Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
www.androidauthority.com
US senators have written to the Department of Justice to investigate Apple's anti-competitive behavior towards Beeper.

US senators have urged the DOJ to probe Apple’s alleged anti-competitive conduct against Beeper.

  • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
    725·
    11 months ago

    The 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.worldEnglish
      1242·
      11 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.worldEnglish
        222·
        11 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 than 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.worldEnglish
        41·
        11 months ago

        They’d have to allow any app to replace iMessages as their sms client.

        Alternatively, you could argue that their monopoly in messaging is being unfairly applied in hardware. That would have to be brought up by a hardware vendor like One Plus.