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Apple is the fake competition | 188 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
I feel that way too
Authored by: tiger99 on Sunday, August 12 2012 @ 12:16 PM EDT
Some considerable time ago, I called Apple a Monopoly, and doubtelss suggested that they were every bit as bad as M$, here on Groklaw. PJ, always striving for accuracy, rightly pointed out the error of my assumptions, because in the legal sense they were, and probably still are, not a monopoly.

The problem is that a monopoly exists when someone owns most of a given market, and Apple have never owned a majority of the market for either computers or phones. The law, as of now, would seem to only look at the overall market for vaguely similar products. I happen to think that is wrong, but that is how the law stands as of now. If the market was defined as computers which can run apps intended for OSX, they have 100% market share, and have achieved and maintained that monopoly by restrictive practices.

If anti-trust law ever does take a more fine-grained look at the meaning of markets, it will be clear that Apple are indeed a worse monopoly than M$. But I doubt that such a thing will happen any time soon.

On the other hand, with some considerations such as legal requirements for interoperability in certain places, notably the EU, it could be a logical step to look at why an OS is only available on a single manufacturers hardware, and do something about it. If it was decided that the market really was limited to platforms which can run apps written for OSX, Apple's behaviour would probably amount to illegal tying, at the very least. All it might take is for legislators somewhere to realise that an Apple computer and a PC are really totally different markets.

Same for phones, Android is a very competitive market, which is good, but Apple is closed. If the market was legally the iPhone market, they would be in deep legal trouble.

It all depends on how the law, in the forseeable future, is going to view markets. For instance, in the car industry there is massive competition, but just suppose that one, and only one, manufacturer was making cars running on some new and very "green" type of fuel, and refused to licence their technology to anyone else. Would, or should, the law not regard the market as consisting only of green cars, not gas-guzzlers too, and would there not then be the possibility of an illegal monopoly?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple is the fake competition
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Sunday, August 12 2012 @ 01:15 PM EDT
It allows Microsoft to argue that they are not a monopoly.

Note the price break Apple is willing to give to Microsoft.

I call it collusion.

Some people spin it as competition.

---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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