The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.
The anti-trust pressure has increased with this administration. Lina Kahn has been effective at the FTC in bringing a number of cases forward.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ is a very well executed newsletter with more detailed information regarding anti-trust if you’re interested.
She was pretty good on Planet Money : https://www.npr.org/2023/11/03/1197954506/lina-khan-interview-amazon-ftc-antitrust-paradox-monopoly
Yeah and hasn’t she lost pretty much every case she’s brought forward? She failed big fucking time with the Microsoft/Activision merger even though all the antitrust evidence was right in front of her nose. I’m glad the FTC is trying, because they’re actually doing their job, but they’re doing an awful job when it comes to actually being in court and proving their case.
People shit on Sony for trying to block the merger, but they absolutely were right for trying to block it and now games like starfield, the new Indiana Jones, and probably more in the future will be deliberately left off the PlayStation platform altogether. But that’s all okay right? Because now you get call of duty on gamepass!!! RIGHT???
I see a bunch of complaints against Kahn, but I haven’t been able to find articles on what she did that someone else would have done to be more effective. I don’t normally follow this type of news, so if anyone can point me to some articles, I’d appreciate it.
I’ve heard a few interviews with Kahn, and she sounds like someone looking to make a difference, so I’d like to cheer her on, but if she’s not the right person for the job, it’d be nice to see some examples why. I’d think much could go on to make her lose without it necessarily being due to her actions or inactions.
https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2023/07/18/lina-khans-antitrust-losses-cast-doubt-on-her-sue-dont-settle-philosophy/?slreturn=20240221150002 apparently she’s just taking the sledgehammer approach of suing companies instead of working with them to understand their motives and to make reasonable concessions that will benefit everyone. If those concession discussions fail then you sue and have more leverage in your case I guess. Either way, it’s a fair criticism IMO, and for the record I’m not really a right leaning individual, I just think she’s jumping into lawsuits without doing her homework first.
Dang paywall. That’s at least something I can look into more directly though, so thank you.
Lemmy makes me feel right wing anymore. I think the general news and politics here might be worse than Reddit, which is a shame. There’s a lot of things I’d like to learn or discuss, but half the threads might as well be bizarro MAGA rallies with how cultish they get.
I just came back to this post from one on Angela Chao, and just like the last one about that story, people are cheering on this lady’s death because they don’t like her brother-in-law. I haven’t been able to find anything about Angela that would indicate she had it coming, but that isn’t stopping anyone. If people have valid criticism of a person or idea, share it. Don’t just keep shouting “such-and-such bad!” over and over.
It’s getting worse and worse, completely agree. The reasonable people are getting pushed out by brainless zombies, just like on Twitter or something.
We need to work more on getting in the first few comments before they get there. If I come in and hot takes are all I find, I just move on. I’m sure others do the same.
It didn’t used to seem that way but some of the discussions I’ve had here are actually worse than reddit recently. Take a discussion about Instagram drug sale spammers. I mean, people selling likely counterfeit “xanax” etc to anyone on social media by spamming. Who would stand up for these scumbags? People on Lemmy, apparently, who consider themselves leftists and communicate like sophomoric 19 year olds. “Drugs should be legalized anyway!” Well, that’s not going to make it legal or safe for addictive drugs to be sold on social media and uh, Xanax is legal. I found discussion of the same article on Hacker News and the difference in quality of comments was vast.
Lol that’s exactly the stuff I mean. Legalize drugs, sure. Make them safe and take the business from cartels. Legalize anonymous strangers selling random chemicals, nah.
It was good maybe the first 3 months of the Great Migration, then had a sharp decline. Those first few months were great.
I’m not here for anyone’s militant views on politics, software licensing, diet, or religion. I just tend to avoid most comment sections anymore.
Why are so many people misspelling her surname? Or is the URL to the news article wrong?
I looked up the difference, and it seems that the majority of us have probably been raised in a place where Kahn is the more common spelling we’d encounter.
