Far too often it becomes what is good for the company to maintain or grow it's profit/control vs what is good for the market/consumer.
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Apple Faces German Antitrust Probe Into App Tracking Transparency
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Far too often it becomes what is good for the company to maintain or grow it's profit/control vs what is good for the market/consumer.
Why, for example, would someone's ability to sideload deprive someone else of the ability not to sideload?
My point was that anti-competitive behavior hurts consumers when there is no where else to go. With cell phones there is a multitude of manufacturers, linux and now Tesla is getting into the game. Apple wouldn't be as successful as they are today if they were screwing consumers with anti-competitive behavior. So it's a reasonable think to say, if you don't like Apples' way of doing business, go somewhere else.
Breaking up AT&T is the poster child of the court system gone wrong. We went from one monopoly that controlled everything to a triopoly that doesn't really benefit consumers and the US is ranked where in the world as to the quality and cost of it's cell phone service. AT&T is the poster child of a monopoly because it had everything, but then again it gave us Lucent labs, one of the most prolific laboratories ever.
Where can iPhone owners who want to shop somewhere aside from the first-party App Store go?
Android. The operation of the ios app store is legal. It has not been found in any court of law in the US to be anti-competitive. Apple has a monopoly on it's own products, which is legal.
It's not about device options. The anti-competitive behaviour is rooted in software: operating systems and app stores.
And there's only relevant operating systems (that have the relevant apps) to choose from: iOS and Android.
The operation of the app store in the US has been legally challenged, and at this time Apple has been found to be operating a legal monopoly. You can say what you want it to be or hope it will be, but that is the bottom line.
I didn't say it was illegal.
That must be why specialised legislation is brought forward that "aims to prevent Apple and Google, operators of the App Store and Google Play, respectively, from engaging in what supporters of the legislation deem anti-competitive practices in app markets"
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If it's legal, it's legal. You can attach any nomenclature you want to it. By the way the word specialized should be changed to socialized.
It certainly can be that way at times and when the situation crosses the antitrust/anticompetitive behavior line, it needs to be addressed.
Again, where did I dispute that here?
As for nomenclature, you yourself were making a point about anti-competitive behaviour:
Legal or not, yes, I agree that it hurts consumers.
Also yes, I do believe that Google and Apple are acting anti-competitively.
It the anticompetitive behaviour observed is legal (in such important), then there should be specialised legislation to make it illegal.
And that's what is currently brought forward in the EU and the US.
Anticompetitive behavior can still occur even if there is consumer choice or alternatives. A company doesn’t have to control 100% of a market for there to be illegal antitrust/anticompetitive behavior alleged and found in that market.
Also, a company being "successful" doesn't necessarily prove anything. Achieving or maintaining that success may be because they blocked, restricted, used predatory or other anticompetitive practices to try to prevent other companies from having a chance to become similarly successful and/or did those things to discourage new competitors from trying to enter the market in question.
"Go somewhere else" is a poor way to react to or deal with potential antitrust/anticompetitive activities used by a company.
Right. But there is somewhere else to go. (But I guess we disagree on that) There's also linux and the much vaunted Tesla phone which can't come soon enough to level the playing field.
It can occur, in this case in the US it's not. But sure at 50,000 feet I agree.
A company that mass produces consumer discretionary products this successful does in fact prove something, especially since the competition has less expensive cell phones.
Yes, how is apple or google preventing competitors from entering the market. It's similar to saying Ford is preventing me from entering into the auto manufacturing business.
If you were AT&T in 1983, go somewhere else was meaningless and required two tin cans and a string.
But in 2022, go somewhere else:
- Samsung
- OPPO
- Lirbrem, pine phone
- etc, etc.
App developers can go to iOS. Or Android.
Almost no one else uses anything else as a smartphone OS.
That's why developer can't just "go there".
Just slightly under half a century. And yes I'm hilarious for dragging up the hypocrisy of Germany's surveillance laws and this sudden tracking transparency investigation. Clearly hilarious...
Ok no there really isn't anywhere else to go. There aren't any pure Linux phones i.e. not complete garbage trying to pretend to have a superior free ecosystem, which much like Linux on the desktop is already turning into a completely fragmented nightmare hellspace in which to burn many hours of your existence on (note Linux user and professional since 1996 so I'm well qualified to whine about this). And let's not even say Tesla has a phone because today it doesn't exist and much like most of Tesla's promisees it'll never exist or be late. When it does, it'll be a garish poorly engineered mess that you have to pay for extra features that will never be delivered and crashes every 5 minutes.
Now FreeBSD on a phone, possibly with a better multi-media oriented kernel and message passing interface with a decent UI and an application ecosystem I'd buy. Oh now wait I did. I've got an iPhone.
I'm fine with this situation. New combined software and hardware ecosystems are immense projects spanning thousands of people and decades. It naturally forms monopolies like governments do, because it's a big hard job.
There is no level playing field and never will be. Pick a side and get on with life.
What I object to is monopolies of ideologies and governments are pretty hot at justifying those in the last couple of decades.
According to your user profile, you're in London UK.
Considering you are in/from one of the most surveilled places on the face of this earth (London UK), in one of the "western democratic" countries whose legislation has the least regard for internet privacy - while Germany has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world...
...it's indeed quite hilarious, yes.
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Likewise, if Apple doesn't want to play by Germany's rules, nor those from the EU (as previous MR articles have brought up), Apple is free to leave those markets and take their business elsewhere
Yes I am fully aware of their situations and have been following them for years.
The issue is that the noise around it has drowned the signal out and has merely emboldened authority to push for greater surveillance. Remember he who controls the marketing controls the perception.
Apples’s success with iPhones vs Android speaks for itself.
Yes I am indeed in London, UK.
To note, the studies around the use of CCTV here are somewhat fictional. In fact you will find that they are based on an extrapolation of one high street in the UK which is a notorious crime hotspot and over half the cameras were actually broken and just left there when they installed new ones. And there is enough capacity to perhaps look at 1 or 2 of them at a time and the guy doing it isn't some police guy it'll be the lowest bidding minimum wage employee who doesn't care about the job. Never underestimate our national pass-time of failing miserably at stuff.
Might want to have a look at the details of fintech sector data handling if you really want to be scared. It is far worse than all of these worries put together I assure you.
It’s one thing get into a philosophical debate about monopoly powers.
….But the argument here is over ATT. This is lawfare by advertising and intelligence firms trying to give users the “right” to be tracked and have no way to know about it.
It’s using consumer facing protections to give *companies* the right to data mine you. The argument being it’s unfair to companies that they can’t do the same level of collection as Apple.
….But the argument here is over ATT. This is lawfare by advertising and intelligence firms trying to give users the “right” to be tracked and have no way to know about it.
It’s using consumer facing protections to give *companies* the right to data mine you. The argument being it’s unfair to companies that they can’t do the same level of collection as Apple.