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Apple May Face Antitrust Inquiry
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the NY Post:
"According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools. Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry. It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform-neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft, and Research In Motion. An inquiry doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers. Typically, regulators initiate inquiries to determine whether a full-fledged investigation ought to be launched. If the inquiry escalates to an investigation, the agency handling the matter would issue Apple a subpoena seeking information about the policy."
Now normal service can resume, and the anyone-but-Apple brigade can froth gently at the mouth while insisting their rants are somehow not the mirror image of the "fanbois" they detest so much.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
...I can understand where Apple is coming from, as far as wanting to maintain the quality of the programs available to its users, but that is still a thinly veiled attempt at justifying keeping their devices locked down tighter than a million dollar whore.
For a company whose users have been stereotyped as hipsters, they really love to retain control over EVERYTHING they sell.
Living With a Nerd
I am not at all fond of Apple's "use only our tools" stance, however I'm wondering exactly how they define anti-trust in this case? I understand that Apple is dictating devs to use their toolset, but how does this kill competitoin? Apple doesn't say you can ONLY develop for iPhone, they simply say to use X-Code for iPhone dev. Is it because Apple has a "monopoly" on their own products? Does the DoJ like Flash? Seriously, I can get that people are pissed off at Apple, but if you don't want to play, don't. Apple does not have a monopoly on touch screen phones, or tablet like devices, not by a long shot, and I fail to see how Apple telling it's developers that they need to use Apple tools as an anti-trust issue. Next we're going to hear from the DoJ that Apple is being investigated because OS X is only licensed for Macs? Maybe they will force Microsoft to develop Office for Linux, because I like Office and dammit I should be able to run Office on my Ubuntu machine. MS is forcing me to buy Windows or a Mac to run Office and that is anti-competitive behavior. Maybe the FTC and the DoJ should focus a little more on why we had to bail out the banks and Wall street and on how the behavior on their part hasn't changed very much. Or maybe Steve Jobs should buddy up with those guys and pay them a little more?
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I hope they roast Apple's fruity little ass with the biggest legal flamethrower they have stuck aside.
No, you don't. Consequences for them could also mean consequences for the product you like.
Maybe something will come of this, maybe it won't, but here's to hoping.
The 'good' you want to happen could mean Android has less of an edge to compete with them. Apple's "walled garden" is an opportunity for something more open to sneak in.
There are lines that you cannot legally cross, and Apple very well may have done so.
Only if you dislike Apple. Take that away and then obvious questions come up like "Is Nintendo next?"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Your choice:
Apple's Brave New World where proprietary is done right and trains run on time vs. everyone else's scattered proprietary banana republics where trains barely run at all and each has a different gauge of track.
I'll take walled garden built in Cupertino that keeps out the chaotic evildoers from Taiwan.
After all, it's how the RDF makes fanbois out of everybody who comes too close to His Jobsness.
Who is going to investigate that?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
if apple went ahead with that policy, and tried to practice it, Eu would eventually bitchslap them into changing it. And what Eu does is nothing like what FTC does - When microsoft tried to stall compliance with Eu's decision, Eu started fining them 500,000 Euros a day. Suddenly microsoft managed to come up with a compliance plan that was implementable in acceptable time. Now we have ballot boxes in ms oses sold in europe.
FTC would be way too soft on american corporations, due to the lobbyism plague there is in america.
apple should thank ftc.
Read radical news here
Depends on the kind of antitrust suit. Certainly you can't be guilty of monopoly leveraging unless you have a monopoly, so you're right as far as that goes. =] And it's also true that that's generally the easiest kind of antitrust claim to prove (it's what Microsoft was accused of), because there's a very strong presumption that if: 1. you're a monopoly; and 2. you're leveraging it; then that's bad, regardless of what "legitimate reasons" you have for doing so. (It used to even be considered always illegal to leverage a monopoly, but recent Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at that.)
