Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/27/apps-arent-bricks.html
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Apple just ain’t the good guys anymore.
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Apple makes the most expensive bricks! 
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They’re a big business, so have never been more than the least-worst guys. The good guys have fractional market shares.
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So you buy a $1000 phone and you worried about apps than cost a few bucks.
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Um, wait minute, what exactly is the monopoly here? iOS is not a public conveyance, accommodation, or utility that everyone has a right to access, it’s a privately funded, commercially sold programming environment. Anyone who doesn’t like it can just go over to the vastly more popular Android ecosystem and sell apps in the Google store. This is nothing like the Microsoft antitrust case, where DOJ successfully showed that Windows was so dominant that denying access to Windows for other browsers, software, etc. was equivalent to eliminating competition altogether. This is simply not the case for Apple/iOS, which holds about 40% of the US market share* and much less overseas. If Google and Apple were conspiring to keep app prices high, maybe I could see it, but failing that, I dunno.
Apple sucks, Google sucks, they all suck, but Apple is not a monopoly in any sector in which it competes (much as it would like to be), and it is not at all “obvious” that Apple’s control over the App Store is monopolistic by the terms of antitrust law.
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It’s not abusing, BOINGBOING/doctorow. It’s ALLEGEDLY ABUSING. That’s what a trial is about.
It’s a tall order to make this case, too. Your clickbait headline seems to have already decided it, in much the same manner that I decided to ignore the content of your article.
You want credibility? Maybe the Doctorow name isn’t what it used to be. Try attacking this issue fairly and maybe you’ll get it back, … with someone other than me.
Damn… normally when I see your name on something, I pay attention in a GOOD way.
Here… let me fix this for you:
“Supreme Courts looks ready to allow anti-trust suit against Apple to proceed”. See how that’s fundamentally different? There’s no conclusion embedded in the headline.
Honestly, what happened? BoingBoing has gone to hell.
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You must be new here…
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I am not a lawyer in real life or on the internet, but I’m fascinated as to what an end-user-based lawsuit would even look like. The average price I pay for an app is probably somewhere around $3 or $4. Are people really going to sue, even through class action, because they feel like they should have paid $1.99 instead of $3 for an app?
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Welcome to class action law. All of the wounded millions get a check for 0.58, and the lawyers get millions, as they bank a third of the total recovery. Don’t get me wrong, I love these suits, its the only realistic way to discipline these enormous companies who otherwise wouldn’t ever change anything that made them money (chemical dumping, unsafe cars, monopoly pricing in the absence of a real antitrust enforcement arm). But lawyers take them on contingency for a reason.
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