11.23.10

Apple Expected to Have Antitrust Trouble as Anticompetitive Practices Carry on

Posted in Antitrust, Apple at 3:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Apple is having a tough time because of its own behaviour which can be characterised as conceited (vanity) and abusive (not obeying the rules)

EARLIER this month we mentioned Tim Wu for his criticism of Apple and now there’s a whole new article about it over at TechCrunch (AOL). It’s titled “How Apple’s Closed Ways Could Land It Into Antitrust Trouble” and it says:

Is Apple’s design ideology really “exclusionary” in this sense? Not always, but consider, for example, the iTunes-iPod setup. The “exclusion” occurs when a consumer wants to sync a music player other than an iPod to iTunes. It doesn’t work, and arguably, Apple is “excluding” or “refusing to deal” with independent music players so as to defend its monopoly.

More specifically, Apple’s habit of “upgrading” its products to exclude competitors could be a source of trouble. In 2009, Apple modified iTunes several times to prevent the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes. While its hard to know exactly what the upgrade did, at least some of the upgrades, like 8.2.1 seemed to have little purpose other than blocking Palm’s sync capacities. Apple, for its part, stated blandly “iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.” That turned out to be a code-word for blocked the Pre.

Steve Lohr says that “Apple and I.B.M. Aren’t All That Different” (being like IBM is not a compliment) and there’s news about Apple becoming friends with Rupert Murdoch of Fox infamy. Steve Jobs is helping these deceitful people:

Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital “newspaper” called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media.

More information about it can be found in [1, 2] and Microsoft booster Thom Holwerda says that “European Carriers Threaten Apple Over Built-in SIM Card Option” [via] while pointing to a report from Murdoch’s Financial Times.

We previously saw Murdoch getting closer to Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. This man must love proprietary software for DRM antifeatures, just as he loves monopolies in general (his networks help defend US billionaires, who use the likes of Glenn Beck to mobilise the masses in favour of less regulation over these billionaires, ironically under a “Tea Party” banner/flag).

Speaking of monopolies, a familiar Apple boosters site speaks about (former) SGI filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple. Patents are merely monopolies and almost nobody would argue that monopolies are a positive thing. █

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