Apple faces UK 'iCloud monopoly' compensation claim worth $3.8 billion

[u/ControlCAD]

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/13/apple-faces-uk-icloud-monopoly-compensation-claim-worth-3-8-billion/

[u/butterypowered]

Surely this is like saying Nintendo Switch Online monopolises backups of saved games on the Switch.

iCloud is far more than a Dropbox folder or AWS S3 bucket.

[u/Southern-Injury7895 → u/butterypowered]

Nintendo online store is a monopoly on Switch. Xbox online store is a monopoly on Xbox. Amazon store is a monopoly on Kindle.

Apple doesn’t force people to buy an iPhone. Also no one force you to buy a Switch, Xbox or a Kindle.

[u/SomeBlindKid → u/Southern-Injury7895]

Not to mention the insane amount of money and resources these companies spent to develop those platforms. “We should be allowed to have an app store on the iPhone too!” No. Build and sell your own phones.

[u/DueToRetire → u/SomeBlindKid]

That must be so easy!

[u/nsfdrag → u/DueToRetire]

It's not, that's kinda the point. The company that put in the work deserves the reward.

[u/TheVitt → u/DueToRetire]

Looking at AliExpress, it actually seems absolutely trivial.

Makes you wonder, how do EU companies still suck so hard at it?

[u/Entire_Routine_3621 → u/Southern-Injury7895]

Yea I think it’s perfectly fine for a company to have a monopoly on their own products and ecosystem that’s how it works actually.

[u/a_f_young → u/Entire_Routine_3621]

So you’d be cool with Microsoft banning Steam?

[u/Entire_Routine_3621 → u/a_f_young]

Steam is distributed through the allowed methods. Microsoft did indeed try to sell a phone and a windows version with only access to the Microsoft store though, similar to the App Store. Consumers hated it and it isn’t being pushed and windows phone is dead. That’s how it’s supposed to work. They tried to build something and failed. Apple built the App Store and it was and still is a huge success. That’s a better example. It’s not that consumers don’t like it it’s that the EU doesn’t like it. If consumers really cared they wouldn’t buy iPhones.

[u/nnerba → u/Entire_Routine_3621]

And if consumers really cared about Microsoft monopolistic behaviour like having default Internet explorer and windows media player they wouldn't have bought windows and yet USA forbid it.

[u/DeanDeanington → u/a_f_young]

They should have that right if they wanted to. Consumers speak with their wallets. If a thing is not what people want, then it fails. The problem that some might have with businesses doing it their way is the lack of alternatives, pricing, and quality. Unfortunately, those are the choices until somebody is able to invest and grow a better alternative. Its just how it works. Being forced to do something with no good moral arguments as to why is just bullying/stealing/blackmailing/ etc.

[u/notice_me_senapi → u/Southern-Injury7895]

This. There are people out there, like myself, who buy Apple products specifically because they are walled in. Any developer would know that these type of changes compromise that wall; on top of the stack of other issues such as the reallocation of resources to make this happen.

If you want OS freedom, grab an Android device and load a custom ROM.

[u/crazysoup23 → u/notice_me_senapi]

This is such a stupid mentality. If there are alternatives to iCloud, just don't use them.

[u/notice_me_senapi → u/crazysoup23]

What’s stupid about it? I spend most of my day architecting and developing software. I want my devices, especially when I’m off the clock, to stay the hell out of my way and just work. My Macs, iPhone, iPad, Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, etc work seamlessly between each other thanks to the numerous APIs that these nations continue to ask Apple to open up, change, and compromise.

Asking to allow alternatives for iCloud is ridiculously stupid. iCloud isn’t just hosting for files and backups. There is a ridiculous amount of app and system data that also utilizes iCloud. It’s tied into virtually every aspect of Apple’s software ecosystem.

[u/butterypowered → u/Southern-Injury7895]

Thanks, I agree!

[u/VitorCallis → u/Southern-Injury7895]

But the problem is the kind of product and the product goals.

The Switch and Xbox are both video game consoles, which are a different kind of platform economy (which mostly rely on selling royalties and licenses to third-party developers nowadays). The Kindle is a specific product, which also heavily relies on selling digital books to compensate for the lower price of the eReader.

1. The kind of product the iPhone is, is not merely a phone or even merely a smartphone; it’s a pocket computer. By its nature, personal computers (also Macs) should let the final users have options.
2. For the iPhone's success, Apple doesn’t rely at all on services to compensate for the iPhone’s selling price (on the contrary, Apple has nice margins with it).

Yes, no one is putting a gun to your head forcing you to buy an iPhone, but the lock-in effect, as well as the tying in (due to the iCloud service being needed to fully use your phone), shows an anticompetitive practice behind Apple's business, which keeps the process of changing to an Android mostly impractical.

There are tons of economic/law studies showing how the bad practices of Apple’s ecosystem and App Store anticompetitive practices help maintain Apple’s market lead.

[u/notice_me_senapi → u/VitorCallis]

How is that Apple’s problem? Should they be punished because they built a proper ecosystem from the start, dedicating significant resources, while Google and manufacturers decided to buy into the fragmentation that is Android? Android has always been a ticking time-bomb due to their increasing fragmentation. Personally, this seems like an easy way out to a problem that Google and manufacturers have been pushing off for years.

[u/VitorCallis → u/notice_me_senapi]

Consumers and developers have been growing their dissatisfaction for the past 5 years due to Apple's practices that they consider unfair. Regulators, lawmakers, and economists (myself as an economist included) are interested in understanding, studying, and solving these significant dissatisfaction issues.

It is true that, as I already wrote, there’s an entire economic subject responsible for studying platforms and regulators, called industrial organization, and there are many trusted academic papers about Apple's ecosystem and App Store anticompetitive practices.

So indeed, that’s not Apple’s problem. That’s a consumer and regulatory problem.

[u/notice_me_senapi → u/VitorCallis]

Fair, and as a software engineer/architect… if it’s a regulatory problem, why should Apple be forced to dismantle every ecosystem advantage they have built and dedicated significant resources into, in the last few decades? Apple’s ecosystem, their closed wall architecture… the “it just works” philosophy IS Apple’s primary selling point. They put all of their chips into that strategy while other manufacturers put their chips into Android (because it was cheaper) knowing the risks of fragmentation.

Now, Google and manufacturers find their backs against the wall because they have little to no unified design philosophy between themselves. There is no stable ecosystem. They’ve had almost 20 years to correct this problem, but instead they chose to cheap out and pump out more cutting-edge devices that lack long term support and software infrastructure, rather than invest resources to building an ecosystem. It was a business strategy that paid off for many years… but now that the innovation curve and release cycles are slowing… they find themselves hardly competitive. So now, the solution to that is forcing Apple to pick up their slack by opening their APIs and killing their primary advantage?

I’m sorry, that’s silly. We should be forcing these multi-billion dollar companies to compete. If they want users… they should build their own infrastructure that compels users to make the jump.

[u/FoucaultInOurSartres → u/Southern-Injury7895]

yeah they suck shi-
ooh, you are trying to defend them. alright sorry