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Apple WWDC 2010 keynote (iPhone 4 announced)

grit said:
You dont have to be the only player to have a monopoly.
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In economics, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it
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A situation, by legal privilege or other agreement, in which solely one party (company, cartel etc.) exclusively provides a particular product or service, dominating that market and generally exerting powerful control over it.
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Apple's iTunes perhaps? The iPhone?
 
editor said:
Apple's iTunes perhaps? The iPhone?
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iTunes is a contender for investigation if it does dodgy things at some point and its market share continues to grow.

The iPhone is not because it does not have a completely dominant share of the smartphone market.

Microsoft had a completely dominant share of the desktop OS market.
 
It's difficult to see how though - itunes offers an open format (mp3) available to any media player. Nor is any mp3 prohibited from playing on Apple's own manufactured ipods. The consumer has a free choice still of music portal and player.

That's a world apart from compelling pc manufacturers to bundle your OS with their products or risk consequences. And then using that OS as beachhead into other areas (eg Web browsing) and using that dominant position to exclude other established providers. There's nothing like the cynical moves of MS towards Netscape for example
 
Only the older files are protected AACs iirc though and despite the name it'sa comparatively open (ex Dolby format) open to other manufacturers. Equally you're not compelled to buy AACs, nor were protected formats anything but proprietary across the wider marketplace. The terms of something like protected WMVs were generally much tougher
 
AAC is not the protection, which is called Fairplay

just getting the terms right
 
tarannau said:
It's difficult to see how though - itunes offers an open format (mp3) available to any media player. Nor is any mp3 prohibited from playing on Apple's own manufactured ipods. The consumer has a free choice still of music portal and player.
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I'm no expert, but there seems to be no shortage of anti trust investigations racking up against Apple in the States at the moment.
Federal antitrust regulators may be able to build a case against Apple over its iTunes business because the company has a dominant share of the U.S. music download market, an antitrust lawyer said today.

The Department of Justice is reportedly in the early stages of an investigation of Apple's business practices, in part because of a complaint that the company pressured music labels to pull support of Amazon's "MP3 Daily Deal," a promotion in which the online retailer received exclusive access to new tracks.

Apple has an estimated 70 per cent share share of the U.S. retail digital music download market, significantly larger than Amazon and Wal-Mart, which each account for 12 per cent of all sales.

And the size of Apple's share matters to the government, said Hillard Sterling, an antitrust attorney at Chicago-based law firm Freeborn & Peters LLP.

"This has much stronger promise than the mobile device case because Apple's market share in digital music is much more attractive to government regulators," said Sterling, referring to reports earlier this month that officials at the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are also looking into Apple's ban of third-party development tools for creating iPhone software.

"The DOJ seems to be sniffing around for a stronger foundation for an antitrust case," Sterling said. "And 70% is sufficient market share to raise the specter of a monopoly. It's a strong indicator to the government."

http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/news/index.cfm?newsid=3225039
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Apple faces new antitrust investigation over iTunes
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/63826...faces-new-antitrust-investigation-over-itunes

According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/an_antitrust_app_buvCWcJdjFoLD5vBSkguGO
 
The word 'sniffing' there is highly indicative though. I share some of the discomfort that Apple - the perennial underdog - is now the 300 pound gorilla in the room with such a huge market share. There again they seem to have built and maintained that share through good products, a consistent approach and good marketing. You can't blame folks for buying a successful product.

So far I've seen little evidence of price fixing - indeed Apple's relationships with the studios and music majors has often seemed confrontational and has succeeded in spite of barriers - nor of abuse of their market position to dictate terms in a way similar to MS with netscape or PC manufacturers. And there's still plenty of choice in the market for phones, media players, ibooks, apps and music - witness the floods of new and competitor offers. It would seem weird for an American court to penalise Apple for what seems to be commercial success based around sound strategy and brand leading products
 
editor said:
I can't quite work that article out myself to be honest, and annoyingly, you can't copy and paste it on here.
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Ah. What is in fact the case is that the way to avoid browser ad blockers (and Reader really isn't an ad blocker, it's a page reformatter like Readability, you have to specifically click to get that view and normally the ads will all show up) is not to use browsers at all and write a content app. So actually it's not about iAds at all; you could put any ads you like into an app, from Apple or not. Safari Reader doesn't exclude iAds, Safari never sees iAds. Usual press mix-up.

I am firmly of the opinion that nobody should produce that sort of content in app form anyway to be honest; I'm not buying it, any more than I'm buying DRMed eBooks or music or TV shows.
 
elbows said:
I think there may be some bullshit flying around about Safari Reader. It would help if I knew the technical details about how it determines which part of the site is the actual article - maybe it goes by div tags with certain labels, maybe html5 article tags, maybe something else. Either way I dont expect it to be showing any adverts, those who say it still allows Apples own iAds are mistaken, unless they are simply referring to the fact that Safari reader is not on iphone & ipad at the moment.
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I never even noticed Reader until just now. It's quite nice actually; very very similar to Readability though, they've just nicked that idea and put it in a browser button.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
I am firmly of the opinion that nobody should produce that sort of content in app form anyway to be honest; I'm not buying it, any more than I'm buying DRMed eBooks or music or TV shows.
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Its mainly done for discover-ability (is that a word?) purposes.
 
fen_boy said:
I started using an adblocker because ads had gotten so intrusive and annoying, I have absolutely no qualms about doing so.
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Did you read the Ars article linked?

