In France, the Competition council stated that it was illegal for Orange to be
the sole distributor of the iPhone. If I recall correctly, the complaint was
issued by Bouygues Telecom, whose CEO, incidentally, is a close friend of
Nicolas Sarkozy. The consequence was a sharp increase in the overall number of
sold iPhones.
There no official complaint whatsoever in France as for the way apps are
distributed to the iPhone. After all, the iPhone is not in a position of
dominance in the market of mobile phones, or even smartphones. It only has set
some trends. In my opinion, Apple has the same right to govern the distribution
channels for the very devices is sells, much like it has the right to bind the
sale of Mac OS X to the sale of a Macintosh. It is their own product in both
cases, and neither is in a position of such dominance that it can be a threat
to competition.
As far as I can tell, the commercialization of the iPhone has resulted in an
overall increase of "smartphones" at the expense of traditional mobile phones.
So, in the point of view of the EU, it is not a threat to competition, and, if
I understand the US rules, it has been beneficial to the consumer, so, even if
Apple had a position of dominance, it would not be illegal by US rules (is that
right?)
I my opinion, much more questionable is the way Apple manipulates the market of
NAND memory chips, but this is not a high profile issue.
Best regards,
François
Le 30 mai 2010 à 11:06, Mark Schonewille a écrit :
> Ian and Mark,
>
> I expect the European Commission to "discover" that keeping competitors' apps
> out of the app store (e.g. http://qurl.tk/be ) solely because they're
> competitors' apps is illegal, but that may take another decade. Whether the
> EC will recognise Apple's "technical" reasons to block Flash apps as
> artificial and hence illegal remains to be seen, but usually the EC is
> stricter than the US authorities when it comes to keeping the market
> competitive. In Europe, once you buy an iPhone, you can do with it whatever
> you like as long as you don't violate national laws. You're free to violate
> Apple's license conditions, but that means Apple can deny access to the App
> store (for now).
>
> --
> Best regards,
>
> Mark Schonewille
>
> Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
> Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
>
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> On 30 mei 2010, at 10:53, Ian Wood wrote:
>>
>> The App Store is the only public distribution channel for Apple's mobile
>> devices, outside the enterprise market there's no way to 'sideload' apps
>> other than HTML5 webapps.
>>
>> Maybe nuts, but there doesn't appear to be anything illegal about it.
>>
>> Ian
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