davidw

Peza said:

davidw said:

Peza said:

Haha not surprised in the slightest, it was obvious they would find Apple guilty because Apple has breached their regulations and laws, it is the job of any company to know and understand the laws and regulations of your select market no matter the size. 

What will be interesting is the penalty that will be imposed, the EU will hit hard if required in any company with penalties, I suspect they will force Apple to change its store policy in Europe. Spotify did have a point too over this though and the heat was obviously building up against Apple, need to share the wealth fairly.

The EU Commission is not the courts. They did not find Apple guilty of anything. They only did the investigation and concluded that Apple is violating EU competition laws. It's going to be up to the EU courts to determine if Apple is guilty of the charges. This will takes years and then you have to add even more years for the appeal process.  

Remember, the EU commission did a 2 year investigation and in 2016 and concluded that Apple was avoiding taxes for years, by setting up their HQ in Ireland, (who they claimed was giving Apple favorable treatment) and the commission ordered Apple to pay nearly $15B in back taxes. But Apple (and Ireland) appealed the ruling in an EU court and won. So now the EU commission is appealing that decision. This been going on for 5 years now and counting. Apple has already set aside the $15B. It seems that with this case, it was the EU Commission that did not know and understand their own laws. 

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21325325/apple-eu-ireland-back-taxes-13-billion-overturned-appealed


So don't go out and celebrate yet. Hopefully anything you bought for your big celebration party will keep for another 5 or more years. 

Firstly, get it right, the EU didn’t accuse Apple of anything surrounding taxes, it accused Ireland of breaching state aide regulations and law over its favoured tax levels they agreed for Apple to pay, their grievance was with Ireland and it is Ireland that must pay 12 billion in back taxes. But what do you expect when it’s all true and Apple was paying 0.005% in tax through offices existing in paper only.
Secondly, if you know one thing it’s that the EU won’t give up, also it does not take years to bring cases to conclusion, and it does not let cases be buried in appeals processes. This is anti competitive behaviour not tax evasion by one of its member states.

Perhaps you should look at the way they have treated other electronic corporation electronic giants to get an understanding of how it treats them when they breach competition laws, not like how they are treated in US law that’s for certain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

When it comes to anti competitive behaviour, the EU has incredibly strong laws and regulations over it, and it vehemently defends them and enforces them. You can expect a big fine to be levied on Apple or it will be forced to change its App Store policies to continue operating within the EU market, or maybe both, if found guilty. We shall see.

So you admit that you were wrong, when you claimed that the EU found Apple "guilty". If by "We shall see.", you also include yourself, then you admit that you don't know if Apple will be found guilty of anything, yet.

The EU accused Apple of avoiding taxes and wanted Apple to pay $15B in back taxes, not Ireland. What the EU Commission got wrong was that there is no laws set by the EU regarding tax rates in any of its members country. Each member country can set their own tax rates. But the taxes must be applied to all equally. The EU Commission claimed that Apple received a special tax deal from Ireland. But Ireland low tax rates were applied equally and did not favor any one company.

This is what the EU court ruled and thus Apple did not receive any special tax treatment and don't owe the back taxes. The EU Commission was accusing Apple of receiving special tax treatment and was demanding that Apple pay the $15B in back taxes. Ireland was not demanding that Apple pay the back tax and yet Apple aside $15B, in case the lost. Why? If no one was demanding that Apple pay $15B in back taxes. And how in the name of Hell can Ireland owe and must pay "back taxes" to themselves? What's the point in that? That would be like if the US Federal government were to claim that because TX do not collect a State income tax, they owe themselves back taxes that they didn't collect.

Ireland was never accused of tax "evasion". Neither was Apple. Tax "avoidance", by paying as little taxes as legally possible, is not illegal. Not even in the EU. But In the EU, it is illegal if one got special tax treatment in order to pay less taxes. This was what the EU Commission did not prove, that Ireland gave Apple any special tax treatment.   

It took a decade, to finally win anti-completive charges against Google. I don't know what you consider "years", but a decade is by definition ......10 years. Even if the EU Commission were to cut that time in half, it would still be  ....... years. And this was a case of anti-competitive behavior against a company (Google), that controls 90% of the search engine market. A monopoly, by any definition. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/10/eu-antitrust-probe-google/

DoomFreak said:

Apple is full of crap.  It is very misleading to tell users they can purchase something with a "Buy" button and then suggest that they do not own it.  I think they would get a lot less money , if they had a "Use for an unknown amount of time" button.

They know people think they are buying it.  Purely deceptive.

You do own it. Or at least the license to play it as often as you want and keep it for as long as you want. Just download it into your device hard drive. Apple gives you that option at the time of purchase or any time afterwards. You can even back up those purchased media on to another hard drive, like Apple's Time Machine.

The problem arises when you choose to keep on streaming it from Apple, rather than to save a copy on a hard drive. (Many people do this to save space on their hard drive.)  That's because Apple do not own the content. If the owners of the content no longer wants their contents available to the public or to Apple, Apple must delete it from their servers. It's not up to Apple to allow you to keep streaming contents that you bought, that the owner of the contents no longer want to make available to Apple. But the owner of the content can not force you to delete it from your hard drive. You can still play it from your hard drive for as long as you have the Apple account that it's tied to.

