Apple isn’t considering that they are the baddies?
I suggest strong regulation of the complete BigIT and two chairs for public observers at minimum. In addition they are not allowed to enter any new market.
Why?
Because it worked well with AT&T. Results:
* UNIX
* C
* Open-Source
* Public Documentation
Sounds good? Until the Reagan administration appeared, allowed them to split up (Baby Bells), the UNIX-Wars followed, law-suits against BSD and broad incompatibility. And despite this horrible changes we still got:
* POSIX
* GNU (immediate reaction by FSF - they recognized the situation)
* Linux (which caused itself Git)
* BSD (TCP/IP)
Our information technology builds upon the regulation of AT&T. That was lucky, yes. But you need to prepare luck.
The politicians instead opted for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon with near to no regulation at all. Despite we learned that software immediately tends to monopolize due to Vendor Lock-in and mass-effect.
What are my benefits of a low billion fine ten years after on of this companies hurt us again? None.
Splitting up?
See again Vendor Lock-in and mass-effect.
It's particularly egregious given AT&T fought an infamously protracted legal battle against the United States Government to try to avoid being forced to be broken up (entirely against their will). They exhausted a lot of money and time trying to avoid the scenario the op is claiming they were trying to intentionally execute.
The comments you are responding to aren't referencing AT&T as egregious, but the misrepresentation of AT&T's intentions, given that AT&T desired the polar opposite of what the court ordered them to do, which was to split up. The above commenter was trying to portray AT&T as getting their way by splitting up, as if that was their devious intention all along.
The sentence before allowed had a bunch of stuff about Ronald Reagan and I wanted to avoid the political aspect.
In any event, the whole thing went down and was determined long before Reagan took office. The case was filed under the Ford administration and prosecuted mainly by the Carter administration. By the time Reagan took office the case had been in progress for nearly a decade, and he had been president for barely a year when the final decision was handed down.
OP just has so much confused about this chapter of history.
Thanks for your comment. Maybe I’m wrong in that part. Your link sadly doesn’t work and shows an 404. I’m a little confused because the Wikipedia says:
AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.
>The FCC also found evidence during this period that AT&T was overcharging consumers for physical products that had been manufactured by its equipment subsidiary Western Electric, which was itself a monopoly, and using the resulting monopoly profits to subsidize its landline network operations, which was a violation of antitrust law.[5]
These developments, along with an appreciation of new technologies and business models for telephone service that were becoming available, convinced American regulators that AT&T should no longer be tolerated as the natural monopoly in that marketplace.[6] A plan to break up the company into smaller components was proposed by the United States Department of Justice starting in 1974, citing authority under the Sherman Antitrust Act to reduce the power of a monopoly firm.[1] AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.
Given the context it seems they were fried anyway and were just able to negotiate how the split would be done
I dunno. Do you really fault Apple for wanting to hold onto their vice grip of the AppStore that gives them license to print money at ridiculous margins? I mean, their better angels would have them be so confident in the value of their own store that they'd allow other stores to compete on the merits but honestly ... if we were Tim Cook or in charge of Apple I think we'd all fight tooth-and-nail to keep this cash cow.
The benefit of the app store isn’t money. It’s the security of the ecosystem. 3rd party apps will begin a race to the bottom of fly-by-night iOS developers in it for a fast buck with no qualms about advertising and data trafficking. Before long we end up with what is seen in the Android system.
I mean...is the situation on Android you describe anything to do with third-party app stores and sideloading? Because my understanding was that, despite there being very few hoops to jump through, the only time the vast majority of users even consider stepping out of the Play Store is to install apps to let them stream pirated movies.
Moreover, Apple's App Store is already filled with race-to-the-bottom, shady shit. Apps with bait weekly subscriptions and bald-faced knock-offs are highlighted in tech news and on social media all the time. That's what makes their attitude and arguments all the more galling here: they are doing a really lousy job keeping their own store a safe and reputable place.
The only thing they seem to do a good job with is legitimate malware, and I suspect that's mostly because the OS is so locked down and because they scan for use of non-public APIs.
Developers outside the official store will price undercut those within the store. Legit developers will be forced to leave, fold, and/or adopt the shady data practices of the fly-by-nighters. Eventually the official store will be shadow of its former self.
