France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking

This is not what this case is about.

Seems like it’s roughly what it is about. Apple has a mandatory consent, but won’t adapt it so that third party apps can integrate their own tracking consent into it. As a result third party apps are treated differently than first party because they have one fewer consent screen. That advantages entrenched incumbents with big, locked-in user bases and disadvantages new entrants. Since Apple owns the platform, it’s anticompetitive to pass regulations (which is what Apple is doing here) that discriminate against other participants in a way that acts as a competitive advantage.

Yes, but are consumers that knowingly bought into the Apple ecosystem harmed?

> Yes, but are consumers that knowingly bought into the Apple ecosystem harmed?

It seems that this logic would prevent any regulation of what happens on macOS or iOS, since anyone who is using either has knowingly bought into the Apple ecosystem. (And analogously for Windows, since anyone who is using it has knowingly bought into the Microsoft ecosystem.)

Consumers are only part of the competition equation. I bet consumers also love the initial phases of dumping, but regulators have to look beyond short-term consumer preferences.

Yes. Apple's competitors are suppressed by Apple. Competition would reduce. Thus, consumers would be considered harmed.

Were Windows 98 users "harmed" because IE5 was bundled with the OS? They "knowingly bought into the Microsoft ecosystem", after all.

Clearly the consensus is that YES, they were harmed, and the proof is the Web 2.0 revolution driven by the eventually broken browser monopoly by Firefox and Chrome. But at the time the tech industry trenches were filled with platform fans cheering Gates et. al. and claiming sincerely to want the benefits of the unified Microsoft Experience.

Every time you take an Uber or reserve an AirBnB you're demonstrating the fallacy of that kind of thinking.

Basically: yes, competition is good always, no matter how tempted you are to believe the opposite.

Regulators don’t have to look beyond short term consumer preference (or rather, consumer benefit) with respect to dumping actually, because only the long term aspect of dumping (when prices are raised on consumers after driving competitors out of the market) is illegal. A company is free to burn as much capital as it wants while it is trying to enter and take over a market.

The “consensus” was only in the EU. The US never had a browser mandate and never forced Microsoft to ship Windows without IE.

And browser choice in the EU had little long term affect

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...

FWIW, that's just saying that government antitrust action didn't break the monopoly in question, not that it wasn't harmful. Clearly it was harmful. And Apple's is too.

And yet and still without government intervention, Chrome now dominates to the point where Microsoft gave up and now uses the Chromium engine.

Just maybe if the EU spent more time encouraging innovation instead of passing laws, they would have a real tech industry.

Every Mac and Windows user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download Chrome and didn’t need the government to help them make a decision.

Today in the US, even though the average selling price of an iPhone is twice that of an Android where there are dozens of choices and Android is backed by a trillion dollar company, 70% of users in the US choose iPhones.

In every single country, people with more money choose Apple devices using their own free will even though there are dozens of cheaper Android devices to choose from.

Just like people said “no” to ad tracking when given a choice and now the ad tech industry isn’t happy with that choice.

What mechanism can the regulators use to prevent competition going out of business while maintaining the artificially low prices? Ban price hikes after the competition is dead? What if the dumper decides to leave the market entirely after destroying the competition? [see Walmart leaving small towns, and the resulting food deserts].

The more proactive approach is tractable since it preserves competition (easy) instead of low prices (hard, on shakier legal footing)

Microsoft basically invented AJAX and spurred the entire web 2.0 revolution. Other browsers weren't prevented from being installed.

Compare what Apple does on iDevices. Safari comes pre-installed, and every competing browser can only skin the OS engine; competing browsers can't actually port their own offerings. On top of that, if you actually want to sell a browser, Apple will get a cut of your sales.

And yet, Apple's app store and ecosystem doesn't seem to be treated as a monopoly in this regard. If not here, why wouldn't they also get away with all of their other anti-competitive practices?

FWIW, I think they should be treated consistently as a monopoly. As a backup option, I'll settle for consistently treated as not-a-monopoly.

Mixing and matching rulings will only serve to hurt in the long run.

Yes. Reducing competition harms consumers in the long term. If Apple's behavior drives out all third party apps, consumers will be harmed.

What mechanism can the regulators use to prevent potential dumpers from entering a market? Setting price controls on the entire economy? What if the market is currently beholden to a decentralized monopoly with artificially high prices? [see taxis and the arguments people made for Uber’s existence despite it being an obvious dumping operation]

The more proactive approach requires an omniscient regulator that you hope preserves competition but really can only guarantee current prices and incumbent profits.

> What mechanism can the regulators use to prevent potential dumpers from entering a market?

The legal system, including the discovery process, and basic accounting to calculate when the selling price is lower than BoM cost.

Now it's your turn to answer my earlier question.

> And yet, Apple's app store and ecosystem doesn't seem to be treated as a monopoly in this regard.

... except in the EU where it's now legal to deliver a non safari browser engine through alternative app stores.

It's just that no one will do it for just the EU...

Does Apple list all the advantages they give themselves over the competition on the iPhone boxes in stores & on their websites? Otherwise the customer can't "knowingly" buy into the ecosystem, they only discover the extent of this once they've bought the device.

> The legal system, including the discovery process, and basic accounting to calculate when the selling price is lower than BoM cost.

So price controls is your answer? The Costco rotisserie chicken is illegal monopolization in your world.

> What mechanism can the regulators use to prevent competition going out of business while maintaining the artificially low prices?

The legal system, including the equitable power to split up companies under antitrust law.

There is a reason that the proactive approach has been roundly rejected by courts in the modern day, despite Lina Khan’s best efforts to push it. Despite your comment earlier about preserving competition being “easy” (preserving competition via regulation is never easy) and preserving low costs being “hard” and on “shakier legal footing,” the test for antitrust remains consumer harm, not competition.

> The legal system, including the equitable power to split up companies under antitrust law.

And how well has this been working out? There hasn't been a real threat of forced divesture since Microsoft's anti-trust case back in the 1990s, and large companies are willing to pay fines that are dwarfed by the profits earned from destroyed competition. How does paying a fine undo consumer harm?