To be fair though, amongst other things, we did invent the computer, the world wide web, the concept of programming and the ARM microprocessor.
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Apple and Google's Mobile 'Duopoly' Targeted by UK Regulators
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As Trump and Putin have said:
The EU is a dictatorship, destroying poor little companies and subjugate every independent country.
Rules against the angle on earth - our Apple from Garden Eden - is a more than believable evidence.
/s
TOTALLY understand and agree! Which is why the idea of depending on US tech even seems more odd. The country that literally invented the computer has zero plan to try to make their own mobile computer. I know when they were part of the EU, many of those companies were regulated out of the region. But, at this point, there’s no excuse for just throwing their hands up and leaving their tech future in the hands of others. Especially when those others could use this stranglehold over them in future negotiations.
It’s just one more nail in the coffin for “monopoly” nonsense. There has been no country that has actually tried to put forth, legally, an argument that they’re a monopoly and won. These more creative legal contraptions, their made up term for “companies we want to regulate while also giving other companies comfort that, while they’re effectively doing the same thing, we won’t suddenly try to regulate them” will always be the go to as it doesn’t depend on saying that Apple has an illegal monopoly over Apple’s App Store on Apple’s iOS that runs on Apple’s iPhone.
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The UK has had 17 years to introduce competition from their own markets and companies since Apple rolled out the App Store in 2008. It seems here the argument from the UK is "We took too long to proactively do anything about it ourselves, and now we don't have EU muscle to be our enforcers, so let's make these companies pay."
I don't get this. We employ a bucket load of Google and Apple staff and the last mobile phone platform we truly put on the market was from Racal who are thoroughly dead and gone. And this was the phone
So what? All it will do is fragment the wallet experience into a mess where banks will demand you use their wallet for each card, and google will take over mobile browsing without a buffer. Consumers chose iOS and android because it was better than BBOS, Palm, Windows Phone/CE and Symbian for their use cases and experience.
There's that British company that makes great phones and has a nice app store that goes with it. Just buy more of those and you'll have a trifecta. /s
These regulations do not introduce competition to Apple’s platform. There will still only be iOS and Android.
The way to reduce Apple’s platform fees is to introduce more platforms.
More platforms means more consumers on different platforms.
Consumers can then switch to a platform that offers lower app costs because the platform provider charges less to access its users.
To remain competitive, Apple would then need to reduce its platform development fees and/or hardware prices else it risks losing developers and consumers to the platform with lower platform development fees.
Here we go again. They just don't get it do they? And they just don't learn. Already the Home Office has been or very much likely will be forced to back-track on the attempt to force back-doors into protocols used for iPhone backups. They were also looking to tinker with similar facilities from other providers too. Apple et. al. pushed back and rightly so. The US Gov pushed back, and hard. Surely exactly the same thing is going to happen all over again. I do hope so. And this is coming from a UK resident.
I remember when this first started in the EU, I was thinking that, with Google basically owning the market and Apple only showing 18% market share at the time, that we were on the cusp of the creation of a new smartphone platform. I mean, just having EU marketing behind it being publicized as EU’s own mobile tech, with subsidies from the government able to drive the price close to the cost of materials and the OS created by EU developers, that alone had the potential to swoop past Apple’s paltry marketshare to be the new number 2 in the region. And, unlike China, they’d likely be willing to license that tech and OS worldwide, bringing millions and billions of dollars into the region driving a wider range of devices, demanded by users in the region and around the world.
Then I found that “more competition” didn’t mean more devices bringing more OS and App Store choices from more vendors. Their plan is to go from a situation where Google and Apple provides the solution to a situation where Google and Apple provides the solutions.
Even going the route of having an EU OS with an EU App Store on an EU approved subset of Android phones would have been better for competition than what they came up with.
Only because customers then had half-a-dozen viable choices and could choose the better newcomers, iOS and Android, over the more established ones... and that was probably only because Microsoft failed/were stopped from making Internet Explorer the only viable web browser.
Now, Google and Apple have had over a decade to pull the ladders up after themselves and make it near impossible for anybody else to break in. That's why pretty much every country needs regulation against anti-competitive behaviour.
