This is much more serious that the Microsoft case.
In a more reasonable market, like smartphones or phones in total, Apple just does not have a monopoly. There are alternatives.
Are smartphones a natural monopoly? And at what levels? Hardware (including plugs and jacks, physical button locations and functions?), software, data federation? Like where do you draw the line?
If smartphones must allow alternatives, then why not gaming consoles? It's a similarily integrated device. Would Microsoft be forced to allow unlicenced 3rd party software on the Xbox?
But in reality, in the wake of 9/11, USA thought it was more important to have extremely large companies, and it let them grow.
(And MS’ EU fine was related to not giving the API doc, and perhaps using fines as a political weapon).
Clearly, if US applied the anti-monopoly laws, it would shoot its own companies. In my opinion however, no single entity should dominate, govt or enterprise, and we must parcel large ones to keep competition fair, replacements rolling, class mobility high, the american dream possible for new entrants and more importantly, so that governance of our daily life is regularly given to the next generation.
Antitrust enforcement has more to do with the party in power than anything else. The Bush Administration wasn't interested in suing businesses, and now the Biden Administration is again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5...
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
I’ve seen people saying in these comments often that you have to use safari. I am using ff on my iOS device right now, what am I missing?
But if you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?
- Mac OS X Public Beta (2000)
- SUSE Linux 7.0 (2000)
- Debian 2.2 (2000)
- OpenBSD 2.7 (2000)
- Solaris 8 (2000)
- AmigaOS 3.9 (2000)
- and so on... [0]
Hardly “no alternatives” in my humble opinion.
And in office space, MS-DOS was still a thing for quite some time.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_operating_systems#...
The 2001 decision was comparing desktop options at a time when they weren't any. Today's mobile users have plenty of options, plenty of brands and OSs to choose from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
It was a choice, but most decided to cave in and only sell PCs.
Here that isn't the case, most shops selling iPhones also have other brands available. Customers aren't forced into buying iPhones.
However, Apple isn't extending its dominance in the smart phone area (Apple has 53% market share of mobile devices, Microsoft had above 90% market share for intel compatible PCs https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... ) to its licensees for iOS.
Apple not forcing Samsung to bundle Safari on the Samsung branded iPhones to the exclusion of Chrome.
Yes, Apple isn't licensing iOS to others and that's a key difference. Furthermore, Apple has half of the market dominance that Microsoft had in its day.
Even more so when you consider how much larger these companies are set to get yet (Google will double in size again within ~5-7 years). It's the Microsoft case if Microsoft had been allowed to continue to build its power out for another 10-15 years unchecked. In the 1990s a parade of magazines ran stories about how Microsoft wanted to set up a toll road on the Internet, to position itself to take a bite out of all ecommerce. They were of course meant to be scare stories to garner attention as Microsoft wasn't close to accomplishing something like that at that point.
And yet, here we are two decades later, Apple and Google control two big Internet toll roads and are drastically larger and more powerful than Microsoft was in the 1990s. IBM was seven times larger than Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft of the 1990s looks downright quaint by comparison, an emerging big tech company playing at being giant (back then there were still far larger and more powerful corporations); today, Apple and Google - big tech broadly - are the most powerful and largest companies. Caterpillar, GE, 3M, General Dynamics, GM, Ford, Honeywell, etc look like sad jokes standing next to Apple or Google.
Google for its part has three monopolies which have amazingly been left entirely alone: search, YouTube, Android. They must have signed one helluva protection deal with the intelligence apparatus back when PRISM was getting set up, they got a ten year get out of jail free card (it's in the interests of the intelligence community to have these giant intel-hoovering companies that sprawl and span the globe).
Apple standing against that is important for the open web.