Well heeled consumers will respond by being reluctant to put sensitive personal information on their phones. The entire ecosystem suffers, and phones, instead of becoming trusted personal devices, remain the purview of games, emails, and fart apps. Everyone suffers, especially developers.
You guys, above all others, want people to put more personal info on their phones, not less.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/08/apples-app-store-had-gross-s...
"There are some exceptions to Apple's 30% cut of digital sales, and Apple's figures are rough, which means that Apple's App Store total sales is likely even higher. Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm, estimates that the App Store did $72.3 billion in sales 2020."
So... 72 billion in 2020.. probably even more now.
$72.3B in sales, but given they get less than 30% of that, their cut is less than 21.7B. Put that in perspective of their total revenue of 294B that year the app store represents only ~7% of their total revenue. And I suspect the app store is actually a fairly costly business to run - a lot of effort goes into the decor of the walls around garden. I'm thinking app review, even content serving.
Not arguing that it's not a profit center - but in perspective, I suspect apple's reasons for defending it are not primarily the direct financial benefits of it - it's probably mostly about the indirect benefits.
True... although hardware probably has far higher costs. I found a site giving apple's net profits for 2020 at $64 billion. If their gross was $294B, that means their profit margin on average was 21% for their sales. If the app store is almost pure rent, and you are overestimating the costs of things like reviewing and it is only a few billion dollars to run, then it could have a far higher profit margin than everything else. Perhaps even 80 or 90%? If so, that $21.7 billion gross is almost pure profit and becomes something like a third of all their profits...
oh... also the article does try to take into account the varying rates apple charges and notes that despite the exceptions the true figure is likely much closer to 30% than the lower rates.
> $72.3B in sales, but given they get less than 30% of that, their cut is less than 21.7B. Put that in perspective of their total revenue of 294B that year the app store represents only ~7% of their total revenue.
If you have a company with a single line of business and they were to lose 7% of revenue that is going to be a large hit. There are many industries where that exceeds the entire profit margin of the company.
But more than that, they don't have a single line of business. Suppose that a conglomerate the size of Apple had totally monopolized the world market for lithium mining. Well, that's a $350M/year industry -- it's barely 0.1% of Apple's revenue! Why should they even bother to monopolize it? The answer is, for the same reason anybody else would. Maybe the CEO of the conglomerate doesn't much care, but the head of the mining division cares about it a lot, and so do all of the customers in that industry. And antitrust violations in service of maintaining the monopoly are just as illegal and just as harmful whether it's a subsidiary of a conglomerate or an independent monopolist.
Or to put it another way, 20 billion dollars is 20 billion dollars. It motivates putting in 20 billion dollars worth of effort to hold onto it, regardless of what you're doing on the other side of the building.
> And I suspect the app store is actually a fairly costly business to run - a lot of effort goes into the decor of the walls around garden. I'm thinking app review, even content serving.
Content serving cost is negligible. Review could be arbitrarily expensive, but the experience of developers seems to imply that they're not spending a lot of resources being diligent about it -- policies applied inconsistently, updates often denied for indiscernible reasons etc. Reviewers seem to be only making a cursory inspection or relying on some kind of inadequate automated scanning tools.
Moreover, they have each developer paying $100/year, which should cover that level of review on its own, if the goal was funding the reviews and not extracting rents. Their policies imply the reverse. If the goal was to cover reviews then apps with more downloads should have lower per-download fees, since the fixed cost of reviewing the app can be amortized over more units. And yet "subsidizing" small developers doesn't fit either, because if that was your goal the first thing you'd do is stop charging $100/year to hobbyists and side projects with little or no revenue.
What they appear to be doing is providing a "discount" to hardly anyone. They continue extracting $100/year from the long tail of small timers who aren't making any money, continue extracting 30% from anyone who actually succeeds, but get to put "15%" in their PR knowing that the eligible people only represent a tiny proportion of their collections.
> I suspect apple's reasons for defending it are not primarily the direct financial benefits of it - it's probably mostly about the indirect benefits.
Which are also an issue, e.g. by thwarting competition between browser engines.
