I’m surprised to find myself siding with Apple / Google / etc on this. They did the work to build and maintain a distribution platform. They should be able to define its terms of use and costs. If you don’t like it, distribute differently. If everyone uses those companies’ devices, it’s a market endorsement that the world wants the standardization and managed ecosystem of each platform - that it’s a thing of value.
I don’t see how there’s any way you can tell Apple how Apple has to run infrastructure to support a distribution channel, but it cannot determine the prices or policies for someone using it to distribute an app.
Just because company creates market where products and services are sold, does not mean that the market is outside competition law.
> If you don’t like it, distribute differently.
Relevant market for networked multiplayer games can't be divided between platforms. People who own iPhones and Android phones play the same game online with their friends. Epic can't stay competitive and stay outside Apple AppStore and sell only for Android pones.
Sure Epic can. They can distribute their game as a fully in-browser web app, including building out all the infrastructure required to make this work (like Apple did). Or Epic can create standalone hardware devices that connect to their game network, do market research and user testing on what makes a good device, develop optimized supply chain and production systems to make the device realizable, and spend on marketing to convince consumers to buy and love the device, also like Apple did.
I play chess against people on any devices, through chess.com in a browser, even on my mobile devices.
“Epic can’t stay competitive” in that scenario is 100% Epic’s problem, they are not owed a slot in an app store distribution mechanism that they also don’t have to obey the policies of.
The costs and investment are not unrealistic or unreasonable. Apple paid those costs. Google paid those costs.
There’s a difference between saying “it would be really hard for Epic to recreate an ecosystem and hardware like Apple’s distribution channel” vs “it is structurally intractable or unrealistic in any way.”
If Apple & Google slogged through a decade of developing devices, app stores, manufacturing, etc. then so can Epic. If that’s really hard and Epic doesn’t want to do it, they can play by app store rules and use existing app stores.
The fact that it’s hard and expensive for Epic to do it their own way is no excuse to call other businesses monopolies. They aren’t doing anything that structurally stops Epic from building its own thing if it wants different policies.
Your argument is specious. It’s like saying the suggestion of building your own toll road is too hard, so some other toll road operator (who sunk capital into making their toll road) suddenly has to let you use it for free.
If they built the toll road, and they aren’t structurally sabotaging you from going and building your own if you don’t like the tolls, then this is your problem, and the other party exists as living proof that “this is hard” is not an adequate excuse.
You can’t cry monopoly just because you don’t like something and feel it would be hard for you to do it a different way on your own.
There is a technical definition of monopoly, and this case has a lot of people throwing around terms like “monopoly rents” with no relationship to the actual definition.
A monopoly means you have total control over a market and thus control the price of the market. Monopoly rents are where you can charge higher prices but people won’t go to the competition. Neither is true: app devs can charge whatever they want for their apps. The redirections are about stopping underselling across stores which is a common retail practice when they carry your wares.
This is a fight about retail markup. Epic knows they don’t have a strong legal case which is why they have the PR campaign. The only recourse will be to convince people to change the laws, because this case doesn’t neatly fit in the traditional antitrust model.
It is incredible that people actually think this is the end of history with regards to mobile device operating systems, and we should just declare Android and iOS And their ecosystems public utilities.
Windows once had 95% market share and that didn’t even happen.
Without that pressure Intel and Microsoft would have become even more evil. I think that MS and Intel needed a giant punch for the anti-competitive things they did or tried to do. Intel is still crippling AMD CPUs and they just have to put somewhere one the web a disclaimer(well hidden). If Intel could lockdown their CPU to run only Intel approved apps then Linux and the BSDs would have been hit hard, maybe OSX would not have existed (Apple used and still uses open source code)
They don't have to run infrastructure, they just have to update iOS to remove the signature check on binaries and support installing IPAs from Safari downloads, so that there is no need for their app store anymore.
As a consumer of Apple devices, I want the app store, and I only want app store software to be possible on the device. So if Apple needs to meet consumer demands, I’m an example of a consumer who wants the app store to work like it currently does, and I feel Apple’s policies of taking a cut of subscriptions and in-app purchasing is fair.
For a system where I want openness, I’ll use Librem 5 for example.
I don’t see how there’s any way you can tell Apple how Apple has to run infrastructure to support a distribution channel, but it cannot determine the prices or policies for someone using it to distribute an app.