It's true that Apple does not have — even in the US — the amount of market share necessary to be deemed a monopolist and subject to anti-tying laws for its browser. Android is a strong alternative, and as long as it remains so Apple will be effectively immune from challenge. The reason Microsoft was vulnerable to this is that its market share was much higher.
There is one thing that Apple does that Microsoft did not do: it prevents the user from designating a non-Safari default browser. Every link you open will open in Safari, unless you copy it and open paste it into another browser. Microsoft let users install other browsers and designate them as the default (I don't know if this was always the case, but it has been for a very long time.) I'm not sure if Apple has a technical argument for why this is necessary, but it probably won't ever need it because of the market share threshold.
FWIW, I am a recovering lawyer, and I spent a summer in antitrust law. So I'm not an expert, but I do know how to calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for the purpose of determining market concentration...
> It's true that Apple does not have — even in the US — the amount of market share necessary to be deemed a monopolist and subject to anti-tying laws for its browser. Android is a strong alternative, and as long as it remains so Apple will be effectively immune from challenge.
How does a strong alternative help solving the following problem. Let's say you are a video service provider, and want to offer MPEG-DASH[1] based service which relies on browsers supporting Media Source Extensions[2].
Soon enough, you discover, that iOS users can't use your service, not only because iOS default browser doesn't support MSE, but because they can't even install any alternative that does (Apple doesn't let them).
You are literally forced to implement something[3] in addition to MPEG-DASH to address a substantial amount of Apple users and in the process potentially pay Apple and Co. for implementing it because they own related patents, or you need to agree to ignore them (which means a loss of money for you).
TL;DR: Apple stifled adoption of MPEG-DASH, and forced you to do double work and in theory can force you to pay them money too. This is just one example, there can be many like that, another big one is video codecs and etc., but you get the idea. All that bottlenecks on the same restriction - ban on competing browsers.
Shouldn't this be a subject of anti-trust regulation? If they managed to do it, they have enough control over the market. But again, may be anti-trust law simply isn't equipped to address this? I see it as a major problem.
It's just a threshold issue — if they don't have enough market share, then they can't be sued for tying/bundling. The questions about video standards may be legit, but the assumption of antitrust law is that if there are strong enough competitors in the market, then competitive forces will pressure things in a consumer-favorable direction.
This doesn't hold true always, and certainly not in the short-run, but it's better than having every company with moderate market share being sued by any other company that wishes they had different features in their products.
I don't mean for this to sound harsh, and I wish iOS were more open in various ways that would make things easier for my startup, but I recognize that companies need to have autonomy to build products as they wish — except in rare cases.
I don't think anyone stops Apple from building products. But it's about banning competition, not about their products. And their influence on the industry is way too big to ignore it. So I'm pretty convinced, that what they are doing with excluding competition, shouldn't be happening. It's not about demanding features from them - let them produce bad browsers that are behind modern ones. It's about allowing better ones to be actually used by their users. I.e. choice.
The competition isn't another browser, it's Android. If you don't like Safari, use Android. As long as iPhones are a minority device in the market, regulators won't care what they do.
You make an excellent argument as to why an OS that limits software's ability to access device hardware, run native code, do raw networking, or implement JIT VMs and thus doesn't allow things like alternative browser engines is a bad idea.
I never bought into idea of the Webby OS, that Mozilla were pushing for. But at the same time, no one stopped Mozilla from allowing transforming Firefox OS into normal Linux, with Web runtime as one of the options, rather than a strict requirement. It didn't evolve far to judge really, what it could have been.
Depends on perspective. For MS I'm pretty sure we weren't counting servers, mainframes, etc. And them replying "just buy a Mac if you don't like it" wouldn't have been acceptable.
Apple has a complete iOS / iTunes monopoly in the iPhone/iPad market, which is pretty big. And Microsoft wasn't preventing the existence of alternative browser engines or banning apps competing with them, whereas Apple does.
It causes enough damage to browsers market however, which shows that their influence is sufficient to hinder competition. This should be a subject to Sherman Act or something similar. But I'm NAL either.
> From a legal standpoint Apple don't have a monopoly in the phone market comparable to what Ms had on the desktop.
Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.
Someone who is buying a phone can reasonably choose between iOS and Android. Someone who already has a phone and is buying an app can't reasonably choose between the iOS App Store and Google Play. And someone selling an app can't reach iOS customers via Google's or Amazon's store. They're different markets.
Microsoft didn't restrict what software you could install on Windows. That creates a different market.
That's not the legal distinction. What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer. This was troublesome because, at the time, Windows had a 99% marketshare of PC operating systems, which was judged by the courts to be a monopoly.
Apple has nowhere near the same marketshare in phones. Therefore, Apple is free to do whatever it wants with regards to its OS, as consumers are free to switch to Android.
> What got Microsoft in trouble is that they told PC OEMs that they would lose their volume discount for Windows if they shipped another browser alongside Internet Explorer.
What got Microsoft in trouble is that they had a monopoly in PC operating systems and tried to leverage it into a monopoly in browsers.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly in PC operating systems. They have a monopoly in iOS app stores. It's like having a retail monopoly for washing machines in the state of California. It doesn't matter how many retailers there are in Florida when nobody in California is going to drive to Florida to buy a washing machine.
It doesn't matter how many Android app stores there are when you can't buy an iOS app from them and you can't use Android apps on iOS.
Why is this reverting to marketshare of phones? It's secondary to the problem. It's about influence on the market of browsers, which also affects tons of other things in result, because so many services today are Web based.
(INAL so take this with the appropriate amount of salt)
Because it's illegal to use a dominant position in one market (desktop operating system in Microsft's case) to gain an unfair advantage in another market (browsers). Since Apple does not have a dominant position in any market so they're free to do as they please.
Note that the question what constitutes a market is not always easily defined. Apple obviously has a monopoly on iPhones or smartphones running iOS but I doubt you'll find a judge that sees that as a market distinct of the wider smartphone market.
Well, Apple's ability to stifle the progress of the browser market, demonstrates that their position is mobile market (which is causing the above) is dominant enough. Not sure how you quantify that influence from perspective of the law though, but practically their current influence is very damaging for the whole Web.
True, but in some ways this is Apple doing a favor for competing browsers. Imagine how loudly people would complain if Apple did the opposite — provided no support to other browsers, and left them to compete without Apple's inside knowledge of its OS and hardware. No other browser could come close, and we'd all be on Safari all the time. While it's not ideal to be forced to use Apple's rendering engine, at least we can access the many other features that alternative browsers offer.
I was thinking that myself. Personally I think the entire App Store model they have is terrible. Let's take something really good about Linux (package management), now we'll make all the packages monolithic (eh, guess it avoids dependency hell at the expense of space) and also you can only use our one and only tightly controlled package repository (da fuck?!) oh and you don't get admin rights and you can't install 3rd party signing keys (?!?!)
You market it to the general public of non-tech people and no one cares. It looks fancy and shiny and you no longer need a stylus .. and doesn't crash twice a day like PalmOS.
IANAL but couldn't the MS case be relevant/provide precedent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....