In both, ATT essentially traded government blessing of monopoly in core markets (long distance telecommunications) for agreeing not to expand into other markets (e.g. Western Union money transfers and telecom equipment).
And side point, ATT R&D (~1910 to 1925, later named Bell Labs) was originally funded after the company almost imploded due to short-sighted profit maximization at the expense of customer satisfaction / service quality.
I think it's interesting to imagine what a Google-thats-only-search or a Meta-thats-only-social look like, similarly plowing their profits into independent research labs, but without funneling them throughout the for-profit octopus conglomerates they are now.
Thanks for that. It should be noted that these two cases you provided and the third case that split up AT&T are all not true regulations but were either consent agreements which is a court facilitated settlement or fully out of court settlements. I was only aware of the last case that split up AT&T so I thought GGP was referring to a real regulation that was later removed which I had never heard of.
That's a distinction without a difference; the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations.
What has changed since then are the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations. The law as written has not changed, but the way it's enforced (or not) certainly has.
The consent agreements are agreements between the government and AT&T. They arose because neither side wanted to find out if AT&T was breaking antitrust law. So that the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations is true. But when you say "the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations" has changed, that is not supported by the consent agreement because those agreements are not enforcements of antitrust regulations. Similarly when you say "the law as written has not changed, but the way it's enforced" has, that is also not correct in this case because the consent agreements/settlements are not enforcements of laws. I suppose you can argue that if the AT&T case happened today that AT&T would be more likely not to settle because they would feel that they are more likely to win because legal theories have changed. That is in any event it is a different matter than your claim about the enforcement of antitrust laws which did not occur in the case of AT&T. Also note that Kodak was decided in 1992 and is still considered good law. In that case the court found that Kodak was in violation of antitrust law. And that case is still essentially the basis for most (all?) antitrust cases that have been brought to court since then. For example the recent Epic vs. Apple case was just about how to define the foremarket and aftermarket for the variously tied products in the iPhone (like Appstores and operating systems). Nobody has argued that Kodak itself is invalid due to a change in legal theory. You may see a difference in that the government sued a large company in the past but hasn't done so recently and I think that is true. But your claim that it is due to a change in legal theory or enforcement of law is not necessarily true. None of the large tech companies today are nearly as dominant in their markets as AT&T was. The company which most closely resembles AT&T in market control is probably Google in ads but even then it's not even close to what AT&T was doing which was complete control over all US telephone lines and on the phones themselves with explicit contractual agreements that you could not try to make your own phone and use their existing network. I imagine that would violate the law that came out of Kodak by a large margin and had AT&T existed in the same way today it would certainly be sued by the US government and lose.
> So that the consent agreements and cases arose as a result of antitrust regulations is true. But when you say "the legal theories of when and how to apply antitrust regulations" has changed, that is not supported by the consent agreement because those agreements are not enforcements of antitrust regulations.
You seem to be implying complete independence between something being the results of antitrust regulations, the results of the enforcement of antitrust regulations, or the consequences of theories of how when to enforce antitrust regulations. For people who speculate that these three things might be related to each other, your argument will not work.
It was the result of antitrust regulations only inasmuch as it caused the government to begin legal proceedings against AT&T. It isn't the result of antitrust regulations in the legal sense, just the result of those antitrust regulations existing because had they not existed then there would be no case against AT&T and therefore no settlement. But those results were not an instance of antitrust regulation legally occurring. Certainly not within the sense I initially referred to it which was a regulation such that it could still be used today ("I thought GGP was referring to a real regulation that was later removed"). We can call the AT&T case a "one time regulation" in that it is not a law but was still carried out by the government even if technically optionally accepted by AT&T. But this is certainly different from a "real" regulation which is a written rule that takes affect every time the conditions of the rule are met, which was not the case in AT&T.
The very short is, that AT&T between 1974 and 1982, due to the telephony monopoly rulings, wasn't allowed to sell software. Thus they gave their research results to universities, like Berkely.
How different is that from tech giants using their monopoly profits to develop software that they give away for free? You say AT&T gave away some software to universities. Similarly Google gives away Go (among many other projects) as FOSS for anyone to use. If Google didn't have to worry about money, they might not develop these things to give away for free.