The people whose content you are consuming for free, need to eat.
 
grit said:
Did you read the Ars article linked?

The people whose content you are consuming for free, need to eat.
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Yes I did, and Ars is an example of a site that I might consider whitelisting (despite that whining, hectoring article).
Their content is decent and they can probably be trusted not to fill my screen with popups and ads for viagra or whatever. The problem is that many sites are just too intrusive with their advertising.
My default position is to block ads for my own convenience, I can't be bothered to sort the wheat from the chaff and I don't really see it as a moral decision, sorry.
 
fen_boy said:
I started using an adblocker because ads had gotten so intrusive and annoying, I have absolutely no qualms about doing so.
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Indeed. This idea that to use the internet means you consent to having shitloads of unsolicited advertising rammed down your throat is complete bollocks.

If you require payment for access to your site, make it subscription based, or have some form of micropayment setup available, and if your content is any good, you'll be fine.
 
stupid dogbot said:
Indeed. This idea that to use the internet means you consent to having shitloads of unsolicited advertising rammed down your throat is complete bollocks.
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No you consent to having adverising if you are consuming the content of sites that use it as a way to pay their bills.

However to people such as you who have the attitude, of "fuck them i dont care". I guess there is no reasoning that can argue with that attitude. Do you you take the same attitude here regarding the server fund?
 
grit said:
Its mainly done for discover-ability (is that a word?) purposes.
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Possibly; I suspect a lot of publishers think that it offers them a secure micropayment route too. I don't consider either of these very good reasons. IMO it's a fad which will wear off for everything except app-based regular content that's actually a proper app - e.g. Pocket God.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
Possibly; I suspect a lot of publishers think that it offers them a secure micropayment route too. I don't consider either of these very good reasons. IMO it's a fad which will wear off for everything except app-based regular content that's actually a proper app - e.g. Pocket God.
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Its not a fad, I was contracted to do applications like this 5 years ago on J2ME handsets. Having it packaged in such a way makes your content available to the average non techie consumer a lot easier, in many cases if it wasnt used they probably would never discover it.
 
grit said:
Its not a fad, I was contracted to do applications like this 5 years ago on J2ME handsets. Having it packaged in such a way makes your content available to the average non techie consumer a lot easier, in many cases if it wasnt used they probably would never discover it.
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People used to do this stuff on CD-ROMs too, and nobody bought those either.
 
No, but that's not what makes them faddy.

this will sound like a shit excuse but i've actually just had an operation on my hand, and the local is wearing off, and I don't feel like typing a long thing with my left, so I'll come back to this later
 
Apple has tweaked its developer terms and conditions to explicitly lock out in-application advertising services that might compete with its own iAd service.

The new terms, picked up by All Things Digital, spell out the rules. Applications may not collect statistical information for advertising, or any other reason, without Apple's written permission - and you can be clear that Google, Microsoft and/or Opera need not apply.

Even if the user's consent is obtained Apple won't allow the collection of any demographic information for feeding to analytical services such as Flurry, or any purpose that isn't "directly relevant to the use of the Application".

When it comes to advertising, some information can be gathered with the user's permission, but only if the company doing the gathering is "an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads" - our emphasis. Just in case there's any doubt the clause continues: "An advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent", leaving just about everyone else out in the cold.

The largest provider of mobile advertising, and potential competitor to iAd, is AdMob (owned by Google), while AdMarvel is now owed by Opera (arguably in the development environment business). Microsoft doesn't have a mobile advertising play just yet, but when it does it too will be banned from the iPhone.

Developers can still serve advertisements in iPhone applications, of course, but not if they want to gather the kind of targeting information that makes such advertising so valuable - unless they sign up with Apple's iAd. Cupertino has helpfully excluded itself from the new rules, reproduced in full below:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent, You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

- The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/09/apple_iad/

I cant say I'm surprised about banning competing advertisers. Mainly because Apple got all snotty when Flurry analytics identified 50 Ipads, that where being used at Apple's Cupertino campus before being officially announced!

Isnt it funny how they don't announce these facts at a 'developer conference'
 
grit said:
No you consent to having adverising if you are consuming the content of sites that use it as a way to pay their bills.

However to people such as you who have the attitude, of "fuck them i dont care". I guess there is no reasoning that can argue with that attitude. Do you you take the same attitude here regarding the server fund?
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Btw, I mute the volume on TV ads, too.

I hope that makes your fucking blood boil. ;)
 
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