That's not good enough. If you're Apple, and you're worth 3 trillion dollars, you can both do security and behave in a way that isn't anti-competitive. They could interoperate securely. Is it easier to just lock out your competition and use proprietary everything? Yes, duh. It's also blatantly anti-competitive, which is a thing that societally and (arguably) morally is not acceptable.
I hope to read this blog post in an antitrust case from the DOJ one day.
It isn't anti-competitive to not open up your hardware and software security stack to any other OEMs who wander by. You can simply just buy a competitor's product, for less money even.
I recommend reading the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required all incumbent telephone companies to allow any other company to install equipment in their central offices and buy rights to already laid phone lines at a fixed rate, where all the expense of actually building and laying everything laid entirely with the owner of the central office.
Turns out that (fairly applied) antitrust doesn't care how much it money it costs an incumbent company to begin allowing competitors
This is a goofy argument. Telephone lines are a natural monopoly, cell phones are not. I have no interest in a poorly secured grab bag of bullshit blue-tooth add-ons, and there's no government interest in enabling that.
Whether or not something is anti-competitive has nothing to do with how convenient it is for the incumbent. It may indeed by quite onerous for the incumbent. The bar for anti-competitive behavior is:
- Is this stifling competition?
- Is that harming consumers?
Per the contents of the blog post, yes this is absolutely stifling competition given that Pebble won't be able to provide the same features/experience as the Apple watch. This directly hurts Pebble which prevents them from competing.
As for how much that hurts consumers, the answer is not a clear "yes". The iOS market share is ~60% in the US and I don't think the majority of those folks wear or are interested in wearing any kind of watch, smart or not.
However, if Apple keeps this up they're absolutely going to go the way of Ma Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(1982) and the eventual Telecommunication Act of 1996 which forced incumbent providers to interconnect with folks who would ostensibly be their competition.
This is incredibly vaguely defined here. Saying that apple stifles smart watch competition by not actively working to make iphone more interoperable with non apple smart watches is ridiculous. You'd never say that a car company is stiffing competition by making it hard to install a new engine, or mount after market add-ons.
People have such a confusing hate-boner for apple. Just buy an android phone.
The EU tech space is a barren landscape of technological dross pumped out by Siemens and some other big consultancies, so I’m not sure I’d want to apply their terrible laws here.
I mean the results of the lawsuits are it kinda is. You don't have to open it up technologically in the sense that just anyone ole' device can just pair but you should have to give any OEM access that wants to be part of the secure hardware club— they get to use the proprietary bits for interoperability.
Any smart watch vendor should be able to call up Apple and make their own watch which is equally privileged to Apple's. And the requirements to the vendor to do so needs to be not so onerous as to be an effective ban.
If you’re Apple and worth 3 trillion dollars then you can also ship a voice assistant that’s competitive with the 5 year old state of the art. It should be simple. Money can be turned into engineering results with absolutely no trade offs.
I hope to read this blog post in an antitrust case from the DOJ one day.