March 21, 2024 the United States filed an antitrust complaint against Apple. The filing is a new approach to antitrust and hinges on mostly how Apple chose to design the iPhone from the very start.
Another great piece, Steven. Ultimately all of this reeks of a more basic trojan horse: EU and US governments using these maneuvers to reduce iOS security for enhanced surveillance.
I find this sort of thing absolutely ridiculous. The DOJ is essentially trying to tell people what features they are allowed to implement in a product and also how those features get implemented. I hated this when it happened to Microsoft, and I found it absolutely insane. As an example, if I made a hammer that was better than all other hammers, and people bought my hammer but that hammer happened to also have a bottle opener on it, would the government then be able to say that I leveraged my monopoly on hammers to gain a monopoly on bottle openers? It is more sensible to say that for some reason people preferred my product, and that all I did was supply people with a product that they found valuable. Why should such a thing be illegal?
Yeah... I suppose I am not adding anything to the conversation here, but thank you for the write up SteveSi. Your insight is appreciated.
Wow Steven — this is a very well researched and written post. Must have been quite a lot of effort to compile all this, but we are certainly better off now that we read it. And the MSFT experience and anecdotes are so useful too.
Excellently researched article Steve, your anecdotes from Microsoft are very insightful. My hope is this becomes a landmark case for the limits of antitrust, by DOJ losing completely, but I doubt this will happen. The case law and the letter of the law at this point only exists as a historical constraint, something a new theory like Living Constitution etc can easily dismiss. Their whole motivation and deciding factors seems to me bigness and then they work backwards to see what sort of case they can bring against the “Big Tech”. At some point someone needs to make the govt/ DOJ understand that they don’t need to be so paranoid of big companies, those companies have far lesser influence than you think and trying to crush them every time they become big is not healthy for society or for you either. I wonder when that day, if ever, will come.
Just curious about the “smartphone is not a PC” idea. While a agree that in a very practical sense the two are not the same, when you start to deconstruct what they are, the line seems much blurrier to me. I agree that they are marketed as different products and that part of what Apple is selling is an ecosystem, but I am less convinced that Apple’s marketing is in any way what dictates what their devices are. I can market water as ice but that does not make it so.
I guess I find personal desire for a very technical contrast of what separates a smartphone from a PC. Maybe this is pedantic, and for all I know it may have already been worked out somewhere in a legal setting.
All the same, I enjoyed reading an opinion from the opposite side on this when almost everything I have heard up to now supported the DOJ. I look forward to reading more.
It is the level of abstraction customers deal with. The App Store embodies that. The idea that a "computer" means you own the OS+platform and can do anything you want is antiquated. I wrote a bunch about that in the EU post previous to this one.
Without doubt, Apple, Android and Samsung reserve specific APIs in their sole interest of monopolizing profitable apps. Just because DOJ have not yet gotten to Android (kinda) or Samsung on that topic does not make it right for Apple, who is by far the most egregious violator. APIs for SMS, Bluetooth pairing, direct WiFi to name a few, Apple’s apps have magical experiences with such APIs, others have to go through such obfuscated processes deeming them worthless. Hey, I like Apple, but call a spade a spade, I would like see Apple level the playing field. Steven, your view truly sounds like you are looking to be on someone’s good graces. You are smarter than that.
Of course there are APIs. We all know software is layered and if the implementation uses layers that are not published that does not make them secret, reserved, or nefarious/exploitive APIs.
It is very easy to come up with this narrative. Developers just imagine how they would have architected the code--after the fact--and then assume there is a layer they could call into. This had been happening to Windows for a decade. 95% of the APIs that were "undocumented" were just implementation layers we had no intention of documenting. The 5% (actually less given the numbers) were literally mistakes in header files or API docs because nothing was automated. Those were all just fixed as reported.
