Can Apple be sued for its "anti-competitive" behaviours?

[lsquare]

Just remember, Apple did approve the Opera browser which I think does duplicate existing functionality. So can you call that "anti-competitive" behavior?

That was an odd one, but it's not completely surprising given Apple's inconsistent behavior in terms of picking which applications to approve. No one, but Apple knows why they approved Opera.

 

[atulhost]

I respect your feeling but honestly I would like to see you in place of Owner of Apple corp. then its interesting to how you tackles the market competition hazards.

 

[Emulex]

dude opera blows azz- it brings back memories from my touch pro lol. the only reason they approved it is because it sucks so bad compared to safari its not funny. serious joke given how fast the 'net is around here on at&t it isn't any faster. maybe on the iphone 2g lol.

This is exactly case in point why we do not want flash apps cross-compiled to iphone - crappy apps that exist that are not finely tuned to the device will crop up everywhere.

If you haven't spent enough time with opera on the iphone to recognize how windows-mobile the experience is - well you just haven't spent enough time using opera on the iphone. SUCKS.

Now where it will get tricky is when they kick google in the ballz and team up with microsoft and let silverlight (which is more touch aware already) create apps. that is when all heck will break loose. Microsoft+Apple would be a force to be reckoned with and it appears they need each other.

Honestly - kill java - kill flash (keep silverlight) - kill windows 8 home (we can call it Windows os X) and let microsoft dominate the corporate/server market where it is far superior - that would be superb.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Why kill flash but not silverlight?

 

[Cogman]

Why kill flash but not silverlight?

Flash, initially, was designed as sort of a interactive movie thingy. It was never meant to play games, render video, or pretty much any of the stuff it currently does throughout the web. In some cases, that really shows (video playback without video card acceleration). It is slow, bloated, and not really well supported across platforms.

Silverlight, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up to do the stuff that flash does today. It was designed for video playback, games, ect. And surprisingly is pretty well supported across platforms (Imagine that, microsoft being linux friendly... Who would have guessed?). Silverlight is actually pretty easy to program for, flash, however, can be a beast.

Flash's biggest advantage is the fact that it has a huge install base, and that is the primary reason of why it will be around for quite a long time to come.

 

[mykill100]

Bwhahahahaha. You obviously don't understand anti-competitive laws and what they mean.

Tell, what actions has the apple store taken against the google marketplace? None? Then whats the complaint?

Oh, your complaining that they refuse to sell some applications? Well guess what, they don't sell windows PCs at their stores either! OMG, isn't that wild? Companies can choose what products their stores sell! Incredible. You might as well start complaining about newegg because they don't sell oxyclean.

Or are you complaining that you can't develop a third party app for the iphone without going through the istore? Again, I point to the fact that apple is completely within their rights to deny whatever app they want from their store. They can control what apps are allowed on their OS and how their OS works. They aren't the only company producing smart phones, and they certainly don't have a giant lead over other smart phone providers (in terms of market shares/sales).

In no conceivable way is apple being anti-competitive. They aren't price fixing, they don't dominate any market place. They simply aren't in the position to be anti-competitive.

Oh, and BTW, I hate apple as a company, I also really dislike the way they run their Istore or the perpetuation of douchbaggery that constantly comes from a lot of their supporters. However, AFAIK, they aren't doing anything illegal.

Of course Apple are being anticompetitive, Microsoft just got sued for not promoting other companies browsers on there OS. Can you put IE8 on your Iphone? Are these laws just for Microsoft. Apple is also a major player probably the second largest OS provider in the world these laws where made for the thousands of companies trying to make it into the software market. Even the bluetooth on my Iphone is restricted to apple. imagine the outcry if Microsoft closed off there systems to the competition. Microsoft by law now have to promote Apples browser among others. Apple are breaking every anti competition law in the book, you only need to google "Apple anti competitive" to see the whole picture. It stinks of corruption and all we get is an anonymouse notice that the justice department are secretly looking into it. If one company can be sued for installing an integral part of there own OS but leaving there system open for all competition while Apple gets away with murder blocking all competition from every aspect of there OS then something is badly wrong. we can never have true competition without iniversal compatability

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Get off your high horse. Verizon limits bluetooth file sharing on all their phones. Why arent we complaining about then? Because your hate or bias against apple is too strong.

Opera was just put on the iphone. So your browser argument is null.