Because they can use the gifts to facilitate lock-in or because they want to share development with other companies or individuals. They give nothing away without it bringing something of equal or more value to them, or they're tossing it over the wall for dead. Any misconception you have that it's because they're super swell people should be slapped right outta you if it's there.
> Any misconception you have that it's because they're super swell people should be slapped right outta you if it's there.
The idea that businesses have to be super swell people is what should be removed. Businesses doing things for money is good. Just as employees don't work for them because they're super swell people. You just shouldn't be thinking this way.
I think the point of releasing Go (they were already using it internally before) was just to get free labor to help expand and improve it. They simply had nothing to gain from keeping it private.
I like this story. Nay, I love this story. But it is a just-so story.
None of the regulators had a clue it would go this way, it is a lot of magical historical accidents, and there is no reason to think interference guarantees positive outcomes.
For example, HN seems to bristle at the subject of AI regulation as a game incumbents play that hews towards regulatory capture.
Apple is clearly in the wrong here but how to best untangle things is not trivial.
I think it's a little bit better than that. There was a theory in operation: regulation which prevents sprawling monopolies will produce good results for society.
Of course, if you shook the historical dice differently, there would be different results. From that point of view it's all contingent, and you can't re-run the historical experiment, and so whatever conclusions you draw must be a Just So story.
But, that theory was in operation. There were regulations which prevented sprawling monopolies, and large (but not sprawling monopolistic) companies did produce a lot of good things for society. No one knew what they would be ahead of time - that's all contingent, after all - but regulators regulated with the expectation that their regulations would produce good effects.
Now we've de-regulated, and the people doing the de-regulation theorize that (predictably) sprawling monopolistic companies will produce more good for society than large (but not sprawling monopolistic) regulated companies did.
So... Did / do they? It's fair enough to argue either way. It's fair enough to argue about which regulations are effective and which are not. It's not fair enough to throw up our hands and say "we can't actually know what's going to happen, so there's no point discussing it."
Because there are theories of economics and governance in play, and they matter, and they need to be appraised.
The market was considered captured when Apple and Google entered the market in 2007-2008, too.
The reality is that nothing prevents a new entrant from gaining marketshare, especially considering that the vast majority of apps people use every day are associated with services not created by Apple. I wouldn't want to, but I could move to Android tomorrow with relatively little friction.
> You either support the only semi open standard of apps being Android or your phone cannot succeed outside of some developer tool.
(1) iPhone and Android had exactly the same problem when they launched. (2) Web apps are a thing. (3) This problem would still exist if iOS didn't exist.
Again, in 2006 "smartphone" meant Nokia, Blackberry, and Palm. There's simply no such thing as a "captured" market when it comes to consumer goods.
> Sure, competitors could have started in 2009, too bad it's 2024 though now.
You may be missing the point, which is that today's Apple and Google are as "permanently" entrenched as Nokia, Blackberry, and Palm were back in the day. That is to say, not at all.
> Yes, that's why we need open standards to lower the barrier of competition.
Many open-source alternatives to iOS and Android have tried and failed to compete. For better or worse, this doesn't appear to matter to mainstream buyers.
You're going in circles, we don't need to speculate, we know that no competitor can emerge because they don't despite a huge revenue potential in this sector.
The proof is in the pudding as I said anyways, I'll believe there's competition in the mobile space when I'll see it. For now it all looks like it's impossible due to blockers like the apps and others.
And yeah maybe smartphones will become obsolete but I'm not going to count on it.
Exactly. But if we suddenly transition to a "recompile to webassembly and ship it as web app" world I assure you $99 ($0 profit) phones will suffice for 90%+ of users.
It will take a very long time but that will be the inevitable result.
Splitting up needs to happen for big and monopolistic US companies, no ifs, no buts. That is if they still want to keep a technological edge in the next 10-15 years.
I personally don’t think that the forced split-up will happen, the direct interests involved are too big for that to have any chance of success, but it’s the only way forward for the US as a whole (when it comes to IT).
Any particular reason you are picking on US companies? or big companies?
Most, if not all, monopolies are sustained by government via laws, regulations, and so on. So let's get specific, which monopolies do you think should be forced to split up and we can test that theory and see if we can identify what government actions sustain the monopoly.