That said, it is not an undocumented or secret API for something like bluetooth pairing, but an OS service they don't offer. there's nothing monopolistic about that. It is fair to want that and the fact that we as engineers know it is possible doesn't make it exploitive to not offer it. In fact it is just as easy to claim it is a bad choice because AirPods are expensive and don't fit in ears so they are being dumb. The antitrust laws don't preclude companies from being dumb or bad at serving customers.
Actually, it is not a case of not making the API available, it is more like they intentionally do make a version available and conveniently lacking the parameters which would make it useful, and you just know someone intelligently and intentionally made that decision because when using an Apple made app, the functionality is blatantly available.
Waiting for your Amicus Curiea filing. The clarity you provide to your readers/followers here could do wonders for the judge in this case. Your history would speak to the fact of your lack bias in support of Apple. Something to think about...
What about the right to repair, is that addressed at all? I like Apple products generally but they do make it more expensive and difficult to fix the products. Really hated that they took away the headphone jack and replaced it with the lightning connector. Wish the MacBook still had a network jack!
Conflicted about this piece. I agree that it's a weak-ish case to bring because, on any sensible market definition, Apple simply doesn't have the market share or power to trigger this kind of anti-monopolisation suit. However, I find the obvious subtext to the piece really offensive and distasteful. That subtext is essentially: "these dumb regulatory guys in D.C. who don't have computer science degrees just don't understand technology and so they don't understand how our markets work and they have no business interfering and opining on it." This is a horrible fig leaf: the reality is that power always corrupts in all circumstances and that includes when software or other technology companies hold that power. Markets don't actually become somehow impossibly difficult to understand just because they involve code or CPUs. Moreover, the lust for money and power is as equally distributed among holders of computer science degrees as it is among the rest of the population. Furthermore, the ways in which that power corrupts are as old as the hills and certainly as old (older, in fact) as the Sherman Act and so drawing analogies as far back as Standard Oil is very often a powerful and absolutely valid and appropriate tool for constructing the argument.
The government, who has the biggest harmful monopoly on the planet, the territorial monopoly on the use of force and violence, and who uses that monopoly to force upon society the corporation, which is a government granted shield to limit liabilities, takes issue with innovative entrepreneurs and private citizens conducting voluntarily transactions. The situation couldn't be more perverse. The government is projecting and are in fact guilty themselves of all the things they accuse.
Great article Steven! I perhaps simplistically reduce the case to who gets to define runtimes because control of those runtimes (and where they sit in the stack) can provide a significant economic and monetary benefits. Apps on the iPhone (with good reason) aren’t allowed to have their own runtimes; Flash as referenced is a good example. SuperApps is another looser type of runtime.
Apple has at the same time extended “runtime” to more customer facing elements— iMessage and the Wallet, for example. This approach means that there is one and only one interface for SMS or payments; this is somewhat beneficial to the users, as it prevents the need to open different wallets for different transactions, etc.
A remedy that allows for an open set of APIs to plug into these higher order “runtimes” is possibly, and arguably advantageous for Apple to further the value of its ecosystem.
The challenge I have with runtimes is that runtimes are always built on TOP of other things. In many ways almost everything is a platform -- it might be because of custom code and APIs, it might be because of user interface conventions (or customizations), or how/where data is stored. So "platform" is a useless word. The real operative word is whether something *requires* an underlying layer of software. If it does then it is an "app" which might do something or still require more work but it rides on the "platform" of others. If it doesn't do anything per se then it is middleware. The question then becomes does a true platform have the right to curate middleware in order to maintain product integrity or brand promises that it makes. I believe this was the huge innovation in the Apple platform. Absent that it is a case that relies on freezing an OS at some arbitrary level of capability which is like saying cars can't have radios from the car maker or you can't buy more tools from Dewalt after drills even if they use the same battery. (Hypos always risk arguing about them, let's not do that). When the US v MS case started a browser was going to replace Windows. It still hasn't.
