“The European Union intends to tighten the standards regulating the digital economy,” Leonid Bershidsky writes for Bloomberg View. “Even as internet companies change their terms of service to comply with privacy regulations that take effect next month, the European Commission published the draft of new rules governing the interaction of online platforms such as Amazon, Apple and Google with the businesses that sell through them.”
Bershidsky writes, “The proposed regulations, which aim to increase transparency and fairness, are overdue but far from sufficient.”
“Businesses are at the platforms’ mercy,” Bershidsky writes. “A marketplace owner, for example, can launch a competing product and sell it on more favorable terms than outside vendors. That’s what Spotify says Apple is doing by claiming a share of its monthly subscription fees. In return, the streaming music service sells the subscription at a higher price to iPhone users, which makes Spotify’s product more expensive than Apple Music — the platform’s own offering. In a brief sent to the European Commission last year, Spotify called for ‘imposing heightened obligations in cases where the platform operator competes downstream on the platform against its own business users.'”
“The EU would be justified in prohibiting companies that function as intermediaries from running services that compete with those of outside vendors,” Bershidsky writes. “This would mean requiring Apple to spin off Apple Music and perhaps even all of its app and content business. Google would have to get rid of its shopping-comparison engine, which earned an almost $3 billion fine last year, and all similar products (for example, for airline tickets) that compete with anything that comes up in its ‘organic’ search results. Amazon might need to spin off Marketplace (and offer its products on it on the same terms as other sellers).”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck with all that, m’kay?
As per Spotify and Apple’s App Store:
Once again, these are Apple’s platforms, built from the ground up. Apple owns them. Hence, Apple can charge what they like for the use of their App Store infrastructure. Anyone who doesn’t like it, including Spotify, can go to other smartphone platforms, including one with 82.6% market share as measured by units shipped which — drumroll, please — neatly negates any and all imperiously vapid antitrust claims of Apple having a “monopoly” in smartphones. — MacDailyNews, July 15, 2016
SEE ALSO:
EU proposes to regulate tech giants’ business practices following Spotify’s complaint against Apple – April 26, 2018
Apple’s App Store anti-competitive? Spotify and Elizabeth Warren think so – July 15, 2016
Elizabeth Warren accuses Apple of monopolistic-like actions; Spotify concurs – June 29, 2016
From the article:
“This would mean requiring Apple to spin off Apple Music and perhaps even [******]all of its app[******] and content business.”
…
“It could only benefit consumers”
So splitting software from hardware so the company does not control the whole widget could only help consumers. This idiot is so profoundly stupid and communist, and so profoundly does not understand Apple and reasons for its success and advancing technological arts, his and bloomberg’s stupidity in advancing such a spectacularly and infinitely dense stupid idea has collectively brought down earth’s average IQ by half. Idiots.
Yes the iOS customer should have the choice to get Apps, music, services from Apple.
Other purveyors of these things should not be forced to do business with Apple.
This protects the iOS customer. Your life need not change at all.
This is exactly why anti-trust law exists.
They need to relax the overly regulated world they live in and maybe they’d have their own Apple, Amazon, and Google.
… ain’t that the truth!
Every sane computer user prefers to know who is compiling dossiers on them. They want to know when the virtual thugs are tracking them. They want guarantee of privacy and security. They want the addressee of the message to be the only one to have access to it.
Damn good thing the EU has consumer protection. It’s clear the feckless US govt has been owned by corporations so long that they don’t know what a citizen is. “The American People” means dumbass consumer sheep to be fleeced. As long as there are at least two global corporations to pick your pockets, aint that freedom?
I’ve long said Apple’s behavior is worse than MS’s during the anti-trust days.
Each downvote this is certainly going to get is an admission that M should have sold all Windows software exclusively through it’s own store, and had the right to choose which third party software existed for the PC. They did own the OS after all….
Google… time to declare them as either a monopoly or public utility, and regulate them accordingly.
Amazon… Tim to be investigated.
To all you stockholders out there, your right to make money does not take precedence over peoples other rights.
Good for EU. BTW, ‘rein’ in.
It’s REIN IN, not REIGN IN. Oh, what difference does it make anymore! — everyone seems to think indifferent.
Imagine what it’s going to be like years from now. I remember hearing a story/joke about how the language used by presidents of Apple’s home country has declined, from Abe Lincoln who’s Gettysburg adress is at the top high school level, dropping down to Kennedy who spoke about a grade 10 level, Nixxon who was at a grade 8 level and dropping below high school is the shrub at a grade six. Now there is a chump that tweets covfefe. Ironically you can use the word but folks aren’t sure about their meaning, but I can’t use certain words that I’ve coins because people know exactly what their meaning in.
There are few cunning linguistics and free thinkers left. Look for the barrage of insults thrown at them by the fearful populace, usually a good way to spot them.
Have a good one, don’t let the which hunters cast a poor spell and make for a reiny day, might lead to some collision, uh collusion.
Tongue in cheek of course.
Whose, not who’s.. Funny, Nixon went to Whittier College. <:—( Dubya attended Yale and HBS. <:-) Trump got his BS at Wharton. <:-\ One might expect better language skills from Ivy-leaguers! Yet Honest Abe was self-educated, and wrote his own speeches. Go figure, eh?