221
Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
(www.bostonherald.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Technology
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It‘s a duopoly and I doubt the US will tackle this problem. At least the EU has started doing something about it.
Some nuance to that. The software platform is a duopoly, the hardware is not.
Not that it matters too much, because anticompetitive practices don't need a 100% or even a 50% market share.
and even then, Android is mostly open source.
I've personally updated the kernel to my Amazon Fire tablet (and believe me, the 3.18 branch doesn't contain as many security backports as they'd have you believe)
Antitrust is not about whether people have the arbitrary ability to go around it, it's about whether people actually go around it, and if not, is that because one player entrenched themselves in the market that they are able to distort it.
I mean, you're both right.
Yes, the use of OSS by Google doesn't exempt them from antitrust laws.
But also yes, it does give them a defense that Apple just doesn't have. Not solely because of the OS portions, but also because it tends to guarantee some nominal competition. See above my point about Samsung's alternatives.
Correct. But hardware is not the problem here, I‘d say.
I guess it depends. If Apple made iOS available on other hardware this conversation would be different, I bet. The problem with Apple's practices is the "ecosystem" approach. You get one of their devices and you HAVE to use their OS, you HAVE to use their core app bundle, you HAVE to use their store. And in a number of things where you don't have to, you're heavily incentivized or the competition is made less competitive. And now you're on a software platform that only works with Apple hardware, so now you have an incentive to migrate your other computing devices (laptops, desktops, smart TVs) to be from Apple, too, because that's where your compatible software lives.
It's the sort of practice antitrust laws exist to prevent.
Google is no saint and will do as much of this as they're allowed, but at least the nature of their OS and the diversity of manufacturers and OS customizations means they don't control the ecosystem end to end. The biggest manufacturer is Samsung, and they will ship with their browser, an alternate store, a different mail client and a bunch of OS modifications Google doesn't control, so Samsung and Google give each other some plausible deniability within the Android ecosystem oligopoly.
US won't tackle it because it's a hegemon and in mercantilist terms benefits from it.
The EU and everybody else are, in fact, interested in changing this.
But - if nobody remembers, there was a certain TRON Project in Japan. Read up how it ended. Now, US threatening Japan with trade sanctions to preserve some oligopoly and US threatening EU with trade sanctions with the same goal are two different things, the latter is harder.
EDIT: And I don't want this to rub someone in a wrong way, but this is a rare case where something possibly called "states' rights" could have made sense. If the federal government was stripped of ability to do such things.
You‘re right. That‘s why we need a strong EU and multilateral partnerships to counter US and Chinese ambitions.