News - Apple SDK changes face regulatory scrutiny

[usxhe190]

the companies should be allowed to add or not include what they want. the customers can vote with their pockets

That's the whole point of competition laws.

If we let big dominant companies to become bullies and effectively control the whole market, customers cannot vote with their pockets.

[Hicks12]

I think Apple have got away with it for so long because they haven't used bullying tactics in connection with the supply and pricing of parts or software.

For example, MS was hammered for charging more for Windows if OEMs put other browsers or media players on PCs. Intel get kicked about because they were withholding component shipments if OEMs were also buying from AMD. I think they were also charging some more for certain parts of they weren't playing ball.

Apple haven't been doing this because they control their whole eco-system, no third parties are really involved. But they are getting to the stage where the EU cannot ignore them for much longer.

Iirc your missing a bit about Apples tactic.... ordering crap loads of flash storage and then when the companies have finished manufacturing it then they withhold the cash and reorder it at the new pricing level. That to me is darn right cheeky and just the same as what Intel and MS did partly .

Apple shouldnt be treated differently so i feel its about time they got investicated .

[TheAnimus]

the companies should be allowed to add or not include what they want. the customers can vote with their pockets

This is a problem with free market theory, as there are just too many variables to have a clear optimum (you can't just use linear optimisation for it!)

You can have a company become big, as it does it becomes increasingly hard for it to do something, its not agile, and a small start up comes along and squashes em dead.

An example of that would be Yahoo & AltaVista, they where giants, along came google with a much lower cost business model, and obviously better results due to a clever idea (page rank) which blew the others out of the water.

Now what would happen in todays harder to get venture capital for nothing world if Google said that anyone who didn't use their ad channel exclusively pays a penalty rate, which makes it infeasible to advertise with them. That would pretty much stop any other start up competing with them on their business area wouldn't it?

The same would be true of stopping people targeting multi-platform code at your platform. What your doing is saying hey we've got a great share of ABC1 market group, due to the iPhones higher price for many application developers this might well be 70%+ of their userbase. They are saying that we don't want anyone easily multitargetting. They are blocking Adobe's offerings before they've even been finished. Squashing people who were using the Novel toolset (which most users couldn't tell...).

This is not fair to the free market, when looked at from the perspective of the mobile phone applications market, it will decrease the worth of it, that means its the job of the regulators to intervene?