Apple Anti-Trust (was Apples actual response to the Flash issue)

[Sarah Reichelt]

> Like a few others on this list I am now pretty convinced that the PC market
> is about to be dramatically overtaken by the new mobile market in terms of
> sales and new software developments. Apple and others will be quite happy to
> leave the desktop market to the web and to open source strategies - they
> simply will not be interested in closing this market - let Google have it.
> They (ie Apple and others) clearly want to dominate the mobile market in the
> way that Microsoft succeeded to with the 1990's desktop market.

I completely agree with this assessment.


> Regulators and commentators are now wise to those tricks and will kick up a
> fuss early if they see moves like this coming - there are a lot of people
> and governments who want to keep these new markets open, and global
> networked markets do not stay open by themselves - they can and have decayed
> into monopolies, and mathematical models clearly show this to be an inherent
> property of free markets in certain situations - we don't need a conspiracy
> theory to explain it.
>
> It is not unreasonable to view this as an early stage in the battle between
> two different types of mobile market place, one closed and dominated by a
> single proprietary player and the other open. I think regulators would only
> be doing their Job (pun intended) to take a closer look at this - better
> early than late given how long these things take to go through the courts
> and how fast this market is going to move.

It is important to remember that there is nothing illegal about having
a monopoly. But as Microsoft showed, it is possible to use the power
that a monopoly gives, to perform illegal acts.
This is a distinction that is ignored by most bloggers, but I would
hope that the denizens of this list are more intelligent than that.

Regards,
Sarah