 

[speg]

Of course Apple are being anticompetitive, Microsoft just got sued for not promoting other companies browsers on there OS. Can you put IE8 on your Iphone? Are these laws just for Microsoft. Apple is also a major player probably the second largest OS provider in the world these laws where made for the thousands of companies trying to make it into the software market. Even the bluetooth on my Iphone is restricted to apple. imagine the outcry if Microsoft closed off there systems to the competition. Microsoft by law now have to promote Apples browser among others. Apple are breaking every anti competition law in the book, you only need to google "Apple anti competitive" to see the whole picture. It stinks of corruption and all we get is an anonymouse notice that the justice department are secretly looking into it. If one company can be sued for installing an integral part of there own OS but leaving there system open for all competition while Apple gets away with murder blocking all competition from every aspect of there OS then something is badly wrong. we can never have true competition without iniversal compatability

Except for the fact that there is a ton of competition. Android devices, Blackberries, MS phones, etc... If the iPhone held 90% or even 80% of the market, then you might have an argument.

 

[TheStu]

Get off your high horse. Verizon limits bluetooth file sharing on all their phones. Why arent we complaining about then? Because your hate or bias against apple is too strong.

Opera was just put on the iphone. So your browser argument is null.

My most recent Verizon dumbphone actually broke the trend and I had full read/write access to it over bluetooth. Still can't put my own ringtones on it though.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Ok then. So just why don't you wait awhile and then when they get to it they'll give more bluetooth access. And why would you want file support access?

 

[Cogman]

Of course Apple are being anticompetitive, Microsoft just got sued for not promoting other companies browsers on there OS. Can you put IE8 on your Iphone? Are these laws just for Microsoft. Apple is also a major player probably the second largest OS provider in the world these laws where made for the thousands of companies trying to make it into the software market. Even the bluetooth on my Iphone is restricted to apple. imagine the outcry if Microsoft closed off there systems to the competition. Microsoft by law now have to promote Apples browser among others. Apple are breaking every anti competition law in the book, you only need to google "Apple anti competitive" to see the whole picture. It stinks of corruption and all we get is an anonymouse notice that the justice department are secretly looking into it. If one company can be sued for installing an integral part of there own OS but leaving there system open for all competition while Apple gets away with murder blocking all competition from every aspect of there OS then something is badly wrong. we can never have true competition without iniversal compatability

anticompetitive laws apply to companies that dominate the market (IE, AT LEAST 70% of the market) Thus the anti-competitive laws that hit microsoft don't necessarily apply to apple.

Apple may be the second largest desktop OS producer out there (though, I somewhat doubt that.) However, microsoft still controls over 80% of the desktop market. Until apple is #1, most anti-competitive laws that apply to microsoft don't apply to them.

In every market that Apple is in, there is another competitor keeping them from being a monopoly. They are safe for a long time to come.

 

[MrColin]

Correction: Title should read "Can Apple be Successfully Sued for being Anticompetitive"

I can sue Apple for smelling bad if I want to pay the court costs. This is America, the greatest country in the world, and thanks to our endless appeal system I can successfully sue Apple for being anticompetitive if the scales of justice find that I have a bigger pile of money than they do.

 

[Penti]

Remember there's a huge difference between Microsoft and Apple, and that is that Apple is an OEM, they can do whatever they want in that capacity, bundle software etc (something MS has tried to stop PC OEMs to do). Microsoft is an ISV, which has punished companies like IBM (that was '95) by delaying OEM shipments leaving IBM with old OS's. In order to punish it's competitor. It has used it's position in a way to limit the OEM's ability to bundle competitive software to programs included in Windows. And so on, and has lost in court due to their practices or have settled for lots of cash which matter because they had a monopoly in the PC-desktop business. Most of that practices has been solved now with Win 7, you can include another browser cleanly without hacking. They have opened up much more now. You can get specs for most systems including the proprietary doc-format. (But although not as much as Apple were which the core of the OS is open source, as well as lots of other system components).

Apple won't have that problem as they are the only ones who can bundle software with their hardware and systems.

But in a way it would kinda be like locking out Adobe Premiere and Avid from using quicktime to displace them from the marketplace. They wouldn't have much chance to win in court for doing that.

As for phones I don't think it's that bad as portrayed, but of course a cell phone vendor can choose to do pretty much whatever. Operators are often even worse.

It's hard to strike an OEM to be anti-competitive, they can pretty much only be that towards other OEMs. There's plenty of markets where there's only a single vendor dominating the market yet aren't anti competitive or put up barriers for competitors to form.

And it's pretty much only anti-competitive if they abuse their market share and power to maneuver to hurt competitors and gain market share by preventing them to act in the market or tying a unrelated product to another maybe to harm a competitor who also releases a product in that segment or just lessening the competition or put them out of business and then jack up the prices. Including a free iPhone in any mac purchase in order to lessen the competition or otherwise effect the competition in the cell phone market would be anti-competitive and might be judged for it. But not if the purpose and the effect, is not to hurt or harming the competition in the unrelated bundled product, but just for selling the macs.

