Google Slams Apple Over iPhone Ad Ban

crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."

Comments

Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly?

[delinear]

And what you're missing is that the dictionary definition of monopoly has little to do with the legal definition. Now I'm not saying either party is right or wrong, but to just read out a dictionary definition and say Apple are in the right because of this strict interpretation ignores the fact that that's not how monopoly law works. There are many complexities to consider in both establishing, first, if there is an effective monopoly (and this doesn't mean you have to control the entire market, just enough of it to give you the ability to shut down competition, ala MS insisting in the past that hardware vendors had to buy a license for each machine they sold, even if it wasn't going to run windows, effectively negating the zero price point of open source alternatives - sure there were alternative OS vendors the hardware manufacturers could use, but they'd be shutting themselves out of the biggest market, ergo effective monopoly), and second, if there is an actual abuse of that monopoly. It's by no means not as clear cut as either side is claiming it to be.

Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly?

[HermMunster]

First, this is Jobs (reality distortion fields envelop those emanating them), so no, they don't have 28%. Not even close. What do the other manufacturers claim they have? RIM is still number one. Android is growing much faster than Apple is, or did.

Second, they don't have a monopoly. Not even close.

Third, this is restraint of trade and illegal.

Re:WebKit is based of of the KHTML

[TheRaven64]

I think you'll find if you look at the underlying codebase that the lion's share of development was still done as KHTML

Spoken like someone who has never looked at the code. If you exclude:

• The JavaScript engine.
• Most of the SVG support.
• Most of the DOM stuff.
• Most of the CSS support.
• All of the HTML 5 stuff (canvas, websocket, and so on).

then yes, most of it was done as part of KHTML. If you look at KHTML now, you'll see a lot of changes back-ported from WebKit. If you compare WebKit now to KHTML in 2002 (when WebKit was forked), you won't see very much common code at all. When WebKit was forked, KHTML was about 140KLoC. According to Ohloh.net, WebKit now is 715K lines of C++, 75K lines of ObjC, 34K lines of C, and a lot of various other things. Even if Apple had retained 100% of the KHTML code, it would now account for 10% of the total codebase. In reality, large chunks have been rewritten (KJS, for example), so it's now less than 5%.