There are other kinds of anticompetitive trade practices, though, with lower threshholds. At the one end of the scale is being a monopoly, where your conduct is closely scrutinized; at the other end is being a tiny player, whose market power is so small that any claim you were engaged in anticompetitive behavior is implausible. But in between there's a whole area of restraint-of-trade and anticompetitive tying, where you can be guilty of an antitrust violation without being a monopoly, if you have sufficient market power to influence another market improperly, and you did in fact do so. For example, some car manufacturers lost antitrust cases relating to car parts, despite not having a monopoly on automobiles: courts found that e.g. Mercedes banning anyone from making Mercedes-compatible parts was anticompetitive tying between the car market and the replacement-parts market, even though Mercedes isn't a car monopoly.
Those kinds of cases often come down to what the intent of the tying was. Mercedes argued that they wanted to control the replacement-parts market not for anticompetitive reasons, but for quality-assurance reasons; the courts ended up not buying that. But often courts do buy arguments that there was a legitimate reason for tying (possibly even most of the time; non-monopoly tying prosecutions succeeding isn't that common). In Apple's case, they would presumably argue that the purpose of requiring XCode and certain languages isn't mainly to restrain trade in dev-tools markets or to make it harder to port apps, but because of reasons related to its app-review process ("it's easier to review apps if they're all in Obj-C on XCode" or something). I could see a court giving reasonable deference to that, though predictions are always dodgy. The main place I could see that failing is if there's some smoking-gun email that ends up as evidence, where a VP or someone says, "hey we should institute this new requirement because of [reasons that sound like restraint of trade]".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Inquiry != prosecution.
The point of an inquiry is to determine whether there is a basis for an anti-trust case or not.
There isn't some pre-inquiry inquiry to decide if the company has enough market share or has behaved in ways that violate anti-trust laws, so there's no point in crying about how Apple doesn't meet the criteria for an anti-trust case.
Yes, this isn't really an antitrust issue. The iPhone/iPod/iPad do not have an exclusive in any market area, and it's really easy to find alternatives if you don't like what Apple is doing with their lock-in.
The Nokia 5800, for example, is nearly as good as the iPhone in many ways, and is better in others. Around $250 can get you an unlocked phone (no contract required) with WiFi (so you could skip the data plan if you wanted to) and qualifies you for the AT&T $15 data plan instead of the $30 one the iPhone requires if you decide you want data on the go. Plus it's got a 3 megapixel camera, a second camera on the front for video conferencing, and the usual things you expect in a phone like a replaceable battery, mass-storage support, upgradeable memory, etc.
The point is not to directly compare the two handsets as much as to demonstrate a specific example of why Apple does not have an exclusive lock-in on the touchscreen smartphone market. Blackberry and many other companies have their own entries in the ring, many of them are very capable units, and all of them except Apple currently allow pretty open development policies. So if openness is a criteria for you, Apple isn't the right answer for you. If you like the way Apple is doing things, then there's an Apple for that. You have a choice, therefore antitrust law should not apply.
If and when Apple exceeds 80% smartphone market share, is required in order to perform some function that no other device can replace, and/or starts telling developers that they cannot port the same product they submit to Apple to any other platform, then we'll talk about "Antitrust". But I don't see any of that happening any time soon.
As it stands, from what I can see, Apple is just nannying their users and annoying their developers, which (IMHO) is bad for their product and bad for their brand, but is their decision to make since there are plenty of other (arguably better, though that depends on your priorities and personal preferences) smartphones on the market.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Let's not be too drastic with these inquiries. Apple might get mad and move all its manufacturing jobs to China or something.
Reply to That ||
Probably not. It's the "Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission", not the EU.
Not that anyone will read this before posting, but
Inquiry != prosecution.
Not that you read the summary before posting...
An inquiry doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple
All Apple needs to do to avoid this is publish performance and stability guidelines that can only be met by Objective-C or C++ code...
So what happens if Adobe CS5 which can take a flash app and emit objective-C for it meets those performance and stability guidelines?
The primary reason Apple has this rule is to prevent flash apps from being so easily ported to its platform.
I know a bunch of people are going to say I'm some kind of fanboy or something, but: there are reasons to believe this restriction is not entirely business-driven. That is, there's reason to believe there's some technical reasoning behind it.
Now, I do believe there are business reasons too. The technical reasons wouldn't be enough to forbid all environments other than Xcode+Objective C. I could see something like MonoTouch being able to meet the actual technical requirements trivially.
