Then you in most cases have the option to vote with your feet.
Are you saying it's Ok for Apple to avoid being fined?
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Apple Files Motion to Dismiss Department of Justice Antitrust Lawsuit
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Are you saying it's Ok for Apple to avoid being fined?
The imessage example is a good one. It is software, it is not something that is tied into the hardware that makes it impossible to be used outside it's own eco system. Apple could have made a version for Android that allows Android users to communicate to iphone users using imessage. Apple have always said no to this and that if people want to use imessage to communicate with one another, they must purchase an iphone. This is anticompetitive because there are other mobile devices out there that could communicate with iphones via Apple's messaging system, is just that Apple refuses to allow that to happen (3rd party apps allow it to happen).
like "Apple, stop being so good and rich"? ;D People buy this product for a reason. gtfo and let them buy it? xD No one forces anyone to buy Apple.
It isn’t that the EU has a vendetta against Apple. What do all those companies designated as “gatekeepers” have in common? None of them are European. The EC has a lust for fining foreign, and especially American, companies for dominating categories where Europe has failed to create sustained viable competition. Nokia was a giant and owned a large portion of the cell phone market. They could have owned the market today. But, they were caught flatfooted and couldn’t compete when the iPhone entered the market, followed shortly thereafter by Google with Android and an open source OS model. The EC is merely trying to find a political solution to a business problem.
Actually Apple does with imessage. What was and sometimes still is the biggest feature that is used on a mobile phone? text messaging. Apple knows this and thus it want's everyone in the world to use an Apple iphone and the way to do this is to prevent the biggest feature of a mobile phone from working with your competitor (Android) by preventing direct interoperability between their text messaging systems. There are many of us who have family members that are in both camps, iphone users and android users. Both camps should be able to flawlessly text each other without the need for phone settings to change or to install 3rd party apps. An android using family member should be able to just add their iphone using family members contact details into their android phone, press on their contact name in the address book and start texting one another but Apple prevents that from happening because it will not allow Android to use it's imessage system. This gap is bridged by 3rd party app developers but it shouldn't be. If my sister buys an Apple iphone and I have an android phone (Motorola), when she rings me to tell me she has got a new iphone I should be able to just add her new telephone number into my contacts list, save her details, then start texting one another but I can't. If I want to be able to have flawless text messaging between my sister and me without the use of 3rd party apps or either of us having to spend time going into each of our phones settings to change some settings, I cannot do that, I have to by an iphone. THIS is what Apple wants and THIS is why it is anticompetitive.
Conversely, that explains why Apple will probably not remove the physical SIM slot in EU iPhones anytime soon.
If you are referring to the DoJ suit regarding OS’s, the main problem for Microsoft is that their licensing agreements were structured to force PC manufacturers to pay for a Windows license for every machine produced, regardless of whether the machine was shipped with Windows. This did actually suppress competition. PC manufacturers who might have promoted and bundled a competing OS (like Linux) didn’t want the extra expense in a hardware market with cutthroat competition.
If you are referring to the ECs action against Microsoft on browsers, that is a perfect example of the feeble BS the EC tries to pull. It would have been a reasonable suit in 2002, when IE was over 90% of the market, having crushed Mosaic and Netscape through bundling IE. But, they filed the suit in 2009. IE was such a bad browser that by 2009, Firefox was already the most used browser. By 2013, when the settlement took effect, Chrome had become the dominant browser and IE had receded to around 11%. In other words, the EC jumped late to correct a problem that the market had already corrected. Why did they do that? There were people in Europe producing browsers who blamed Microsoft’s bundling for their lack of success. Today the browser market belongs to Chrome and the European browsers that were blaming Microsoft for their lack of market penetration either don’t exist or have far less than 1% of the market.
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Wrong. Apple supported the standard messaging at the time iPhone came out, SMS. It still supports it. It still works. Messages go between Android and iOS more times than you can count everyday. There is interoperability at the SMS standard level.
Complaining that Apple hasn’t jumped to support a different industry standard (RCS) shows a naïveté about the nature of industry standards. They aren’t laws. They are not mandatory unless a law is passed requiring their implementation. China has passed such a law and so Apple has integrated support for RCS into the next version of iOS. But, you’ll still get to complain in ignorance about interoperability with Android. You see, Apple will only support the RCS standard. It won’t be supporting Google’s non-standard extensions.