Sure, but these new rules are really just the UK implementation of the EU's DMA (which was probably partly written by the UK anyway) which any tech firm that wants to trade in the EU will have to comply with anyway.
Anti-monopoly legislation works best when it prevents monopolies forming.
Most competition laws don't require a literal monopoly or duopoly - just a market that is dominated by a few big players.
That's why there are multi-platform developer tools.
That's why there are standard protocols, formats etc. to help interoperability. When you have couple of big players, they can push their own proprietary "standards" to lock people in.
Great example.
There are W3C standards for how web browsers worked.
Microsoft had a near-monopoly in the OS market, bought a web browser and bundled IE with windows, pretty much reducing the competition to negligible market share. Even managed to make IE the standard browser for MacOS.
Then, Microsoft started adding proprietary features to their browser (ActiveX, OLE not to mention various HTML and CSS quirks - and quite probably just being obstructive at W3C) so some websites written for IE stopped working properly on other browsers. Because they were the dominant browser on the dominant OS they really didn't have any incentive to stick to standards. Some web developers went the extra mile to make sure their sites worked on firefox, webkit etc. but it was a faff.
Then - something broke that pattern. Was it the EU browser choice screen? Was it other anti-trust cases about IE bundling? Was it Microsoft missing the boat on mobile? The rise of iOS? Google using search to push its own browser? Probably a bit of all of those. Anyway, browser choice got better, standardisation got better, proprietary browser extensions largely went away, there were three mainstream choices aside from IE - Chrome/Firefox/Safari - and a lot of smaller options which were viable because they used open-source versions of the main engines and/or the same W3C standards. Browsers started competing on how well they implemented the standards, not by inventing new standards.
Except that we're now creeping into the situation where Chrome and Safari (via its mobile version which is the only choice on iOS/iPad OS - other iOS browsers are little more than re-skinned Safari) are getting really dominant. Mobile Safari is becoming a pain to develop for, has been slow to adopt W3C standards for things like multi-touch and other Rich Web Application features over its own etc.
Nothing is stopping another platform from existing other than app developers refusing to make their apps for it.
It’s the app developers who caused us to be left with a duopoly.
Allow me to put it another way. What is the UK doing to encourage home-grown disruptive tech? The UK has tremendously successful universities. It has many successful businesses and generally does great at fintech. If the UK wants to improve computer/smartphone tech in the UK, what is the government doing to promote innovation?
The success of Blackberry, for example, didn't stop Apple from coming out with the iPhone and iOS. Although Apple and Alphabet effectively control the smartphone OS market, there is potential for a disruptive business to come along. Look at what OpenAI and other companies are doing to Google's search dominance (see also this article).
I'm not saying every country needs its own mobile OS or smartphone brand, but governments that are working on restructuring tech companies should look at implementing policies that encourage their own tech innovation. The UK started out strong in the 1950s and 1960s and then floundered. Regulating iOS and Android in the ways proposed are weak attempts to foster ersatz competition within a platform rather than addressing governmental bureaucracy that impedes innovation.
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They never have, since the inception of the personal computer, and near a dozen or more have tried.
If you are talking about a focus on a singular company then I think your point and sarcasm are great. However, while I think a government going after Apple or Google for their individual business practices is a terrible thing, I am ALL for a government researching issues of a duopoly. Having the two main players in the market conspire and hold the market in place is good for the them and bad for consumers. This is where the government can assist. But only if they are actively working together to control the entire market. This is true anti-competitive behavior and needs to be checked.
Why does everyone assume so much about how the P&L and other financials work at these massive organizations??? I know it feels easy to just speculate, and maybe it is a little fun, but I think we should use a lot more words to indicate opinion instead of stating so much as fact. The real honest truth is that these companies evolved. They didn't start up one day in a mature mobile market. That means that each one (Apple and Google) matured through this process. Costs for certain areas of the business are not always associated directly with profit centers. Often times businesses do things for a reporting purpose, or a management purpose, or geographic purpose, and on and on. This means that we don't know the affect of forcing a business change onto a business.
