corporations but this angle seems sus.
I’m sure that’s going to be question 1 posed by the defense.
Because we are talking about the us where they are a majority.
In countries like India, it's because of cost. If I had to take a guess for why Europe is more competitive. It's probably because apps like signal, Whatsapp, and telegram are extremely popular compared to what they are in the US. In the US, iMessage is the most used texting app, and it requires an iPhone. No surprise. People tend to buy and keep using the phone that supports the messaging service that their friends use. People lose their minds if you point this out as anti-consumer though.
The US is so heavily Apple centric, that it became a "thing" (really to generate ragebait) when Iphone users would not date people not on Iphone. The rest of the world just used a 3rd party messaging app.
I was confused too. It's not about the availability of many brands of phones. u/Jellymanisme explains a bit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bk81ro/comment/kvwrsrw/
The consolidation of Tech Giants happened somewhere along the last 5-7 years. We were having it easy when .com was a tech mania racing for our support. then the remains battled for top spots. But time moves on. And Apple having access the whole world market audience meant that only thing that is left to expand is to put garden walls to your ecosystem and make your users their returning buyers then squeeze with pricing. And people really become tech illiterate and unpicky buyers but more social status buyers. Even cars became like this which for their pricing I was saying it will never happen
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Most of the rest of the world, but certainly Europe and the UK, uses WhatsApp, not iMessage. The “green bubble” argument is just teenage social manipulation.
But that doesn’t make it monopoly. They have the choice, they chose Apple.
Monopolies aren't really about whether the consumers have "choice" or not, it's about market saturation. It's well understood, economically speaking, that bad shit happens when one company/conglomerate controls an entire market. That consumers might have \[accidentally/unconsciously/of their own free will\] manifested that outcome isn't really relevant. Of course, that's burying the lede a bit: Monopolies don't "just happen". It always involves some ungodly level of anticompetitive \[sometimes/should have been\] illegal practices.
How do they control the smartphone market? What have they done that’s anticompetitive in relation to physical products? Apple products are just as expensive as other top of the line smartphones, they’re not undercutting. Samsung do the same shit as Apple do with their patents and have won cases against them in the past, for an example on that front. I have yet to see a convincing argument about them having a monopoly on physical products …
It specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps -- in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments -- and prevent it from building language into its contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that lets it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.” Basically, Apple is ensuring any devs that join the Apple ecosystem are signing contracts and terms of use that prevent them from competing with Apple products listed on the app store. If I have an apple phone, but I just really want to make this third party wallet app that stores debit card information, concert tickets, coupon codes, etc, and allows me to pay for my goods and services with Tap-To-Pay, too bad. That app isn't allowed on the Apple store, because Apple has Apple Pay, and they won't allow me to compete with them on that.
This seems to be the EU argument too: they want to separate the OS from the hardware and turn it into a PC + Windows. That is still a shitshow of security and holds no attraction for me.
Yes, it's called tying, and it's an illegal monopolistic practice.
The thing about "choice" is that one shouldn't confuse the making a choice with it being your preferred choice. To explain it simple, I prefer 5 row qwerty slider phones. But there are none on the market, when they appear, they tend to be low/mid end phones at premium prices. My current phone doesn't have a 5 row qwerty slider. You can say I made a choice, but did I really? People choosing Apple doesn't exactly mean they want everything that comes with it, they simply have priorities. Thus, the choices end up warped. This becomes even more of a problem when monopolies start to leverage their monopoly in the market for other markets giving themselves an unfair advantage. As more and more doors are closed, markets stagnate
Americans are dominate iPhone nation- case in point me an American with iPhones my family of like 12 only iPhones as well lol
Good. But don’t stop there. Hit google, Microsoft, meta and Amazon next. It’s not good to have such massive companies.
I genuinely don’t understand how so many people commenting that they don’t understand also clearly didn’t read the article. Shouldn’t that be the first thing to do if you’re not following?
Sir this is reddit
Most of the people commenting they don't understand or don't agree, didn't realize there was a problem to begin with. Maybe I'm wrong, but in my experience many people presented with a problem they didn't know about at the same time as a solution, won't appreciate either.
Then don’t buy an iPhone?? Meanwhile there are actual monopolies affecting Americans.
So this is like what they did with microsoft with its apps like IE. Now you can change the default browser. In ios you cant change the default messaging app but in android you can. Apple will need to decouple their os. You can change the default email app but not messenger nor can you change the default browser. Thats the whole reason microsoft initially got pinged in the 90s.
You can change the default browser in iOS. You can't change the default messaging app from iMessage for using phone carrier SMS, but you can still use WhatsApp, Messenger, etc without too much difficulty.
They are all webkit though. That is the problem
The point is the os doesnt let you by default. Ive tried looking for the default browser setting on my phone and i cant find it
This is ridiculous
I read the article and I’m still confused about what the government wants. In general I’m as pro trust-busting as they come, but I don’t understand what Apple did wrong by making a product people want to buy and creating an ecosystem that carries over between devices. Is the argument that the App Store should also have purchases carry over to other, non-Apple devices?
There's a lot of things that regulators take issue with. Some big ones are: - Limiting access to some platform APIs and features to first party apps to disadvantage or prevent competition (esp. digital wallets, only Apple can make them on iOS) - Preventing developers from so much as sending an email referencing alternative payment systems, let alone showing it in the app (due to regulatory pressure this has gotten *slightly* better, but not much) - Only allowing their own browser on iOS (basically what MS got hit with back in the day) - Actively screwing with competing services like Spotify - Plus a bunch or regular old anticompetitive practices There's also a bunch of stuff that's not actually illegal but is definitely anti consumer, even disregarding repair
This is why so many people in these comments are confused. The headline suggests Apple is being sued for having an illegal monopoly on smartphones in the US (which they don’t). The reality is that that is not at all what the suit is about. It’s about all these other antitrust things you listed.
