Comment on Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
Zak@lemmy.world 9 months agoThe US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry
It further explains that “market power” means:
the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors
Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They aren’t excluding competitors. Anyone is free to write a cross platform messaging app that has blue bubbles in it. The preloading thing could be an issue if you can’t uninstall imessage. Otherwise it would follow the IE/edge ruling.
But we’ll see what the courts say.
Zak@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We’re far from court cases. What we have right now is politicians asking the Department of Justice to investigate. I suspect that’s more likely to go nowhere as it is to go to court.
If it did go to court, either side of the smartphone/messenger equation could be argued as anticompetitive use of market power, or both; they could claim that Apple used its market power in smartphones to popularize its messenger service, which it then used to increase its market share in smartphones.
holdthecheese@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They’d have to allow any app to replace iMessages as their sms client