Apple Violated Antitrust Ruling, Judge Finds

> There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone.

It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.

> I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company.

As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s

I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.

It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.

Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.

It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.

I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.

Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy

With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might.

Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.

The repercussions of this could be huge.

The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.

I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.

To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR.

Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.

It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.

That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.

I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66.

I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.

Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people.

Boards private jet to Monaco

There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.

I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.

If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.

The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.

Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.

> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)

Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.

...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".

Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.

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There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.

Exactly my point!

This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"

Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.

Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.

(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)

You can’t arrest a fictitious person.