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Apple Antitrust Case Gets Green Light
SuperAlgae writes "The recent antitrust suit against Apple regarding iTunes and iPod has been approved to go forward. This is only the beginning of the process, but it does bring up some interesting questions about what defines a monopoly." From the article: "Slattery claimed that Apple's system freezes out competitors, and while one antitrust expert called it a long shot, another antitrust law professor said that the key to such a lawsuit would be convincing a court that a single product brand like iTunes is a market in itself separate from the rest of the online music market."
Grow up.
/.ers have friends who bought a non-iPod mp3 player only to find out that none of their Fairplay-encrypted songs will play on it? How many /.ers have iPods that they wish could use Napster or a competing music store to purchase songs with different rights or improved quality?
However, in the iTMS + iPod world, these are two separate products that each have a strongly dominant hold on their respective markets, which also monopolistically exclude all competition from functioning with either product. I say it's about time someone looked at this case. How many
Are you being serious? Anyone who claims to be a Slashdotter cannot seriously claim that they had no idea songs purchased from iTunes will not work on a non-iPod or that songs purchased on Napster will not work on iPod. I call serious BS here.
This sounds like a severe case of sour grapes.
This is not a monopoly. There are competitors out there. A lot of them. They blow chunks when compared to iTunes in my opinion but they are out there.
This lawsuite is without merit. I would be keen to findout who is bank rolling this FUD.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Bingo. Apple isn't a monopoly because:
1) They don't block you from using other music on the iPod. They also don't block use of other OSes on the Mac.
2) It is the iTunes Music Store. That should give you the hint that it's designed for iTunes. Apple didn't create the iTMS as a standalone product, it was created as a feature of iTunes. Now, I don't expect to get Windows features (DirectX 9/10) on Linux or Mac, and I don't expect BMW to supply their features to Ford. You easily use a DRM-free music store to buy music and load it into iTunes.
3) It's really the RIAA's fault. If there was no DRM on iTMS songs, you could use them anywhere. Music that can't be loaded into iTunes can't be loaded because it has DRM from someone else on it that iTunes doesn't know how to break.
Lawyers.
After reading some posts here, I think the idea is that there's a tight integration of iTunes and the iPod. The only real way to buy music legally online (for the vast majority of music) is through iTunes. IIRC music from iTunes will only play on iPod music players. Sure you can burn it to CD, and then re-rip to mp3, but I think that's really missing the point. The vast majority of consumers just aren't going to go through all that hassle
The only reason that there's seen to be a problem here is that the iPod is the most popular digital music player, by a long way. If it held only, say, 35% of the market, with (for example) the Nomad taking another 30% and the other players splitting the remaining 35%, no one would be complaining about this. The iPod has become most popular purely through marketing and good design, not through any shady underhanded deals, like telling OEMs they won't be getting any more iPods if they sell other music players. Apple has leveraged nothing but its aesthetics (and a certain amount of cool-factor) to gain this spot in the market.
Which is still only a monopoly if you define the "market" to be the iTunes Music Store.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Mama bell didn't ignore it. It won repeatedly starting in the 1950's and only lost in the early 80's. Their problem was:
1) They were a monopoly
2) They did lock everyone else out
3) They were popular and the public liked them so politically there wasn't much push to break them up.
Actually, I am more of type C:
C. Monopoly in itself is not illegal. What's illegal is abusing monopoly to prevent others from competing.
Now, if Apple obtained a monopoly on iPod and then tied it up with iTunes so that no other competitors can compete with iTunes, they have a point. But the fact of the matter is, iPod and iTunes were tied up long before each of them gained a 'monopoly' status. Where is the abuse in that?
Apple have made a very good, attractive and popular music player. This has deservedly done extremely well in the market place.
They have also created a music store, from which you can easily purchase music online and playback on your iPod.
