A legislature work is not bound by an economic model. A legislature is bound by the set of laws that is in place for it to work, and then even those can be amended somehow.
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Apple and Google 'Duopoly' to Come Under Scrutiny in the UK
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A legislature work is not bound by an economic model. A legislature is bound by the set of laws that is in place for it to work, and then even those can be amended somehow.
Not only can you regulate markets, you have to - to preserve the free market.
If not, more mergers would happen. And think of the mobile market... if you had retained the ATT monopoly and faced no scrutiny, they could have preserved that monopoly into the mobile phone age by just denying any competitor the ability to connect to their net, to give one tactic that would keep any competitor from emerging.
I don't follow the reasoning. While I don't support the basic premise of "control of every phone needs to stop," at least this investigation is looking at the correct market - mobile phones.
Let's look back 14 years. We had 100 different phone makers each peddling their own OS. almost all of them were absolutely miserable. Custom ROMS for each phone. No practical ability to customize or extend functionality. Any apps that might have been available are phone manufacturer-specific, expensive, and only available the the mobile phone providers. The only phones that were close to what we have today were Windows CE (e.g., Compaq PDA phones) or Blackberry. I guess you could include Symbian in the list too.
Come 2007 Google is working on Android as a direct BB clone to enter the market. Apple released iPhone. Google quickly shifted Android design consideration to mirror iPhone. The market rushed away from the dedicated simple phone interfaces and into the world of current smartphone OS.
This shift is a natural progression. There is no barrier to anyone else creating a new phone OS and market it to phone maker. Perhaps Linus will back a LinuxPhone? Or perhaps Nokia will update and reintroduce Symbian? The fact is, there is little benefit in trying to do so. Android is open source. It is ported and customized by the larger phone makers today. The current duopoly is a natural progression. And the only reason anyone could possible imply innovation is the previous generations of phones and phone-OSs ceded the market.
Mobile phones have always been controlled. Mobile phones have always been expensive. Mobile apps have always been expensive. Mobile phones have always had a walled garden - only it was Nokia, Erriccson, Motorola, Verizon, AT&T, etc. And the developers were sure not making the money then they are now.
In the US we had 2-year carrier contracts that included a highly subsidized phone. Phones and services were actually more expensive pre-2007. Most of the rest f the world always paid full prices for a phone - hundreds of dollars to over $1,000 - so the argument that users are paying more now is even more difficult to make.
I think that ultimately, many countries (US included) will focus more and more on the App Store and Google Store rather than the OS itself. The OS is the way for governments to centralize the focus of an investigation ("we investigate iOS"), but it's would be VERY hard for a government to even facilitate the creation of new mobile ecosystems. However, the App Store is ultimately just a gateway to install apps, and I am sure that measures to open it up little by little - maybe even facilitate the creation of new App Stores within an ecosystem such iOS - is probably doable by legislative acts.
They can potentially issue fines as they are in desperate need of cash after Covid.😝
I would argue "Chicken and the Egg". Which comes first? If you have a platform that (phone and SDK etc.) attract "users" first, then "developers" will follow. WebOS may have been better, but did it attract a user base for developers to sell too? Seems not to have happened. Apple created iOS and a phone that Mac users wanted. Users happily accepted the device without any 3rd party developers being able to sell them anything on that mobile device. Same for Blackberry and Google Android and Windows mobile etc. They all had nothing but what it came with, and people purchased them. When things "changed" enough to start picking a side either on device preference or feature sets and or "apps" that started to come down the pipe. It became what it is today. This was not Apple or Google forcing out competitors. They failed on their own merits. Either a combination of times changing, dev's not making apps for any particular platform, not being easy to code for, not having a big enough audience to sell to, bad UI or phone design, etc. Any number of reasons or combination of reasons. So long as no other company forced out the other by bad market practices etc. This is just how it is supposed to work out. The EU or US will have zero chance of changing anything here. You can't force business to exist to counter a monopoly or duopoly. They can try to break up Apple and Google and make them sell off parts of their business. However, I would counter that either or both would choose to not be in the business at all then. As a big FU to all those governments. Since they still own the rights to well, all of what they made. No one else could just pick up from that point forward. Not only that, if someone wanted to say purchase it from Google and or Apple just the mobile business. They would over charge for it, cause they can. To make up for the next 10 years of assumed profits.
Just my 2c.
DUMB
DUMB
DUMB lol 😂
There is no duopoly.
Apple’s OS is on its own product.
Google has a monopoly and that’s because there’s nobody else who can make a decent OS for the majority of phones.
Who is there?
Microsft tried and failed badly.
Symbian was 💩
Blackberry version of Android was 💩
Firefox tried an OS and it was 💩 💩 💩
Amazon tried an OS and it was 💩 💩 💩
Before smart phones we had PDAs with many different OS and they were all 💩 💩
DUMB
DUMB lol 😂
There is no duopoly.
Apple’s OS is on its own product.
