Tech Regulations & Govt | |
Tech Regulations & Govt | |
3994 VIEWS | |
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On March 13, Spotify
filed a complaint with the European Commission that accused Apple of
violating antitrust laws.
Spotify CEO Daniel
Ek summarizes the critique in a blog post, writing:
“Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world,
is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and
the App Store—and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is
fine. But in Apple’s case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage
at every turn.”
Among the unfair advantages Ek names are the 30% tax Apple extracts from purchases
made through its payment system, the technical restrictions Apple places on
companies that elect not to use its payment system, and the technical barriers
that Ek say “include (locking) Spotify and other competitors out of Apple
services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch.”
Spotify is not an outlier in its opinion of Apple's behavior, but the fact that
its lawsuit was brought to the European Commission highlights one big point:
It's going to be messy to make this work in the U.S.
It's not that there isn't momentum behind this cause. Senator Elizabeth
Warren recently outlined her plans to regulate tech companies in an article
aptly titled, “Here's how we can break up Big Tech.” In it, she offers a
comparison of modern tech giants to past antitrust cases—from Standard Oil to
more recent examples like Microsoft.
Many in the tech world, unsurprisingly, are skeptical of arguments in favor of
bringing antitrust suits against tech giants, at least in the U.S.
As Ben Thompson says, unlike railroad or oil monopolies of
old—which built their empires by forming trusts—“Google, Facebook, Amazon,
and Apple dominate because consumers like them. Each of them leveraged
technology to solve a unique user needs, acquired users, then leveraged those
users to attract suppliers onto their platforms by choice, which attracted more
users, creating a virtuous cycle.”
Thompson's argument, echoed by many, doesn't contradict antitrust
accusations—Thompson himself is critical of Apple's use of the App Store—but it
does emphasize how messy it will be for governments to apply century-old
antitrust statutes to modern-day tech companies.
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