The thing is that they have used the popularity (which have reached monopolistic levels) of the iPod to prevent competition to their music store. Until other music stores can sell to the 80-90% of the market that has iPods, they are not really in competition with iTMS. They are simply locked out by Apple and iTMS has succeeded not on its own merits but on the coat-tails of the iPod. Furthermore (and here is the real abuse) Apple, through their response to Real who managed to offer iPods compatible downloads, demonstrated both the capability and willingness to lock out any direct competition.
Apple could perhaps show a significant number of purchases from iTMS being made to non-iPod owners and therefore an absence of tying, which might be one defence (presumably they would have done this already if they could)
Apple might be able to demonstrate technical reasons for breaking Real's compatibility module.
Ignore the fact that this is an iPod and Music store. Compare it to a server and client. Real become the Samba team. Effectively MS are leveraging their desktop operating system monopoly to prevent non-MS file servers being sold. Anyone who tries to reverse engineer the transfer protocol gets locked out. No doubt MS would come up with all sorts of vertical integration excuses (and probably a good few security ones concerning trusted platforms, which nicely parallels the DRM in iTMS). At the end of the day MS would still be guilty of abusing their monopoly in one market to ensure success in another - and mandatory licensing of the CIFS / SMB protocol has been one consequence of abuse.
The only real difference is that this is Apple and not MS.
At the end of the day, I hope that Apple is forced to licence Fairplay, if only to ensure that MS can't pull the same stunt in a larger market.
Which is why most aviators sigh when they hear "Roger, wilco" in movies (because Roger means "I have understood your transmission"). At least my Dad does, anyway (15 years as RAF navigator).
Oh shit, Dell has a monopoly on Dell computers! Lenovo has a monopoly on IBM ThinkPads! Someone call the FTC!
After all, I am strangely colored.
If they become less efficient, a competitor will eventually arise to capitalize on their "monopoly profits" and choice will be restored.
The keyword here is "eventually" though ... the question is, how long?
The problem with (some) monopolies is that, even if they become inefficient, they may as a result of their position be able to influence the market in a way that allows them to manipulate and distort a "free" market into a "not free" market. Not to harp on the Microsoft case again, but it's a good example: Microsoft had (in fact still has) a lot of power over the OEMs that allowed them to effectively "force" the OEMs into only selling Windows, and selling Windows with every computer sold. By doing this they literally blocked major market entry access points for potential competitors - in effect, artificially making the market less free.
There are dozens of other ways still that monopolies (or even just powerful companies) can artificially distort markets in their favour, but that's venturing off-topic.
Funny how not using the Apple solution immediately means you're giving money to Microsoft, a convicted monopolist. Just saying..
That link I posted before covered most of the major ways in which a company might try to maintain its position in the market. The eventual conclusion is that all the common "monopolistic" techniques are bad for business, and aren't sustainable in the long term, whereas the pressure from upstart competitors remains as long as the monopoly exists. Eventually their reserves wear down until they can't afford to fight any more.
To take Microsoft for example: very few people would still consider them a monopoly. Sure, they're still a huge company, with billions of dollars in reserve cash and investments in every market having anything to do with computers. By all accounts, they're going to be around for a very long time yet. However, they're facing serious competition right now on several fronts. They're not the only option any more in operating systems, office suites, server platforms -- in fact, I don't think there's a single area in which they aren't facing some kind of competition. Some of that may be because of their "punishment" by the DoJ, and the EU courts, but for the most part those judgements didn't cause any real financial harm to them as a company. Mostly, I think it just took some time for the market to become fed up with their policies and begin to look into alternatives. Those alternatives may or may not win out in the long run, but they are forcing Microsoft to rethink some if its policies in a way that benefits everyone.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Its called innovation, its called competition. They were just better at it than the rest and now they've got their just rewards. Get over it.
That's not what the parent was getting at. It's true that Apple built a vertical market for themselves, mostly by being hip and having a good product. But they also throw their weight around to keep it that way. They want your iTunes purchased music to be mostly useless if you buy another brand of music player, so that when you are in the market for your next MP3 player you'll buy an iPod rather than deal with the hassle of repurchasing/breaking the DRM on the music you have. Whether or not that is monopolistic is now the question at stake.