from Hacker News

Apple’s App Store and Antitrust

by lleger on 6/30/10, 8:25 PM with 17 comments

• by rbarooah on 6/30/10, 11:58 PM

  The problem with this analysis is that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones, mobile OS's or app stores, any more than Nieman Marcus has a monopoly on department stores. If customers don't like the selection, they have choice for all three. The same is true for developers.

  If this ever does come to be investigated, it will be interesting to see what Google's position is. Will they claim they can't compete?

• by extension on 7/1/10, 12:21 AM

  Of course, this is hoping for democracy in a system that doesn’t yet require such freedom

  Surely nobody expects "democracy" from a privately owned app store. Clarity and good faith, yes. Agreements should be explicit and transparent between the involved parties, and that is really the relationship developers have with the app store, not democratic rule.

• by hsmyers on 6/30/10, 9:24 PM

  Clear and cogent. A little to trusting of the DOJ's getting it right, now or at some point in the future. As memory serves, when they took on Microsoft, Andrew Schulman had three 'Undocumented' books on the shelves, any one of which would have done the job for them.

• by xenophanes on 7/1/10, 1:10 AM

  > For example, iBooks provides a slider UI element to control the brightness level. This puts Apple in an unfair competitive position because other apps — such as the Kindle or even non-competing apps such as Instapaper2 — can’t offer this functionality to their users.

  GoodReader has a brightness control built in. Are they not supposed to? Why not?

• by atom_robot on 7/1/10, 1:47 AM

  I think my Instapaper and Kindle iPad app are broken.. they both have brightness sliders. Where can I buy the anti-competitive versions of these apps?