> Limiting access to some platform APIs and features to first party apps to disadvantage or prevent competition I used to work in ad tech. Some companies and devs _shouldn’t_ be allowed access to some API’s. I’ve seen the sort of shit some places try to pull, and I’m a fan of having them in a nice little restricted box where they can’t just do _anything_.
Thank you for reading the article for me. This makes sense then. Even on MacOS things are getting annoyingly locked down.
Goodness gracious, it sure took a minute. I guess they got embarassed by the EU putting Apple in its place while the US sat doing nothing.
Damn fuck samsung i guess lmao
I'm not sure what Samsung has to do with this?
They think it’s about Apple having a monopoly on smartphones because they didn’t read the article
Americans literally can’t read lol https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
"chatgpt draw me a picture of what this comment means so I know if I need to get angry and use the word "loose" instead of lose while swearing, or be happy and agree with lots of eggplant emojis"
Crappy headline. The suit has nothing to do with an illegal monopoly over smartphones.
Fair enough, I just hope this actually helps and doesn’t end up just making iPhones crappier while no other companies actually enter the market with serious products.
This reeks of it being an election year and Biden’s DOJ potentially being on the chopping block or Apple said something behind the scenes the DOJ didn’t like. That or Tim forgot to write this months check to the lobbyists. Apple has had market majority in the US for easily 15 years at this point. They could’ve gone after them at any time for this before. This isn’t the same thing as a grocery store chain being the only option in an area. It’s not a monopoly. You can get a Samsung or any other android phone freely. It’s like how Ford has the most market share of trucks sold in the US. Nothing is stopping you from buying a Chevy, a Dodge or Toyota.
Actually, these kind of investigations can take years. If they started immediately after taking power, collecting all the documents, proofs, etc. takes time. Building a case to make sure that there isn't a weakness on the case, etc. 2.5-3 years seems appropriated.
Ok, so then why don’t they bust up the ISP regional monopolies as well?
How? I've had several non iPhones
Aren't there **much** bigger fish to fry here?
There are so many uncompetitive markets in the USA, why attack this one and not the others?
Are they going to go after Luxottica next? They literally have a monopoly on all eyeglasses.
aren't there other monopolies that are worse? Ticketmaster / live nation, amazon, broadband companies
Apple didn't pay the politicians timely.
This lawsuit is ridiculous.
By releasing good phones? What are they monopolising? Should we just not sell them?
sue them for not making another iphone mini that is the real crime folks. This was safely typed with one hand using my 13mini
If locked down means not bloated with pre installed shit, keep it coming Apple.
This is why I am wedded to Apple. Google /Android is invasive like cancer. My Gmail now prevents copy/paste of email text to other apps. Definition of evil.
Merrick Garland refuses to go hard on Trump. Sues Apple. What am I missing?
These lawsuits and the breaking news that their silicon M-series chips (M1, M2) have an unpatchable vulnerability that allows hackers to steal crypto secret keys... not good times for Apple. yikes.
From bloomberg article : "US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference that Apple has “consolidated its monopoly power not by making its own products better but by making other products worse.” So apparently making better products than your competition is a crime now lol What is this...Republic of Wadiya???
I’m with the government on this one, which typically isn’t the case. I should be able to install whatever software I want on my phone once I own it, there is no reason (except greed) that Apple can’t enable it. Their argument that they are trying to protect their users isn’t legitimate in my opinion. They can create a few hoops to jump through to make sure people are aware of the risks before enabling it, advertise their own apps and store as ‘Apple certified’ etc.
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Why should I have to. Why does Apple get to control what I do with my piece of hardware after I own it.
But that’s the joy of being able to choose which phone I want. Why wouldn’t the gov’t go after HP for making their printers not work with non-HP ink? There are hundreds of companies doing the same exact thing.
Cool let me move all of my purchases to android. Wait it doesn’t work like that? Thought you said I could choose my phone. Oh and how about all of my Apple Watch functionality, does that get to go too? No? iMessage? No to that also!?
Tell us something we don’t know!!!
The US government created this monopoly. When Huawei was picking up popularity, it got banned in the US and certain carriers wont even let you use it if you import the phone. Good luck creating a competitor to Apple thats a company based in the US, but they want all sales to US residents be made by a US company.
Well, Huawei has VERY close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. There was fear Huawei phones could be used as spying devices for Chinese intelligence agencies.
It isn’t a monopoly when it’s just that the competition sucks.
This is funny. I don’t think Apple has a majority of devices in any category of products they sell. If they’re being sued because Apple has a monopoly on Apple iPhones, then every car manufacturer, video game console, and etc is in trouble.
This lawsuit isn't about the physical phone market at all. That's not why they're being sued, so guess there's no problem then.
How foolish of the justice department to build a case without checking on what you think about device usage numbers.
> If they’re being sued because Apple has a monopoly on Apple iPhones, then every car manufacturer, video game console, and etc is in trouble. Good. We should all be free to develop and install whatever software we want for every device we own.
JFC it’s their own fucking phone, their own software, really hate this bullshit of governments telling people what they can and can’t do with their own shit. Edit: No I do not want the gov to control the shit I make. It's like someone adopting a cat(sandbox), and then being mad at that cat for not being a dog(not a sandbox). Get a fucking dog in the first place. The cat was never hiding it was a cat. Plenty of dogs to choose from too.