Another great piece, Steven. Ultimately all of this reeks of a more basic trojan horse: EU and US governments using these maneuvers to reduce iOS security for enhanced surveillance.
I find this sort of thing absolutely ridiculous. The DOJ is essentially trying to tell people what features they are allowed to implement in a product and also how those features get implemented. I hated this when it happened to Microsoft, and I found it absolutely insane. As an example, if I made a hammer that was better than all other hammers, and people bought my hammer but that hammer happened to also have a bottle opener on it, would the government then be able to say that I leveraged my monopoly on hammers to gain a monopoly on bottle openers? It is more sensible to say that for some reason people preferred my product, and that all I did was supply people with a product that they found valuable. Why should such a thing be illegal?
Yeah... I suppose I am not adding anything to the conversation here, but thank you for the write up SteveSi. Your insight is appreciated.
Wow Steven — this is a very well researched and written post. Must have been quite a lot of effort to compile all this, but we are certainly better off now that we read it. And the MSFT experience and anecdotes are so useful too.
Excellently researched article Steve, your anecdotes from Microsoft are very insightful. My hope is this becomes a landmark case for the limits of antitrust, by DOJ losing completely, but I doubt this will happen. The case law and the letter of the law at this point only exists as a historical constraint, something a new theory like Living Constitution etc can easily dismiss. Their whole motivation and deciding factors seems to me bigness and then they work backwards to see what sort of case they can bring against the “Big Tech”. At some point someone needs to make the govt/ DOJ understand that they don’t need to be so paranoid of big companies, those companies have far lesser influence than you think and trying to crush them every time they become big is not healthy for society or for you either. I wonder when that day, if ever, will come.
Calling Robert Bork the "canon" of antitrust is deeply wrong and incorrect, and really the source of the problems we're facing now.
I more correctly should have called it the “Bork consensus” which is what the NYT has been calling it.
Just curious about the “smartphone is not a PC” idea. While a agree that in a very practical sense the two are not the same, when you start to deconstruct what they are, the line seems much blurrier to me. I agree that they are marketed as different products and that part of what Apple is selling is an ecosystem, but I am less convinced that Apple’s marketing is in any way what dictates what their devices are. I can market water as ice but that does not make it so.
I guess I find personal desire for a very technical contrast of what separates a smartphone from a PC. Maybe this is pedantic, and for all I know it may have already been worked out somewhere in a legal setting.
All the same, I enjoyed reading an opinion from the opposite side on this when almost everything I have heard up to now supported the DOJ. I look forward to reading more.
It is the level of abstraction customers deal with. The App Store embodies that. The idea that a "computer" means you own the OS+platform and can do anything you want is antiquated. I wrote a bunch about that in the EU post previous to this one.
Without doubt, Apple, Android and Samsung reserve specific APIs in their sole interest of monopolizing profitable apps. Just because DOJ have not yet gotten to Android (kinda) or Samsung on that topic does not make it right for Apple, who is by far the most egregious violator. APIs for SMS, Bluetooth pairing, direct WiFi to name a few, Apple’s apps have magical experiences with such APIs, others have to go through such obfuscated processes deeming them worthless. Hey, I like Apple, but call a spade a spade, I would like see Apple level the playing field. Steven, your view truly sounds like you are looking to be on someone’s good graces. You are smarter than that.
Of course there are APIs. We all know software is layered and if the implementation uses layers that are not published that does not make them secret, reserved, or nefarious/exploitive APIs.
It is very easy to come up with this narrative. Developers just imagine how they would have architected the code--after the fact--and then assume there is a layer they could call into. This had been happening to Windows for a decade. 95% of the APIs that were "undocumented" were just implementation layers we had no intention of documenting. The 5% (actually less given the numbers) were literally mistakes in header files or API docs because nothing was automated. Those were all just fixed as reported.