But do you know how MonoTouch actually works? The result would not be portable. It would be just as tied to the iPhone as an Xcode/ObjC app, it would simply be using another language.
Apps on the iPhone need a particular application architecture if they're going to perform well. This is true now, but is going to be even more true in the future, when the OS tries to do more complicated things with each app than simply "jump to it when the app starts, and shut it down completely when the app ends".
The same is true on Android by the way. If you want to use Android's frameworks, you have to access it from within their custom JVM. Yes, you can program in C, but your C can't call their frameworks. You write your C using JNI to make your C routines available to the Java code, and some minimum "stub" Java code has to glue your code to all the Android frameworks. And if you want your code to continue running in the background, you have to fork off a "Service" that is essentially the Android version of a daemon.
The same looks to be true of WP7. It looks like you code your UI up as a silverlight or XNA app, and you flow data into it via ActiveSync (I am not clear on all of the details). Each of these platforms requires a completely fundamentally different architecture to write to. You're not going to get true portability across them easily, not and get a decent experience with the app.
So anyway, on the iPhone OS, you need to have your UI broken up into a set of XIB/NIB files, and each "view" needs to have a "view controller" object -- and by "object" I mean something that the on-device Objective-C runtime sees as an Objective-C object. Has to have the semantics of an Objective-C object, and has to support the introspection methods of an Objective-C object (just as Android objects have the semantics of Java objects). If all that is in place, then the OS can (in theory) do stuff like unload UI assets and UI-related objects from the running process, and notice before they're needed (via Obj-C introspection and method interception and stuff), and load them back in before they're missed.
So if you're using MonoTouch, which is basically (from what I read) little more than a way to do Objective-C programming using C# syntax, you could be fine. Your UI assets would still be in those separate XIB/NIB files, your controller objects would be indistinguishable from "raw" Objective-C objects as far as the runtime is concerned, and so on. So stuff like that ought to be permitted. And it won't be portable.
So, Apple could say something more along the lines of: "Here are the rules. Your UI needs to be implemented as a set of XIB/NIB files in these data formats that the OS can inspect in these ways, and that the OS turns into a view hierarchy for your app upon loading. You need to specify connections between those view hierarchies and a bunch of things that behave as if they were plain Objective-C objects with regard to the following (very long) list of introspection mechanisms. References between objects in your code have to permit these sorts of relocation and this sort of serialization. And your callback methods need to behave such-and-such way, and any time we change the ABI for the closure functionality we added as an extension to the C-family languages, you must be able to conform to the possibly-extensive ABI change within less than a week of being informed of it. And and and...".
You end up with a very very long li
Everyone realizes that this announcements indicated that two government agencies are in the midst of negotiating to decide which one of them might launch an investigation.
Most of us will likely have died of old age before the investigation even starts. Why do real work when you can justify your existence by simply sitting around the office and bickering with the guys down the street.
It took 10 years to resolve the Microsoft case and their market dominance was clear and certain. 3 Years to come to agreement. Another 4 years for the DOJ to sure Microsoft for completely ignoring the agreement. Three more years to resolve the lawsuit.
Since it is unlikely these two departments will resolve their internal squabble any time soon. By the time they do one of them will be out for blood. Unfortunately there will be little to find.
1. They look into it, but decide not to pursue legal action against Apple. I'd say there's a moderately good chance that they decide it's not worth bringing suit against Apple. Good for Apple, questionable for users, bad for third party developers. Nothing really changes.
2. They look into it, bring legal action against Apple and Apple is forced to change their policy. Bad for Apple, questionable for users, good for third party developers.
3. They look into it, threaten suit against Apple, and Apple meets them halfway by allowing third party apps to be installed outside of the App Store, possibly by downloading them to your computer and syncing them from there. Probably the solution where everyone is at least somewhat satisfied. Apple keeps control of their store, third party developers still have a way to get their software on the phone, and users can install anything they want without requiring Apple's permission.
I say questionable in cases 1 and 2 because it may reduce the overall quality of software on the App Store resulting in more choices for users and a larger selection of apps, but the possibility of getting craptacular cross-platform apps the run into the lowest common denominator issue Steve mentioned in his post. It really depends on your overall philosophy.