Are you as well read on cyber crime as you are on anti-trust cases? If so, your rhetoric isn’t persuasive.6 months in in 5 more days and I've not read ONE case of any of that in the EU. Those EU crime syndicates must be incredibly patient criminals.
It's the possibly part that always worries me. The classic monopoly case is Standard Oil, yet the price to the consumer dropped to some 30% of the price before Rockefeller created efficiencies and scale. That was a benefit to consumers.
Of course , the case is more complex, since Rockefeller also drove competitors out of business through tactics besides price; and given companies might at least lose less money by selling at a loss instead of stopping production or selling out/joining Standard Oil prices may have eventually gone even lower as a lot of marginal companies tried to start in business.
The impact on monopolies is a fascinating economic question; of course the challenge with internet discussion is people assume you are defending one side or the other when you are trying to gauge the impact.
So you expect a company that creates a desirable product be required to make those features available to competitors as well?
Edit: Typos and small additions
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I said it must work 'flawlessly, SMS does not do this. I was helping out a family friend with a computer problem, I had an iphone SE and she had an android Samsung. I put in her contact details into my phone and opened imessage to text her. Emoji's, pictures and video's I was sending from my iphone she did not get, only text messages. Plus I never got notifications that she was texting me. And if you say 'well that's a settings problem with either of your phones' then it proves my point because as I said, imessage to Android is supposed to work 'flawlessly', no going into settings, no installing 3rd party apps.
This is pretty standard practice. If a case brought against you was totally without merit, your wise counsel would ask a judge to have it thrown out (as was done here), saving you as their client the enormous additional cost and hassle of preparing for a trial.
Unless Chump wins and replaces career prosecutors with inexperienced political hacks, I expect the final result will be a mixed bag (i.e. "Apple can leave a and b the way they are, but needs to change y and z"). And I say this as someone who thinks Apple is on the right side in this case.
No, it's not. iMessage is Apple's protocol for communicating between Apple devices. SMS is the fall back standard.
Even with RCS, Google has extended it with some of their own additions so it may not work 100% either; which would be Google's fault for using nonstandard implementations.
Apple's implementation of RCS (part of iOS 18) should resolve this issue for the most part.
Competition? Many of which have also been fined/prosecuted/investigated for anti-competitive practices in the USA... (e.g. https://www.reuters.com/technology/...ust-case-over-digital-advertising-2024-06-14/) Reminder: this article is about a US action against Apple - I was just responding to a bit of whataboutism regarding the EU.
The main difference is that the plague of regulatory capture in the US has meant that these actions result in a gentle slap on the wrist - or a wishy-washy settlement - and the companies keep doing what they were doing, whereas the EU tends to follow through...
What EU companies do you think are unjustly missing from the EU gatekeeper list?
Closest candidate would probably be ARM and they ain't EU (or even UK) any more (nor is that the EUs fault) - and even if they were on the list, it wouldn't necessarily put them in violation. Still, they were EU when they played a role in preventing the mobile market from being assimilated by MS and Intel.
So?
Motorola was a giant and owned a large portion of the cell phone market. They could have owned the market today. But, they were caught flatfooted and couldn’t compete when the iPhone entered the market,
Microsoft was a giant and owned a large portion of the cell phone [OS] market [Windows Mobile/CE]. They could have owned the mobile phone market today. But, they were caught flatfooted and couldn’t compete when the iPhone entered the market, (They may be on the Gatekeeper list now but not because of their nonexistent presence in the mobile market).
and so on... iPhone and Android won that one fair and square, beating EU, US, Japanese companies alike. Unfortunately, that puts us on course
That's not such a bad thing so long as Android stays a truly "open source platform" and Google aren't allowed to effectively dictate what apps, search engines etc. manufacturers can install - which they surely would do unless they are stopped. I think what the EU is doing is trying to act before these digital markets have turned into mutually incompatible duopolies.
The problems of a technology "monoculture" (or even a "duoculture" or "trioculture") were nicely illustrated by cloudstrike a few weeks ago...
You think there's a difference?
You think the USA doesn't engage in protectionism to favour American-registered companies?
You think that US technological dominance has nothing to do with companies like IBM and Microsoft who have all faced antitrust action in the USA - but only been made to sit on the naughty step for 5 minutes and then given a lollipop.