Google has a monopoly and that’s because there’s nobody else who can make a decent OS for the majority of phones.
Who is there?
Microsft tried and failed badly.
Symbian was 💩
Blackberry version of Android was 💩
Firefox tried an OS and it was 💩 💩 💩
Amazon tried an OS and it was 💩 💩 💩
Before smart phones we had PDAs with many different OS and they were all 💩 💩
The fact they wouldn't make any money from doing that.
You need a device (phone) to have that OS run on, and well of course. Plus an audience (users) whom wish to purchase it. Then after you get that going, hopefully your OS/hardware is good enough for developers to want to develop for, and so on. This all requires huge investments to get off the ground and LOTS of marketing to get people interested in it. Just for it most likely to fail because Apple and Google are the dominate players here with well established track records of created products and services people want.
EPIC and Facebook and Amazon are all free to try. And the latter 2 did, and failed. And they are both large companies with tons of resources to do it.
Ridiculous nonsense. I guess these people have to at least act like they are doing something even if it wasting taxpayers money. No one wants the other phones u brain surgeons!
That makes no sense, you can't swap OS's (well not in a practical everyday user sense) parts of the code are written for specific hardware.....just like computers...you can run Win on a mac, but you are not replacing the Mac OS, you are running it on top of Mac OS through an emulator and you are can't (as far as I know) run Mac OS on a Win box. I mean there are hacker geeks doing it, but this is not a consumer thing.
I wouldn't say that hardware prices have fallen at all, especially when it comes to Apple.
Welcome to China market, embrace 50% store tax instead of the insufferable 30% Apple tax, all the apps competing each other in the backstage to push advertising notifications and multiple stores crashing each other on single phone. /s
That is pure BS. Take away the duopoly then you have dozens of app stores, dozens of smartphone OSes, dozens of smartphone companies churning out their own ideas of a smartphone, etc., and very little comptibility. You have a nightmare for service providers and greatly increased costs for same. At least with a duopoly you can find what you want as far as OS and apps. You don't really have to worry about whether an app works with your phone. I remember the 1990s when every cellular (pre-smartphone) had a proprietary OS, crap apps, a kluge form of entering contact info, etc. It was darn nightmare. If the little companies went under it is because they sucked and couldn't compete in a fair market, not because of the duopoly. They had their chances and blew it. They are the reason we now have a duopoly. The reason is we the customers culled out the companies that couldn't manage to turn out products we wanted.
would those companies fail or lose customers?
and shouldn't the user/human have more options?
the reason why this planet still spins (besides the fossil fuels underground) is a person having a choice.
the more choices, the better the planet.
Exactly.
I'll just add the distinction that Apple introduced the concept of a unified software platform to mobile phones and the network effects of that were so strong that no one else could compete except for Google who scrambled to create their own software platform.
I think there is scope for realistic rules that improve things for consumers and address the clear imbalance in power.
To me it definitely feels they have an unfair advantage in the service market due to deeper integration than they would afford to developers.
From the top of my head:
- Level playing field for service competitors e.g. limit Apple's commission to 5% on in-app subscriptions to non-Apple services where they compete like music, fitness, video, news (soon meditation)...
- Extend defaulting options, maybe open up the possibility to choose Alexa over Siri or backup to Dropbox over iCloud
It's similar to the when movie studios also owned the cinema industry, meaning only certain films were available at that studios' cinema and smaller studios couldn't reach an audience. Which was deemed to violate US antitrust laws in 1948 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/what-movie-studios-refuse-understand-about-streaming
Myself and others simply don't care that Apple has their own app store and not a 3rd party store on top of it. The app store has plenty of quality apps that meet a certain standard. I've never once asked myself why Apple doesn't have a third party app store available for iOS, nor has 99.9% of the user base.
Only the USA is ideologically wedded to 'pure' capitalism like this.
I'm glad I live in a somewhat free market for businesses, rather than England where they can forcefully tell a business how much money they can and can't charge.
The state where I live tried to tell ISP's to offer a $15/month plan for people living in poverty... A judge just struck down that law and said "no can't do."
Why should it be incumbent on any business to facilitate their customers' departures?
There really is no real problem with that now. I can sell my iPhone and buy a Samsung. Heck - I could get one for free; there is always some carrier giving one model or another away.
Both Apple and Android have built-in data imports tools. Both platforms have the basic apps. Both platforms offer for purchase third-party apps that extend the platforms. Some of these apps are made by developers who support both platforms. Of these some of the licenses will transfer between platforms. But what about those developers that do not allow multi-platform license? Or developers who only support one platform. Should the developer be forced to gift users licenses? Should they be forced to change their business models and develop for a platform they do not with to? Should Apple or Google be forced to refund all your app purchases because you want to move the other side of the fence?
This does nothing to improve life for consumers.
And there reason the comments are all about a 3rd or more OS is the complaint is the Apple / Google duopoly. That would be iOS / Android. If you look at phone manufacturers there are a lot more than two options.