While they are at it, I hope that they define new rules for general purpose computers to be programmable without restrictions. This would be much better for the market (think of unification of standards; also look at how much open-source has benefited us all). Further, it would also be environmentally beneficial, since we wouldn't be forced into buying several (artificially restricted) devices where one would suffice.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
They should also look into why Apple refuses to allow people to isntall OSX on their "non Apple PCs"
Same damn hardware but you cant run OSX unless you buy your PC hardware from Apple.
Microsoft on the other hand, sells an OS that runs on the very same PC hardware that makes up the MAC.... except they dont restrict its usage to only "Microsoft sold PCs"
I dont know how Apple got away with that for years.
Also add:
iTunes, Ipods and Iphones that dont support open formats.
No third party APIs are allowed. I.e. the terms and conditions are against distribution of wrappers for scripting languages like Ruby or Python. At this point Adobe is probably the last big company still willing to accept the risks associated with contributing to Apple software.
Aren't they also pretty restrictive too? Or do they just get a free pass around here?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> All Apple needs to do to avoid this is publish performance and stability guidelines that can only be met by Objective-C or C++ code
Exactly - and it's very notable that they did not do this. They could also easily have written that all applications must support touch interfaces into their agreement. But they didn't. Because they know that in 5 minutes time Adobe would produce a version of Flash that complied with just about anything they wrote in their agreement. So they just had to out and out ban it based on "how" you made it rather than "what" you made. This is one of the telling points that gives lie to their motives.
Did you really just say "stability guidelines that can only be met by.. C++ code"
????
Please leave the programming talk to programmers.
"His name was James Damore."
I know a bunch of people are going to say I'm some kind of fanboy or something, but: there are reasons to believe this restriction is not entirely business-driven. That is, there's reason to believe there's some technical reasoning behind it.
If only your wall of text justified your opening statements.
There is no reason to believe that there is a technical reason behind it. Either the application works, or it doesn't. Thats supposed to be the end of the discussion on the technical aspect of this, but I'll go one further.
Apple is preventing applications written in arbitrary languages from being translated to C++. If there was merit to "technical reasoning" then surely the translated code would be acceptable to Apple, because after all, its C++ and thats acceptable. THis also is supposed to be the end of the discussion on the technical aspect of this.
No sir, you wall of text does not support your assertations. You are suggesting technical reasons, but are not describing any. Most of your wall of text is a "me too" appeal, where if Microsoft does it then its magically also OK for Apple to do it. You are wrong on several counts with that one, because A) Microsoft isnt doing it, and B) even if they were, that doesnt mean it would be OK for Apple.
"His name was James Damore."
All of that sounds to me like "Internet Explorer is built too deeply into the operating system to be removed. It cannot be replaced because too many critical systems services rely on it."
How long would it take Adobe to release an update that handles background services, voip and other new features?
Why does it matter how long? Hell, I contend that they dont ever have release an update.
How long until the iFart App I have in the App store magically updates itself to support background services, voip, and other new features? Thats right, it wont, yet its still going to work.
You are imagining that using C++ somehow makes programs upgradable-via-magic.
"His name was James Damore."
Good heavens, why do you believe that? "It works or it doesn't" is not supposed to be the end of the discussion. Where did that idea come from? If you think that, you don't understand Apple.
"It works" is important. But having every app able to switch to full multitasking support by doing little more than typing "make" once 4.0 comes out is also important. Being able to switch from Arm to x86 or any other CPU architecture by doing little more than typing "make is also important. Running seamlessly on an iPad or "iPhone HD" is also important. Having the unused pieces of your app able to be removed from memory so that background tasks have more space to run in is also important.
Maybe those are not important to a given app developer. Maybe those are not important to a given user.. This is harsh, but none of those folks get a say. They're important enough to Apple to form the kernel of a technical basis for the restrictions. (Restrictions which I've already agreed probably go too far.)
If you develop for xbox, you must use the Microsoft tool chain; if you develop for the playstation 3, you must use the Sony tool chain.
There's nothing new here, save a bit of Apple-hater rambling, and government cluelessness.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Really? When did they release Flash for the Blackberry? PowerPC-based Linux distros? Solaris? WinNT/MIPS (okay, that's a joke).
cat