If it uses exactly the same cellular network technology as it's competitors then yes. Apple and Android phone manufacturers all have to comply with the Cellular telecommunication standards if they want to use the cellular network infrastructure provided by the likes of AT&T, Vodaphone, O2, Three, BT and EE (those are the most obvious to me) but every country has their own network infrastructure provider. Apple cannot go and say it want's to use any or all of those network providers but then say it's going to prevent some of it's features being used. If you use the same infrastructure as everyone else then at some point you will be compelled to offer your services and features to others.
If Apple had it's own network infrastructure then there would not be a problem, it's network, it's rules, just like it commands with it's app store, it's app store, it's rules. But it doesn't, it uses a common telecommunication standard that is available to all. This is why there are anti-competitive rules to prevent businesses from saying 'I am going to use what is commonly available but I am going to make sure I make features that are not commonly available to all. Businesses cannot do that and the EU is telling Apple is cannot do it.
If Apple wants to prevent others from using iphone functions then it should build it's own network infrastructure.
yeah, you can txt message android <> iphone. No problem with that. Geen bubbles, blue bubbles, who cares? Only kids in school. If someone rings you and you can't save his phone number on your contact list - it means you have a broken phone or something ;D Every phone has copy & paste option... cmon bro.
+ what's wrong with using 3rd party apps? Who is buying a phone and does not install any 3rd party app? Everyone does xD If something is blocking you, it means there's another way of doing it. Phone should not be the limitation anymore. At least Apple is not in my opinion. But I agree, RCS texting iOS <> Android should be enabled by Apple.
WhatsApp Reaches 100 Million Monthly Users in the United States
WhatsApp this week reached a significant milestone of 100 million monthly active users in the United States, a market traditionally dominated by...
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You make a compelling case. The DoJ doesn't answer to shareholders or have to make a profit--and these are actually good things. They probably have won most/all of these kinds of cases, because they have to do an enormous amount of prep work in advance just to see if there are precedents that can be used to justify their case ("I don't like their business model" is obviously not sufficient.)
That being said, they do have a budget to work within, and they do have to prioritize certain cases over others. AT&T was an extreme, obvious example of a monopoly, as they were effectively a nationwide phone utility. Imagine spending $4 on a simple three minute long-distance phone call, and you have no other options (except visit in person or mail a letter). That was America in 1970. So you had generally negative public sentiment and an objective monopoly at stake. You have neither of those in this case.
Though I disagree with the case, I personally predict a mixed bag. Apple will have to make some changes to certain products, while leaving others as they are.
The US and EU do not agree with you. There should be no messing around with phone settings or installing 3rd party apps for a messaging feature that should work seamlessly between iphones and Android.yeah, you can txt message android <> iphone. No problem with that. Geen bubbles, blue bubbles, who cares? Only kids in school. If someone rings you and you can't save his phone number on your contact list - it means you have a broken phone or something ;D Every phone has copy & paste option... cmon bro.
+ what's wrong with using 3rd party apps? Who is buying a phone and does not install any 3rd party app? Everyone does xD If something is blocking you, it means there's another way of doing it. Phone should not be the limitation anymore. At least Apple is not in my opinion. But I agree, RCS texting iOS <> Android should be enabled by Apple.
WhatsApp Reaches 100 Million Monthly Users in the United States
WhatsApp this week reached a significant milestone of 100 million monthly active users in the United States, a market traditionally dominated by...
Even if what you're saying is true, what you're implying is utterly ridiculous:
The EU should be ashamed that it didn't foster any of the tech giants, that none of them are European and therefore just let the great, foreign minds violate its markets and interests however they please with no fines or regulations? The EU should just be thankful that they get the privilege to use all of these gifts the foreign tech gods bestows upon them?
Sounds very emotional and extremely fiscally irresponsible. Which is why the EU didn't just haphazardly punish Apple and its peers for not being European but have long been in talks with big tech to come up with regulations that can meet their interests to some extent and leave room for European and other, smaller non-EU businesses to grow and to accommodate EU to consumer rights.
If you took the time to consider the myriads of laws and bans the EU has implemented over the decades impacting nearly every area of privately owned businesses, you'd see that what big tech is being subjected to by the EU is nothing new and has been going on in all EU markets since the EU's inception, long before anyone realized big tech would become a pillar of modern life in the West.
What country or government with an ounce of common sense and foresight would not do what the EU is doing to big tech if it has the leverage?
