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Microsoft Tells Congress That iOS App Store is Anticompetitive

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 22 2020, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-should-I-root-for-again? dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

who am I rooting for again?

Microsoft Tells Congress That iOS App Store Is Anticompetitive:

US regulators are taking aim at big tech firms like Google, Apple, and Amazon, with the potential for antitrust cases later this year. A House committee is gearing up to question the CEOs of major technology companies, but Microsoft President Brad Smith has already chatted with the committee. Smith reportedly expressed concerns about Apple in particular, specifically when it comes to its handling of the App Store.

[...] According to Smith, the recent disagreement over the Basecamp Hey email app on iOS exemplifies the problem. The app needs a $99 annual subscription, but there was no way to purchase it in the app — users had to go to the web. That didn't please Apple, as it circumvented the 30 percent revenue charge. Apple resisted approving the app, only doing so when public pressure ramped up, and the developers added a 14-day free trial for iOS users.

[...] And that's at the heart of the antitrust probe: Is Apple harming competition with its policies now that iOS is one of two dominant mobile platforms? It might take a few years for the government to decide that one.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @05:21PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @05:21PM (#1025000)

    I think they understand it pretty well. The Microsoft Store is the only way to install downloaded software on an Xbox, for instance.

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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday July 22 2020, @10:27PM (3 children)

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 22 2020, @10:27PM (#1025168)
    Yea, someone should really remind Brad of this. They have a consumer hardware device, that has a restrictive (more so than even the Apple app store) "app store" that they control. Every argument that they can make against Apple can also be applied to the XBox, plus a few more on top. I hope they get an investigation into Apple and a ruling that ends up biting them right in the ass. Would be a win-win.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:23PM (#1025189)

      A possible difference is how Apple wants their 30% cut of all sales made within apps. I'm not sure if Microsoft has a similar practice. But Microsoft's angle might be that they want to make an xCloud (or whatever they're calling their streaming service) iOS app and then accept money to stream Xbox games to the xCloud app. They probably want it to be easy for people to pay Microsoft through the app and they probably don't want to pay Apple's cut.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 23 2020, @04:17PM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday July 23 2020, @04:17PM (#1025442) Journal
      The Xbox is not sold as a general-purpose compute device, the iPad is. The tag line when you go to the iPad page on the Apple site is 'Your next computer is not a computer.' They are marketing it as an alternative to a laptop. There are some market problems from game systems providing strong lock-in and giving a vendor control over the ecosystem, but there are pretty self-contained. If the Xbox or PlayStation markets were completely broken, that wouldn't make much of a difference in the wider economy. In contrast, when a large chunk of the general-purpose computer ecosystem market is broken, that has far-reaching implications.
      --
      sudo mod me up

      • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday July 23 2020, @10:54PM

        by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 23 2020, @10:54PM (#1025574)
        So? It COULD easily be one if it were allowed to. There isn't much an iPad or PC can do that an XBOX couldn't if it were allowed to. You could literally hook a KB/Mouse/Monitor and run productivity or any other type of software on it. They have more compute power than a chromebook after all. I don't think marketing has anything to do with it as this isn't a consumer fight with Apple, it's a developer fight. I also think you are drastically underestimating the economic impact here. Not only game devs, particularly indie devs, but other software makers as well as consumers who could repurposed their hardware, especially as it becomes obsolete with the new console release.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @06:09PM (#1025487)

    My regular moron's understanding of anti-trust is that locking people into your products is only against US anti-monopoly practices if you hold a dominant market position or are part of a cabal that holds a dominant market position. So I don't see how, by US legal standards, either Xbox or iOS could qualify.

    Arguably Microsoft propped up Apple in the late 1990s purely to avoid anti-monopoly legal issues. These days I wonder if Google and Microsoft have some kind of explicit or implicit agreement that keeps Bing alive, because without Bing the market position of Google Search is probably adequate to trigger an anti-monopoly lawsuit.