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Brazil Recommends Sanctions for Apple Over App Store Rules

Timo_Existencia said:
But trying to claim Apple is being “anticompetitive” with a 9.1% marketshare is just silly
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It's not.
The question only is, what threshold to set:
At which market share or market concentration they should be regulated.
Unregistered 4U said:
the current regulators aren’t trying to vy for some higher political office like Vestager was.
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I know that politician-bashing has become a trend, but I don't agree.

There are reasons why, in many high-income, industrialised countries around the world, regulators and legislators are beginning to tackle Big Tech's anticompetitive practices. And it's not a big conspiracy to "vie for higher office".
 
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AppliedMicro said:
They do exist on the Mac.
And on Microsoft Windows.

So let's lobby politicians to allow us the same choice and rights on mobiles too.
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Again, business is not a democracy. Yet. But many in here seem to want that. And trying to claim Apple is being ”anticompetitive” at 9.1% marketshare reveals just how disingenuous many of you always are in this discussion.
 
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Apple should just close the App Store everywhere and re-launch it as the Apple Private Catalogue Program for Independent Developers, or APCPFID so it's boring and confusing. That way politicians will lose interest and won't consider it a "store" or "market". Just a listing. It seems that is the problem. Governments think that just because it's commonly known as an app store or app market, it's some sort of public commodity trading service that a private entity is obliged to maintain and be subject to regulations... and obliged to give their competitors stuff for free for some reason.
 
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AppliedMicro said:
It's not.
The question only is, what threshold to set:
At which market share or market concentration they should be regulated.

I know that politician-bashing has become a trend, but I don't agree.
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Which just shows you have zero understanding of what the theories around anticompetitive behavior are.
 
jgdeschamps said:
Governments think that just because it's commonly known as an app store or app market, they think it's some sort of public commodity trading service
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No - they think so because it does service as an important infrastructure platform for thousands of businesses.

Apple should just close the App Store everywhere and re-launch it as the Apple Private Catalogue Program for Independent Developers, or APCPFID so it's boring and confusing. That way politicians will lose interest and won't consider it a "store" or "market".
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It - and its underlying "iOS" platform has only become so successful and widely adopted because that's what they positioned it as: A "market" to which every developer could sign up and distribute their apps through.
 
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Unregistered 4U said:
It depends on how much the fine is. I’d be willing to bet that, like the EU, they will make the fine smallish because what they want more than anything else is to keep those App Store dollars coming in. They just want a reason to take some money off the top and they just provided themselves with that reason.

If you want to examine the actions of regions that want change more than money (heh), look at China and Indonesia. Both willing to prevent the sale of hardware in the region until Apple met their demands. Guess what? Apple met those demands.
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And Apple has already responded in the EU by charging App developers a slew of new fees some as high as 5% commission on all purchases outside of the App Store.

Other fees will just round out the overall cost of developers doing business in the EU.

This is undoubtedly going to lead to higher prices in the App Store in the EU. Something that many people, including myself, said would happen. The EU is powerful, but not powerful enough to stop Apple from offsetting these loses by just adding more fees. Apple is not going to throw themselves off the gravy train, they are simply going to make the gravy thicker.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
They may start actually fining them and then we'll find out.
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Of course you are right. We are all witnessing the most petty chess game the world has ever seen. Apple is going to play this game for as long as they can. Only until it starts to deplete their largest of war chests will we see some level headedness return.
 
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AppliedMicro said:
You just beat me to it.

I might add: they've already begun to do so.
And that will have been only the tip of the iceberg if the noncompliance persists.
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But Apple has just offset the fines with fees though, at least for right now. It's a dangerous game. Yes! But Apple is calling the bluff of the EU to enforce more drastic sanctions. We have to wait and see what Apple does next. This is a lose/lose in my book.
 
AppliedMicro said:
No - they think so because it does service as an important infrastructure platform for thousands of businesses.


It - and its underlying "iOS" platform has only become so successful and widely adopted because that's what they positioned it as: A "market" to which every developer could sign up and distribute their apps through.
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Let me remind you that when the iPhone launched, the original vision was for anyone to develop apps for it using HTML5, Java and some other widely available and free development kits. You were able to go to someone's website and use their apps under their own business terms and through their own infrastructure... did you know you can still do that? You know who choses that route? No-one.

Since that didn't work, Apple came up with a business model/application where you could find apps, and charged third party developers a yearly fee for Apple's own dev kits, along commissions based on percentages for distributing and receiving payments, so developers had even an easier time and more chances of success, and spend less on servers and banks, etc. Did it work? Hell yeah. No one was complaining, not even governments, until some years ago when Epic and Spotify decided together that they didn't want to pay Apple a fee anymore, and they began lobbying all around the world for this nonsense regulations to end Apple's app store business model.

It has nothing to do with the consumer or developers. It's pure, messy lobbying.
 
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I7guy said:
Whether one believes it’s propaganda or not depends on your individual point of view.
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The Cambridge English Dictionary has a pretty solid definition of propaganda. Not really a subjective term as you pant it to be.

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tennisproha said:
In order for something to be deemed propaganda by definition, you have to prove that it's biased and misleading, otherwise the counterargument is actually propaganda by definition.
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Nope. Propaganda doesn't have to be biased or misleading. It's simply information distributed to support a cause. Which is why dismissing it as propaganda is just an ad hominem fallacy.

propaganda: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

tennisproha said:
So do you have data that contradicts their metrics?
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No. I simply believe them while acknowledging that they include way more than fraud as they clearly describe.
 
BaldiMac said:
Nope. Propaganda doesn't have to be biased or misleading. It's simply information distributed to support a cause. Which is why dismissing it as propaganda is just an ad hominem fallacy.

propaganda: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
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No, that's also a misunderstanding of ad hominem fallacy, since I dismissed it by directly addressing your claims validity. Even by your definition, this conversation is propaganda.

But here are some additional definitions:

Propaganda: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause

Propaganda: The systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a particular cause or point of view, often a political agenda.
 
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Propaganda or not, I have done enough research to be confident that a closed ecosystem like IOS provides better security than a more open ecosystem. And even if I'm wrong (I'm not), as a consumer I want the freedom to choose a closed ecosystem for a number of reasons that are important to me.

I get that many of you prefer to have a state-run business environment, but outside of monopoly regulation and actual anti-competitive behavior, I prefer a system where the market gets to decide.

I have and still suspect that this is not driven by anticompetive behavior so much as many governments understanding that they are losing in the digital space, and instead of fostering real innovation are trying to regulate themselves into a more favorable environment. In fact, I'd be more open to the discussions if it were just presented honestly. But trying to hide behind this nonsense is silly. And further erodes trust in government.

There are plenty of people on this thread who know they can't make a solid case that Apple is being anticompetitive, but who simply prefer an open ecosystem, so are jumping on the government bandwagon.
 
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