And this notion that big tech just has to lie down and take it like a helpless victim needs to stop -If these regulations were too detrimental to big tech finances then pulling out of the EU would clearly have already happened years ago. There's simply too much money to be made despite the losses any of these new laws may lead to.
Stop simping for billionaire tech corporations -They're not building our roads, hospitals, powerlines, or making sure you have access to clean water. They're just creating great consumer products for profit.
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That's funny. I feel like I've read thousands of confident, passionate posts about the cyber crime to definitely befall the EU as soon as this law went into effect (just shy of 6 months ago now): Viruses, Trojans, Ransomware, empty EU bank accounts, all manner of atrocious acts by crime syndicates, plagues, pestilence, locusts, 4 horsemen, etc... and we're 6 months in now and I've not seen ONE such story. "Wolf! Wolf!" cried the boy but this time the villagers did not come.
This builds upon the prior year of much of the same (cyber) security certainty that would rain upon us all by Apple being "forced by 'stupid' EU law" to switch from Lightning to USB-C... that it would doom owners of the new phone worldwide to all kinds of security nightmares along with the extinction of pocket lint ("lint magnet"), and endless hefty fees for port repairs due to wobbly ports and broken tongues. Where's all that at? Did they announce that USB-C phone and nobody bought it? Apparently not as we were reminded in yesterday's quarterly report. Was the outcome worse than practically promised and the amount of broken tongues is so great that owners can't get to their keyboards over the mountains of tongues to tell us about it? Or was that also a prior round of "Wolf! Wolf!"
Apple didn't want to dump the more lucrative fees associated with Lightning, so they spun some security risk (always a goodie, as one can't immediately rule it out or in when spun) and the evangelists (apparently working for them for free), spread that "Wolf! Wolf!" message far and wide. EU law called the bluff anyway, Apple complied (ironically with a port they mostly pioneered many years before on Mac), and there was no USB-C wolf at all. No USB tongues. No wobbly. Pocket lint still exists.
Apple didn't want to comply to the DMA either and lose some of the much more lucrative money of the "Company Store" model long established for iDevices. So they spun security risk and the evangelists spread that "Wolf! Wolf!" far and wide and in great abundance... and even continue to do so now. EU law called the bluff, Apple mostly complied (so far), and- 6 months in now- not ONE "Wolf" at all: no bank accounts emptied, no viruses, no trojans, the EU is still in place, EU Apple people are perfectly fine, etc. Where's THAT "Wolf! Wolf!"
I perceive enough time has passed on the USB-C "Wolf" to write that one off as complete nonsense spread far & wide. 6 months in may not quite be long enough to do the same with DMA but the clock is ticking. At SOME point- probably sooner than later now- if no "Wolf" shows up to gobble up the EU, we villagers will know once again that all that certainty about the impending security disaster in implementation was ANOTHER big pile of nonsense.
I'll "benefit of the doubt" the second scenario. Maybe 6 months is not long enough? But 7 will arrive soon enough... and then 8 and then 10, 12, 14. How many times do the villagers get all stirred up and come running before they finally realize there is no Wolf? They've already realized it with the USB-C port. So we know that even the fan-niest villagers among us CAN.
Anyone still believing that spin can keep running up the mountain to save sheep from those terrible- but apparently very patient- crime syndicates NOT stealing that easy money in EU bank accounts. I'm sure there will be another DMA thread(s) filling with lots of the same "Wolf! Wolf!" soon. I'll simply opt to "think different" like seemingly our Apple friends WITHIN the EU who- as a group- seem to NOT be the ones ranting about a law that only applies to THEM. Show me the "Wolf!" or I'm not buying the increasingly-apparent nonsense.
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There is one doing the rounds at the moment, Apple v EU on tax. Apple won the first round, the EU appealed and is currently going through the motions. Even though it relates to tax it is still related to anti-competitive behavior because Ireland gave Apple very very lucrative tax deals, tax deals it never gave any other company. The EU said this gave Apple significant advantage over it's competitors because whilst they were having to pay normal rates of tax, Apple was not. Obviously this is still going and has been doing so for a number of years so will be interesting to see who wins this.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technol...inst-eu-order-to-pay-11bn-tax-bill-in-ireland
yes, if you feel f*ked like EU (~1% tax Apple pays in Ireland) then you start looking for some other ways to apply fines etc
Or you say the iMessaeg does not work the way it should ;D No one ever complained except Android users. And now it's a problem... if we don't know what this is about - we know what this is about: it's about money.