That said, it is not an undocumented or secret API for something like bluetooth pairing, but an OS service they don't offer. there's nothing monopolistic about that. It is fair to want that and the fact that we as engineers know it is possible doesn't make it exploitive to not offer it. In fact it is just as easy to claim it is a bad choice because AirPods are expensive and don't fit in ears so they are being dumb. The antitrust laws don't preclude companies from being dumb or bad at serving customers.
Actually, it is not a case of not making the API available, it is more like they intentionally do make a version available and conveniently lacking the parameters which would make it useful, and you just know someone intelligently and intentionally made that decision because when using an Apple made app, the functionality is blatantly available.
Thats more semantics I think. I can make these equivalent claims using #define :-)
Waiting for your Amicus Curiea filing. The clarity you provide to your readers/followers here could do wonders for the judge in this case. Your history would speak to the fact of your lack bias in support of Apple. Something to think about...
Ha. No chance :) but thank you.
What about the right to repair, is that addressed at all? I like Apple products generally but they do make it more expensive and difficult to fix the products. Really hated that they took away the headphone jack and replaced it with the lightning connector. Wish the MacBook still had a network jack!
Conflicted about this piece. I agree that it's a weak-ish case to bring because, on any sensible market definition, Apple simply doesn't have the market share or power to trigger this kind of anti-monopolisation suit. However, I find the obvious subtext to the piece really offensive and distasteful. That subtext is essentially: "these dumb regulatory guys in D.C. who don't have computer science degrees just don't understand technology and so they don't understand how our markets work and they have no business interfering and opining on it." This is a horrible fig leaf: the reality is that power always corrupts in all circumstances and that includes when software or other technology companies hold that power. Markets don't actually become somehow impossibly difficult to understand just because they involve code or CPUs. Moreover, the lust for money and power is as equally distributed among holders of computer science degrees as it is among the rest of the population. Furthermore, the ways in which that power corrupts are as old as the hills and certainly as old (older, in fact) as the Sherman Act and so drawing analogies as far back as Standard Oil is very often a powerful and absolutely valid and appropriate tool for constructing the argument.
The government, who has the biggest harmful monopoly on the planet, the territorial monopoly on the use of force and violence, and who uses that monopoly to force upon society the corporation, which is a government granted shield to limit liabilities, takes issue with innovative entrepreneurs and private citizens conducting voluntarily transactions. The situation couldn't be more perverse. The government is projecting and are in fact guilty themselves of all the things they accuse.
Great article Steven! I perhaps simplistically reduce the case to who gets to define runtimes because control of those runtimes (and where they sit in the stack) can provide a significant economic and monetary benefits. Apps on the iPhone (with good reason) aren’t allowed to have their own runtimes; Flash as referenced is a good example. SuperApps is another looser type of runtime.
Apple has at the same time extended “runtime” to more customer facing elements— iMessage and the Wallet, for example. This approach means that there is one and only one interface for SMS or payments; this is somewhat beneficial to the users, as it prevents the need to open different wallets for different transactions, etc.
A remedy that allows for an open set of APIs to plug into these higher order “runtimes” is possibly, and arguably advantageous for Apple to further the value of its ecosystem.
The challenge I have with runtimes is that runtimes are always built on TOP of other things. In many ways almost everything is a platform -- it might be because of custom code and APIs, it might be because of user interface conventions (or customizations), or how/where data is stored. So "platform" is a useless word. The real operative word is whether something *requires* an underlying layer of software. If it does then it is an "app" which might do something or still require more work but it rides on the "platform" of others. If it doesn't do anything per se then it is middleware. The question then becomes does a true platform have the right to curate middleware in order to maintain product integrity or brand promises that it makes. I believe this was the huge innovation in the Apple platform. Absent that it is a case that relies on freezing an OS at some arbitrary level of capability which is like saying cars can't have radios from the car maker or you can't buy more tools from Dewalt after drills even if they use the same battery. (Hypos always risk arguing about them, let's not do that). When the US v MS case started a browser was going to replace Windows. It still hasn't.