I mean the Activision case was a bad case though. Microsoft bought their way into… Third place, it’s not enough to need anti trust. Furthermore, Starfield and Indy were already going to be exclusives, those are Bethesda and that acquisition was already long since completed. Plus, it’s not like that’s the invention of exclusives. Sony isn’t exactly pumping over their games to Xbox here.
Hear me out though: this is a bad case too.
Even if it somehow was very solid, I’m sure it’ll play well on the news that the extremely popular American smartphone manufacturer is being targeted for winning too hard so poor Samsung can have a little piece of the pie too!
I’m willing to hear you out, sure. On what grounds is this a bad case?
The filing is filled with stuff like this (and I’m paraphrasing here):
The easy counterargument to that is that their biggest competitor, Samsung, sells their top end phone for $1,659. It seems like a crazy claim, how could Apple be charging so much, right? But that’s the norm in the market.
The filing is filled with goofy stuff like that. I’m not cherry picking for the dumbest arguments, just for the shortest and easiest to understand one that’s near the front so you won’t have to read far in to check it for yourself. It is a nearly 90 page court filing after all.
Yep that’s 100% a bogus/bad claim. Do you think that these bad claims will invalidate their case though? I’ve seen several mentions that seem to have grounds. Restrictions on app store, digital wallets and hardware all seem problematic from a surface level read. Thoughts?
So let’s say the specific restrictions are unique to apple (there’s a good argument that they’re not, but for the sake of making the best case possible let’s assume they are), the state would still need to prove that they amounted to creation of monopoly conditions in apples favor in the smartphone market.
That’s the language they’re using.
It doesn’t seem like an argument that can be won.
Take the messaging section, I’m paraphrasing again:
Later in the same section
So which is it? Is apple making an unprofitable mistake by not providing a cross platform imessage implementation or are they greedily and monopolistically preventing that same to great profit? It literally can’t be both.
There are a bunch of quotes in that section which do a great job of showing how apple executives want to make the most money for the company, but not a lot that tie that desire into monopolistic control over the smartphone market.
It really seems like a case they’re not trying to win. I don’t know what the play is, but this can’t be the best the doj can do…
Those are tough to disentangle, could they make money by having a cross platform messaging app and charging for it? Yes. Is that more or less than the money apple predicts they make by making it exclusive, luring/keeping others to/on iphone? I would like to believe apple’s internal conversation represents how they view things more than the government saying it would benefit them to open it up.
I definitely think they have weaker and stronger items in here.
Monopoly isn’t illegal the DOJ says. Abuse of monopoly power is. We can all discuss what constitutes a monopoly but I’m putting my money on the DOJ’s definition and interpretation of that definition actually holding water vs. common conception.
I find the most compelling things in their suit to be things that don’t really have a technical reason but a competition limiting one, like:
denying third party devices access to APIs that apple devices can access (e.g. no texting replies from anything but an apple watch)
restricting use of NFC/tap to pay to apple wallet which then requires any financial institution use it instead of making their own app -and apple charges for it of course (0.15%, they apparently made 200 billion USD off of this in some specified time period)
permissions for apples own apps are treated differently than for third party apps (you can’t restrict permissions on core apps for some things I guess - this is second/third hand reading for me from other sources)
That sort of stuff. It’s like, if you allow interoperability/third party access (i.e. a marketplace) then you’re obliged to keep it fair if you’re of a certain size/power.
Hmmm. That doesn’t make sense I feel like I’m missing some key context. Perhaps they meant it doesn’t help their case? I’ll have to read the filing. I know that iMessage has been an issue simply because Apple has refused to comply with other (text) standards that their competitors have implemented. That could be stifling innovation in the market due to their share of it but perhaps that is in the filing elsewhere. I suppose a lot of this evidence would be actually presented when the case comes to trial though, right? How indicative of the case is the filing at this juncture? If it is as poor as you posit, would it even be evident at this point?
Substack 🙄
The content is good, so I support the content.
If all we ever do is hold purity contests over secondary and tertiary concerns, like the platform, we’ll never accomplish anything.
I didn’t say anything about the content. Just… Like… Substack 🙄