So what would be the difference if Apple just built all the features of Dark Sky into the default Weather app and crushed Dark Sky leaving them with no market?
And as far as they would still have Android, we all know that the Android market isn’t nearly as profitable for app developers as the iOS market. They wouldn’t have received any money. Why would you want the government to tell developers who you could sell your property to? How would that affect the entire startup ecosystem? Would investors only want to invest money on companies that could go public? Especially seeing that for example only two YC backed companies have ever gone public.
Also, if the government did stop Apple from acquiring Dark Sky, are they also going to stop Apple from hiring the developers, the developers let their app rot and Apple still has them to integrate the best features of Dark Sky into the Weather app?
I’m always amazed at how willing people on HN are to give up their freedom and independence to the government.
I didn't impute that the anti-monopoly regulations are necessarily a good thing or a desirable thing. Just that, if you want to stop monopolies, you're overlooking one of the most powerful ways that they can get built. Anti-monopoly regulations should be investigating this, but they don't. Whether or not we should have anti-monopoly regulations is a different question (and I don't think monopolies are a moral evil inherently and are if anything essential in some areas to drive innovation) But if you want to fight monopolies, you need to be looking at things like this.
The idea is to prevent monopolies before they happen. If antitrust gets involved in a merger they dont want to let the merger happen and then reverse it, the idea is to prevent the merger from happening in the first place
Apple isn’t close to having a monopoly in anything. So there isn’t any action that regulators could block which would prevent a monopoly.
Also all the markets that Apple are involved in are highly competitive. Computers, mobile phones, tablets, video/music streaming, credit cards, online payments, and headphones are all highly competitive with healthy competition.
Additionally when Apple enters a new market they are normally increasing the level of competition not reducing it, and that competition has often changed the face of those industries. If anything Apple increases the health of industries they enter.
Anti-trust regulations aren’t there to harm big companies, they are there to promote the health of markets by increasing competitive pressure.
I’ll go out on a limb now and speculate that the existence of Apple has made the use of anti-trust regulations less likely or necessary in the markets where it is active in.
If Apple had a monopoly in mobile phones and they used that monopoly to try and create a monopoly in headphones then I could understand the call for bringing in the regulators. But the current situation is nowhere near that. You can even buy Bose headphones in Apple stores.
And as far as they would still have Android, we all know that the Android market isn’t nearly as profitable for app developers as the iOS market. They wouldn’t have received any money. Why would you want the government to tell developers who you could sell your property to? How would that affect the entire startup ecosystem? Would investors only want to invest money on companies that could go public? Especially seeing that for example only two YC backed companies have ever gone public.
Also, if the government did stop Apple from acquiring Dark Sky, are they also going to stop Apple from hiring the developers, the developers let their app rot and Apple still has them to integrate the best features of Dark Sky into the Weather app?
I’m always amazed at how willing people on HN are to give up their freedom and independence to the government.