Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B

As long as Apple requires they make use of those services for me to install software on the computer I bought, and they prevent others from producing equivalent competing devices via patents (i.e. government granted monopolies), zero.

It's not that it's not worth something, it's that they're abusing their patents and monopoly to extract further compensation after I already bought the device.

Someone asks this every time, and the answer is always the same. Fair pricing can only be discovered in a competitive market. The problem is that Apple moves heaven and earth to prevent competitive markets from doing their thing.

That being said, this is the UK, where even in a reasonably competitive job market people can still sue their employer for "unfair pay" [1], so maybe the thinking here is a bit different than my silly classical liberal brain

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0817jd9dqo

This question is valid only if Apple lets apps host their own apps, bring their own payment system.

Apple bans all such activities, has held the entire app ecosystem and seeks rent. If they think their offering is superior, then they should be OK competing. The fact that they have not opened it up says that they are happy to overcharge.

Remember, competition is always good. Let Stripe and Apple duke it out on payment processing, and let the best one win.

Let games me hosted both on Epic Store and App Store, and let users decide where to download it from.

That will be fair.

How much of a fee do you think you should pay to install applications on your computer? The same amount as that.

Or provide alternative ways to install software.

This is a problem of their own creation.

For me it's not about the percentage, it's that it is a monopoly. If I make an iPad app, my only route to market is Apple.

That is before I get into my personal objection to having to ask permission to put software on a computer I bought. I own an iPad but I can't just install anything I want on it, Apple needs to approve the software first. For me that's just anti-creative and anti-everying-I-love-about-computers.

All I really want as a software developer is to be able to write software and have people use it if they choose to. I don't want Apple or any other company inserted as a middle-man.

“Quality Control”?

Outside of the absolute bare minimum to check this box for a plurality of observers, I can’t imagine anyone actually saying the App Store has a quality control process with a straight face, especially not one that would be championed as acceptable as a market practice.

Thing is that's a question for the market to decide. Which is why we have anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws in the first place. We don't want the state setting "fair" prices for anything, it always backfires. We want them ensuring the market is free to set prices. Monopolies granted by the state (trademarks, copyright, patents) are specific and limited, and ideally we want monopolies that arise naturally to be similarly limited, or broken up if they are being weaponised against the public.

Allow developers to distribute their apps outside of the app store, the cost apart for firmware maintenance and development will be 0.

Apple is not bringing its users value by prohibiting sideloading of arbitrary apps. Rather, this is an extreme example of rent-seeking which has affected almost all countries around the world. It needs to be regulated away.

This isn't an EU judgement.

I don't know, but when every single business on the planet has to pay you 30% for access to mobile device users, it definitely isn't.

I think both third party app stores (without aggressive scare screens) and third party payments will be globally available on both platforms in the next few years. But it will take some time for enough piecemeal jurisdictions to require it for it to become burdensome for the companies to have different options in different regulatory regimes, and to make it no longer worth blocking in jurisdictions which haven't ruled against them yet.

The UK adopted the EU antitrust model in the 1990s and still kept it after Brexit. So it's has a lot more stuff about 'fairness' and controlling markets, it's not just about prices or monopolies abusing their market position or blocking mega mergers. At least on paper...

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919. The comparators available to us (the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Steam’s lower headline rate) suggest that the competitive rate of commission would be in the range of 12 to 20%. We do think it is reasonable to make some adjustment to that range to accommodate the points made by Apple about its premium brand, the quality of its offering and its established market position. However, we do not think those would be sufficient to displace the upper end of the range and are likely to operate mainly at the lower end, where the offerings are arguably less attractive to users for those reasons.

920. Applying again an approach of “informed guesswork”, on the basis of the evidence before us, we find that the likely range of Apple’s Commission for iOS app distribution services in the counterfactual is between 15% and 20%. For the purposes of quantifying the overcharge (for both the exclusionary abuses and the excessive and unfair pricing abuse) we will use the mid-point of that range, which is 17.5%.

I haven't dug through the linked documents but it's probably in here some where... https://www.catribunal.org.uk/judgments/14037721-dr-rachael-...

Looks like their net profit globally is like $90-100B per year. If you think of the share of profit that's coming just from the UK, this is probably very sizeable as a penalty.

apparently people will make this same comment every single time whether it's a $2M fine or a $2B fine