Having the OS, the hardware, and the app store, along with a lot of the (almost mandatory) cloud services AND the most popular apps, all made by the same company.
For a smartphone, I can pick between 2-3 (depending how you count) major OSes, tons of different hardware vendors for the non-Apple ones, one app store if it's Apple or any source if it's not, whichever cloud any third-party app uses or no cloud if I desire, and a lot of popular third-party alternatives to the native apps.
All that choice is already there, just for a phone. Previously you'd choose a flip-phone and have it all locked together, including with the carrier.
I don't think I would describe Apple as a monopoly. But I would say that copyright and patent law helps tech companies, like Apple, by restraining competition.
All I know is that I have it disabled on my phone except for the couple of services I do want (like Find My), and it works fine. My photos get backed up using Google Photos app, etc
I think if you turn it off entirely, it'll ask you once for each OS update if you want to sign in, which isn't too bad.
When it really screams is if you log into iCloud then forget your password and it keeps asking you to input it. Like with every elderly member of my extended family.
Do people really download anything from the MS store...? I got Python from there once and it's been nothing but annoyances. I guess I'm technically one of that billion users, but I'll never download anything from there ever again.
Anything large and successful in the US economy should be forced into the public domain. /s
When do we break up ASML and Taiwan Semiconductor and force them to give all of their technology to the US with no compensation? They're large, successful, de facto monopolies. All of their IP should be forced into the public domain across the board.
The US needs to start hitting ASML with massive fines. 1/4 of their earnings perpetually should be a good start.
We should also very clearly be allowed to utilize all trademarks for any purpose and at any time, since we're obliterating intellectual property. I should be free to use the BMW and Mercedes names for anything I like, including in the auto sector to compete with them. They should not be allowed to have a monopoly over those brands, it restricts competition.
All IP is a deal with society. If it's not serving society, the rules should be changed. In trademarks, the benefit is very clear - consumers do no do well from an entity passing off their product as someone else's.
I don't think the smartphone market is that consequential either way. It's a mature and played out end-user product already, not comparable to the early AT&T. If Apple could somehow be forced to properly support third-party app stores then so what. Forcing full PWA support would be much better, but still. I don't think it'd usher in some tech boom or meaningfully help consumers.
Personally, I don't fw apps anyway so whatever. Even if the govt wants to force iPhones to be like shitty Android then that's alright, I'll keep my old iPhone then deal with it when needed.
Probably just a more visible "install" button would eliminate the need for half of native apps. I've tried doing a PWA before, and despite iPhones having all the right capabilities for it (they even support push now), users were totally confused installing a PWA in the first place.
Beyond that, in theory, very few things need to be native apps if OS-makers really wanted to embrace PWAs. WASM and all that, and equally importantly, access to more native APIs.
I think people could have said the same thing about the phone network, because it wasn't obvious what they were missing: everyone already had a phone, after all, and they worked just fine; I guess we could open it up so more people could make phones but do you really think that is going to change the world? Turns out it did, and it shouldn't be lost that Apple is a beneficiary of this... imagine if they, at best, had to pay AT&T a 30% "core technology fee" on their sales of iPhones because the iPhone was using the phone network or, at worst, were simply never allowed to make a phone at all. Apple controlling what is viable to release and then making it 30% more expensive is absolutely having massive effects on the market and is slowing down innovation, whether you see it or not (and even if it somehow in a crazy turn of events actually didn't, we should still want our price break from real competition).
I suggest strong regulation of the complete BigIT and two chairs for public observers at minimum. In addition they are not allowed to enter any new market.
Why? Because it worked well with AT&T. Results:
Sounds good? Until the Reagan administration appeared, allowed them to split up (Baby Bells), the UNIX-Wars followed, law-suits against BSD and broad incompatibility. And despite this horrible changes we still got: Our information technology builds upon the regulation of AT&T. That was lucky, yes. But you need to prepare luck.The politicians instead opted for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon with near to no regulation at all. Despite we learned that software immediately tends to monopolize due to Vendor Lock-in and mass-effect.
What are my benefits of a low billion fine ten years after on of this companies hurt us again? None.
Splitting up? See again Vendor Lock-in and mass-effect.