Apple aren't allowed to move towards monopolizing the market and destroying threats to it, but they can't really monopolize their own product 🙂 They are far from constituting a monopoly in desktop computers or cell phones. They are one of the smallest phone vendors. With a insignificant share of the market. But for example even though they where early in the finger-touch revolution it could be deemed anti-competitive if they had built barriers for others to use it. Like refusal to license essential tech. Monopolizing by shutting out competitors or building barriers is as said not allowed. But without them coming a monopoly I don't see how any government / court could force them to open up their software for other OEMs or forcing them to separate software components. If they had a monopoly in computers it would be of interest to split them up in order to allow competition and limit price fixing or gouging. For them to have a monopoly in the cell phone market they would have to sell like a billion phones and just to have one in the smart phone segment some 5 times their current sales. They would also pretty much had to planned the monopoly or prevent competition for anything to happen for them. Anti-trust might be stopping them to buy all the competitors to achieve it. Or doing other things that would seriously affect the competition. In short world domination just for achieving domination is not a valid business plan. Dominating a market by fair competition is.

Kmax82, every mobile OS is non-free and proprietary, you can't flash any phone with your own software without cracking it. Your not allowed to flash your own flavors of Android it's a closed proprietary system thanks to many of it's components and drivers being non-free and not possible to be released freely. You can thank hardware vendors and patents for that. Bootloaders won't allow you to load your own images on those phones either. Just if they are crackable. There will never be a free mobile OS, there will never be a free Flash runtime, we simply live in an unfree world. With free meaning as in freedom, open source and redistributable without any licensing. We are moving more and more into the black box world. Where you aren't allowed to open the box and are forbidden too.

 

[Eug]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idINN0321150720100503

The New York Post first reported regulators' interest in Apple's policy, which essentially requires people who write apps to choose between writing them only for Apple or for Apple's rivals.

The agencies are expected within days to make a decision on which would handle the investigation, the Post reported.

"What they're (Apple) doing is clearly anticompetitive ... They want one superhighway and they're the tollkeeper on that superhighway," said David Balto, a former FTC policy director.

 

[ViRGE]

I doubt this will lead anywhere, but you never know.

 

[Pliablemoose]

"What they're (Apple) doing is clearly anticompetitive ... They want one superhighway and they're the tollkeeper on that superhighway," said David Balto, a former FTC policy director.

That's the worst description of the issue I've heard yet.

 

[Eug]

WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...816.html?mod=WSJ_business_LeadStoryCollection

Apple's new language forbidding apps from transmitting analytical data could prevent ad networks from being able to effectively target ads, potentially giving Apple's new iAd mobile-advertising service an edge, executives at ad networks say.

--

Some critics contend Apple is now engaging in the kind of tactics that got Microsoft Corp. in trouble with antitrust enforcers in the 1990s.

Apple could try to head off trouble with antitrust enforcers by changing the terms of its developer agreement, one person familiar with the situation said.

 

[lsquare]

lol!

So I guess I'm not alone in thinking that Apple is being anti-competitive.

 

[James Bond]

Can i sue the OP for being stupid?

You are the product, the polar opposite of the apple fanboi. A tool just the same.

<----- Apple/Wintel forum

Owned, haha.

 

[Plester]

I hope they get a slab of humble pie shoved down their throat by DOJ or whoever. The Apple culture needs to go away and come back different. That said, they make some good sh!. Just think if they did it with a sense of humor (smarmy 'I'm a Mac' campaign ain't funny, nor is any of their other pretentious marketing).

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

The DOJ "inquiry" is regarding the Quattro acquisition and the iAd platform. It's just an inquiry. Plus, considering that it's not a monopoly, I don't see a lot being done here.

 

[Eug]

My understanding is that you don't have to be a monopoly to be anti-competitive, but I suppose being an effective monopoly does help to make the case for anti-competitiveness.

 

[Kmax82]

I still feel there is plenty of competition to allow Apple to do whatever the heck they want. People are free to buy other items. I can move to Linux or Windows, if I'm not happy. I can buy an Android, Nokia, Palm, Windows, etc.. phone if I don't want the walled garden of the iPhone.

I just don't understand how this is "harming" anyone, or "anti-competitive". I feel like it's spurring competition by giving the Droid the awesome ability of marketing "DROID DOES".

 

[BarkingGhostar]

It is only anti-competitive if Apple is THE major player in the market, they are not. They are growing, and they are big, but they are not the market. Microsoft was the market.

If Apple isn't the market, and Microsoft was the market, who IS the market presently?

 

[Kmax82]

If Apple isn't the market, and Microsoft was the market, who IS the market presently?

It's a blurring line. With so many users on different platforms, it's really hard to tell.