It is POSSIBLE that Apple could lower the 30% cut because it is "arbitrary" in the full sense of the word. However, it is also true that if they lowered it, and the ripple on affect of that loss of revenue in the business affected areas that need revenue, Apple would simply adjust and backfill that revenue via some other charge, fee, etc....Also maybe not.
Also, there is a HUGE assumption that competition would lower prices. While that was certainly true in decades past and with non-software industries, the software industry hasn't really followed that pattern. I tried to google to find the article, but the Harvard Business Review (I believe) did an article a while back that looked into this. What they found was that in the software space a company who was entering a mature market would undercut on price when they first arrived to the space. Eventually however, the more market share they got, the more their prices would adjust to be in-line with (+/- 10%) of the rest of the market. The study showed that while sometimes the companies would have higher profits, much of the time they relied on venture funding to get the company up to speed and eat the lost profits at the beginning to eventually be "back on track" once they started charging an more "industry standard" rate.
Another point to consider is that look what Epic is doing with their platform. They are a huge vocal complainer about Apple and Google not being fair by locking people into their App Store. However they are paying over $500M to have exclusive rights to distribute games on their platform! LOL So you can go to a different platform if you want, just not if you want a game they have! 🤣 I think people are being naive if they think that breaking this stuff apart means the new companies are going to operate on any different principles than Apple or Google.
You are just going to have more of them doing the same thing, charging the same basic prices. This is a war between giant corporations and who gets the money, it is NOT about the consumers and they will not win because Apple or Google is forced to make changes to their App Store policies.
Also, BTW, in case anyone missed it, I firmly believe the government needs to look into Apple and Google working together to control the market.
Plus if there really and truly is a LARGE number of users/developers that want different, then that’s a custom made golden opportunity right there! They would RUSH to stake their claim on whatever this new platform would turn out to be, such be their dissatisfaction with what currently exists, right?
I think most people saying there are folks that want different realize they’re a small enough group that, even if all of them were to back a Kickstarter for the new thing, it wouldn’t be enough to get past the funding round. The fact that some people want something that no one can produce profitably enough has been true forever.
Is there literally any evidence this is happening though? Not being facetious, I’m genuinely asking.
Clicking through to the UK’s page on this, they’re not accusing Apple and Google of colluding, they’re repeating the faulty EU logic of “there are only two options, open and closed, therefore Apple needs to open up like Google so there’s in effect only one option - too bad if you want a closed ecosystem; we know better than the market” with a side of “Google and Apple shouldn’t be allowed to prevent or discourage people from sideloading because we clearly don’t understand how malware works.”
That's a lot to write when you're missing the key point: The only assumption we're using is that Apple is trying to maximize profit. Unless you think Apple is doing something benevolently, then there is absolutely no logical reason that the prices of the app store would go up by the introduction of competition. And if you think that Apple is a benevolent company that doesn't try and maximize profit, then I'm happy that you're happy in that bubble.
No, there’s not. There IS a history of companies working to control the markets, though. And, one of the earmarks of that is when the market shrinks from many choices to fewer choices. However, there are known ways that companies get to this point and some of those ways in this example would include:
-Buying rival hardware makers and putting them out of business
-Demanding exclusives from developers (if you release in my App Store you can’t release anywhere else, ever)
-Forbidding retailers to carry competing products (threatening not to allow them to offer yours for resale)
-Forcing deals with carriers that would keep them from selling competing products
—which would lead to having structural blocks in place preventing competition from arising.
A cursory non-extensive glance would show that there’s not enough information available to make any of these worthy of the money required to research it further. Though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I’d happily take a several million dollar grant and a number of years to come to that conclusion if it would make anyone feel better!
Sometimes people like things and buy what they like based on the features or because it’s what their family buys or what their friend buys or what some influencer told them to buy. Google and Apple don’t have to be colluding for those to be the only options, they just have to be good enough that even folks that say they want something different will still buy them rather than rejecting them and waiting for what they want.
God, yes. Especially since Apple and Google are hell bent on making their operating systems so ugly. Their obsession with encapsulation, padding, and white space has gone too far IMO.