Supreme Court rules against Apple, allowing lawsuit targeting App Store to proceed

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Seems the bigger issue

was really directed towards developers being required to charge more for offering their (for-cost) apps in order to give Apple their required cut and Apple's counter-argument being that they were just a middleman and developers who utilize the App store need to pay for that service. But I think from a technical standpoint, Apple has also kept 3rd party developers from setting up their own direct-to-consumer app sites due to how iOS is configured (locked down) unless someone goes through the trouble of jail-breaking the device (and voiding the warranty) to get the app side-loaded somehow.

If this is the case, that is why others ecosystems are nervous. Seems a similar (but not identical) thing happened with M$ back in the day when they bundled IE with Windoze and integrated it so that you couldn't remove it and they lost in court for doing that. I.e., they may be trying the same approach as this -

Antonio García Martínez business 02.11.18 10:00 am
What Microsoft’s Antitrust Case Teaches Us About Silicon Valley

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Microsoft famously missed the rise of the web in the early ’90s, with Gates dedicating only a fraction of his mid-’90s tome The Road Ahead to the internet. Meanwhile, Netscape introduced millions to the pleasures of browsing and surfing, forcing Microsoft to do one of its notorious “fast follows” (i.e., rapid copycat product launches). The company introduced Internet Explorer in 1995 and wasted no time in browbeating and cajoling companies the world over into making it the default web browser on their systems.

Word of Microsoft’s depredations reached the US Department of Justice, which in 1998 sued the company for violating the Sherman Act, a vague and archaic law that regulates the ability of conglomerates to assemble monopolies and stifle competition. What’s more, the government’s lawyers wouldn’t just move to penalize Microsoft with fines—they’d seek to break it into smaller companies.

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Microsoft lost the first round in 2001, with the presiding judge ordering the company’s breakup. This “structural solution” (to use antitrust lingo) was later overturned on appeal, largely because under US law being a monopoly per se isn’t illegal. It’s typically only when a company abuses that dominance through coercion and collusion (among other anticompetitive tactics that raise prices and hurt consumers) that drastic remedies must be taken, and the appeals court wasn’t convinced that the judge in the first trial applied the correct standards to order a breakup. Microsoft and the government decided to cut their losses and reach a settlement, with the company agreeing to a series of “behavioral remedies” that dampened its ability to strong-arm others. Microsoft as Gates built it would survive, but the message from the government was clear: No one company could dictate the tech industry’s playbook.

Now, as Gates is off trying to cure malaria, and the chorus of complaint against Big Tech reaches a crescendo, could Bezos and his fellow giants end up in the government’s crosshairs? It’s unlikely, mostly because the tech world is fundamentally different today than it was in 1998 while US antitrust laws are essentially the same. To use a geopolitical analogy, technology was then a unipolar world and Microsoft its lone superpower. The tech world has since become multipolar: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and (a reduced) Microsoft are near-­absolute monarchs of their respective domains. No single giant can dominate any other, and one company can coerce another only with great difficulty, if at all. The prospect of Facebook twisting Apple’s arm to ship a new iPhone without any social media apps except for Facebook’s—which is more or less what Microsoft supposedly did to Apple with Explorer—is unthinkable.

https://www.wired.com/story/what-microsofts-antitrust-case-teaches-us-about-silicon-valley/