Plus if you lose or damage your hard drive, you can re-download any purchased media from Apple for free, providing its still available on Apple servers. Try doing that with a physical disc purchased at Best Buy or Walmart.   

gatorguy said:

tundraboy said:

gatorguy said:

Per another source there's a difference in what each side would like to claim as the marketplace:

Competition regulators tend to take the view that the relevant market is “iOS apps,” and here Apple has a 100% monopoly on their sale and distribution.

The first sentence is downright stupid.  There has never ever been any case where the relevant market is defined that narrowly.  We might as well accuse BMW of monopolizing the relevant market called "Cars with BMW engines".  Or closer to home, Microsoft is monopolizing the relevant market called "Xbox games".

I see the AppStore as being quite similar to how Ticketmaster operates (and I'm not the only one). Are there any antitrust cases involving Ticketmaster? 

EDIT: Here's one legal opinion (Apple v.Pepper) where Apple and Ticketmaster are equated, and why they believe a SCOTUS ruling re:Amex should have been applied. 
https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/13/dementia-sets-in-at-scotus-as-the-justices-collectively-mislay-amex/

How they operate are not similar at all. Not even "quite". And really, you might be the only one to think that. 

With Ticketmaster, the concert/sport/event venues determines the face value for a ticket and Ticketmaster will add their service charges and fees to arrive at the final cost of the ticket they sell to consumers. No matter what the final price of the ticket to consumers, the venue still gets 100% of what they wanted for the ticket plus sometimes a percentage of Ticketmaster fees. The venue do not have to take into consideration Ticketmaster fees, when determining the face value of their tickets. The consumers pays Ticketmaster fees directly.

With the Apple App Store (and all app stores for that matter), the developers determines the final price of their apps and Apple (or the app store owner) gets a commission when the apps are sold through their app stores. The developers has to consider the commission when determining what they want to sell their apps for, to ensure a reasonable profit. The consumer buying the apps are paying only what the developers charges. The consumers pays the app store commission indirectly.  

Plus, with app stores and developers with free apps, the consumers can still download their free apps, for free. Will Ticketmaster process free venue tickets without adding a service charge and fees to the consumers or charging the venue for distributing their free tickets?  Imagine if 75% of the tickets available at Ticketmaster, were free of charge to the consumers or the venue offering the free tickets.

And I'm willing to bet that if this was mainly about the Google Play Store, you wouldn't be so quick to say that they are quite similar to how Ticketmaster operates. 

gerrit said:

Around the world Apple is currently being investigated in 8 different antitrust investigations, has already been found guilty of antitrust violations for their iBooks Store in the US, and in 2019 lost a Supreme Court ruling on how the App Store is run (Apple v. Pepper). Epic may be self-serving, but most developers I know agree that Epic is on the right side of this and are hoping that Epic wins. Self-serving or not, they're on the side of the developers. The big question is really if anti-trust legislation will force Apple to change before the lawsuit is even decided.

First of all, the anti-trust case against Apple dealing with the iBook Store had absolutely nothing to do with how Apple was running their iBook Store. It had to do with Apple and 5 large publishers conspiring to set the price of eBooks above what Amazon was selling them for. Amazon was selling eBooks at a lost or near lost because they were able to make up the lost by selling Kindles.

If each of the 5 publishers had signed up with Apple iBook Store independently, there would be no anti-trust case at all. But the 5 publishers organized as one to fight against Amazon and that was the heart of the anti-trust case against the publishers and Apple. 

In fact, Amazon is now operating their eBook store the same way Apple has always been doing it with their iBook Store. By letting the publisher set the price and Amazon gets a 30% commission on the sale (sound familiar?), by using the "Agency Model" instead of the "Wholesale Model". With the Wholesale model, Amazon could set its own price after paying the publishers the discounted wholesale price. The agency model is how the Appel App Store operates since its beginning and it's the same way the stores on MS and Sony game consoles are operating.   

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/23/20991659/ebook-amazon-kindle-ereader-department-of-justice-publishing-lawsuit-apple-ipad

Plus as mentioned already, the Apple vs Pepper case had nothing to do with anti-trust against Apple. All the ruling did was to allow class action lawsuits against Apple, that might involve anti-trust violations pertaining to the Apple App Store. 

None of these 2 cases has anything to do within anti-trust violations pertaining to how Apple ran and has continue to run, their iBook Store or App Store. Absolutely nothing has changed after these 2 rulings, in regards to how Apple run their online stores. The iTunes Music Store has been operating the same for nearly 20 years now. 

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

How many words will the Apple execs need to explain why YOU can't install any software YOU want on YOUR devices?

Just one word ........ Jailbreak. 

Or maybe instead of being an "Outdoor" app developer, you should try becoming an iOS app developer. With a $99/a year Apple Developer account, YOU can side load any app YOU want into YOUR iOS device, by using the provided X-Code and a Mac or PC. Even if the iOS app don't meet the certification to be in the Apple App Store, iOS developers can side load it into their own iDevice for "testing" purposes. Just like how an Amazon Fire device can be put in "developer mode", to side load apps not available in the Amazon App Store.  Only one wouldn't need to pay Amazon for a developer account to do so.