How does this have anything to do with market share anyway?
Are you serious or are you just trolling? This is an anti trust lawsuit. The definition of antitrust is preventing abuse of monopolies. And the definition of a monopoly is “controlling most or all of the market share” or something.
Antitrust is about powerful companies abusing their powerful positions. With powerful I mean control over a market.
The idea is that if society is functionally dependent on a product, it shouldn’t be the case that the owning company abuses that position to force people into walled gardens.
While it’s of course still bad if a smaller company does it, the amount of people impacted will be lesser, so it’s not seen as critically important to take action against it. So that’s why antitrust laws only target the big ones.
I do absolutely disagree with Apple not being big enough though. iOS has a 30% market share in the mobile OS market according to statcounter, that ought to be big enough imo.
Well, those measures are not seen as anticompetitive then, because you’re not stiffling competition, you’re rather even aggressively competing with the big players. But yes, a company with a monopoly may not be allowed to perform the exact same action like a company with little market share.
The thing is, laws don’t have to be fair. As a society, we want laws to ensure the best outcome for everyone involved. Fairness just happens to generally serve that purpose.
But in case of anti-competition laws, it does not. For example, it could even be beneficial to humanity to literally just force any company above 60% market share to pay a big fee. Because ultimately, competition is beneficial to humanity and a monopolist is couteracting that.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see them take the Apple route in the future and just ban them altogether to avoid additional anti-trust suits.
Eh, I’m not so sure. Nobody knows the future for certain, but given the recent moves to enable third party app stores to provide more complete features like automatic updates, it might be much easier for the company to just build on that API to later argue that they have plenty of legit competition while keeping tabs on the secondary markets.
Keep the competition in your sandbox, so no surprises.
It seems Google lost because they allow other app stores, but also because they paid off other companies not to include them.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see them take the Apple route in the future and just ban them altogether to avoid additional anti-trust suits.
No, Apple won on some technicalities.
The case was in a US court but the court was only concerned with their global market share?
How does this have anything to do with market share anyway? They could have 1% and it would still be wrong.
I don’t understand what the difference is. Games are functionally and financially the same as every other app in the store.
Are you serious or are you just trolling? This is an anti trust lawsuit. The definition of antitrust is preventing abuse of monopolies. And the definition of a monopoly is “controlling most or all of the market share” or something.
My brother in Christ, if you think any size company should be allowed to engage in anticompetitive activities then we have nothing more to discuss.
When discussing the results of court proceedings what matters is the actual law, not what you think should be the law.
So the law says “anticompetitive measures are totes chill as long as you’re not completely dominating the market”?
Antitrust is about powerful companies abusing their powerful positions. With powerful I mean control over a market.
The idea is that if society is functionally dependent on a product, it shouldn’t be the case that the owning company abuses that position to force people into walled gardens.
While it’s of course still bad if a smaller company does it, the amount of people impacted will be lesser, so it’s not seen as critically important to take action against it. So that’s why antitrust laws only target the big ones.
I do absolutely disagree with Apple not being big enough though. iOS has a 30% market share in the mobile OS market according to statcounter, that ought to be big enough imo.
Well, those measures are not seen as anticompetitive then, because you’re not stiffling competition, you’re rather even aggressively competing with the big players. But yes, a company with a monopoly may not be allowed to perform the exact same action like a company with little market share.
The thing is, laws don’t have to be fair. As a society, we want laws to ensure the best outcome for everyone involved. Fairness just happens to generally serve that purpose.
But in case of anti-competition laws, it does not. For example, it could even be beneficial to humanity to literally just force any company above 60% market share to pay a big fee. Because ultimately, competition is beneficial to humanity and a monopolist is couteracting that.
Eh, I’m not so sure. Nobody knows the future for certain, but given the recent moves to enable third party app stores to provide more complete features like automatic updates, it might be much easier for the company to just build on that API to later argue that they have plenty of legit competition while keeping tabs on the secondary markets.
Keep the competition in your sandbox, so no surprises.