Steve Jobs: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010)

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1438188756738191362/photo/1

by ece • 5 years ago

395 248 5 years ago

tvanderb• 5 years ago

I really don't understand why it's such a big deal Apple wants to restrict people to use their payment system. It's their platform and they're a private company. Can't they just do whatever they want?

dheera• 5 years ago

They charge a 30% cut of payments and they just want their money.

bilekas2• 5 years ago

I believe they can.. but there's a fair use issue, I'm not sure if you can create a market and then just corner it.

There was a recent supreme Court ruling I believe that suggested Apple have to allow other payment options. But they are free to kick off whoever they want..

exit• 5 years ago

in general then, do you think anti-monopoly & consumer protection regulatory efforts should be thrown out?

advisedwang• 5 years ago

Because it's bad for consumers. We will end up paying more for these services if we allow these kinds of practices to continue. We will lose the ability to keep content we have bought if we move between services or don't want to keep up paying subscriptions.

Being a private company doesn't mean you just get to do whatever you want.

fshbbdssbbgdd2• 5 years ago

Just out of curiosity, would you also say it’s within Apple’s rights to tax a portion of all transactions on the phone, including:

1. purchases of physical goods on the Amazon app

2. food deliveries on Doordash

3. money transfers initiated through the Chase banking app?

If in future years all commerce moves to devices, Apple and Google have a duopoly, and they decide to tax the entire economy, is there any limiting principle? Or do they just get to take some % of GDP as profits? Is that a fair price for the contribution to society of getting to market first with smartphones and building a moat?

If there is a limit, then we should figure out what it is.

shoto_io2• 5 years ago

Why shouldn't they? It's their platform. People could just not code apps for the iPhone and consumers could use other devices. Couldn't they?

majormunky• 5 years ago

Credit card companies do this right now, except the money transfer one (maybe there do there also?)

wwtrv2• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, do you think it’s fair that I have to pay a share of the the item price when selling items on Amazon? What right does Doordash have to tax my restaurant just because I want to accept order using their app?

If, not at what point should we start regulating their prices? When they control 20%, 30%, 50% of their respective markets?

can16358p2• 5 years ago

I totally agree with you personally, but unfortunately the antitrust law doesn't work that way. It's your company and you've put years and millions (if not billions) hours of human work and created a system, and others start having rights on something that you've created privately. But unfortunately this is the case and telling this simple fact gets you downvoted to otherside of Earth on HN.

oaiey3• 5 years ago

The same arguments is true for apps. You put years in effort and then someone steals a significant part of your revenue.

Apps follow the AppStore law. Apple follows US law. And the later includes some social aspects like Anti-Trust laws, consumer rights, etc.

Companies exist in a nation. A nation serves its citizens. So when a company is treating the citizens bad, a nation has all the rights to enforce whatever is needed. Hence antitrust laws.

Hamuko5• 5 years ago

"It's their X and they're a private company. Can't they just do whatever they want?" sounds like a really shitty world to live in.

Imagine if your ISP could tax your data at different rates depending on where it originated from because "it's their copper and they're a private company", or if Nokia could charge Apple $1000 per device sold because "it's their patents and they're a private company". The latter example of course would have made it completely impossible for the iPhone to ever exist since Nokia could've just priced them beyond all reason.

czzr4• 5 years ago

Nokia can charge $1000, but then no one would license their patents - so they charge a price the market will bear, that maximises their profit.

Obviously the market can bear 30% for Apple. And this is actually unsurprising because the number used to be more like 50% when software was sold in physical stores.

You’re free to think that’s too much, of course, and refuse to pay it.

oaiey3• 5 years ago

They are not a "private company" in that sense. With their user segment, they form a market and the app store establishes a "legal" system. Basically their users are citizen of a Apple nation and whoever wants to make business with them, has to follow the "legal system".

Consider the free market system (as the economic system of the western world), where you have choice between offerings, then the Apple ecosystem is the exact opposite.

tengbretson• 5 years ago

Yeah! If they don't like it then maybe they should make their own smartphone.

Wait.

pulse7• 5 years ago

Apple operates within a country ("platform") and most follow the laws of the country ("platform rules"). Country laws are protecting consumers. So Apple can't do with their platform whatever they want... They could do so on a ship in the middle of the ocean - where no country laws apply - but then they wouldn't have so many customers there...

dariosalvi78• 5 years ago

The problem is that developers and companies are obliged to accept these practices because they control 50% of peoples' devices. It's not just a "private company" any longer, it has become a public infrastructure.

bilekas2• 5 years ago

That's interesting. But I don't understand exactly why it would violate their TOS by accessing a library of books.

Is it because they could be bought through the Kindle app on Android and then accessed on an iPhone? Thus bypassing the apple payment option? If that is the case it seems like a bit of a stretch.

Hamuko5• 5 years ago

As far as I understand it, it was possible to buy ebooks in the Kindle app around 2010 and they decided that it was no longer going to fly.

I don't actually understand what their intention was beyond a show of strength. If you pull the Kindle app, iPhones and iPads are now a worse platform for ebooks, and if you remove the ability to buy ebooks in the app, it just gives iPhone and iPad users a worse user experience. And obviously, as they stated themselves, Amazon was never going to actually adopt the 30% cut payment system.

mattnewton• 5 years ago

Pure conjecture on my part, but iBooks was probably thought to be competitive with the kindle and they thought that ebook customers could be served by their own platforms just as well, no large loss and lots of potential upside for apple.

paxys2• 5 years ago

The violation was being able to buy books from the Kindle iPhone app without using IAP.

From what I can gather from that exchange, Apple originally approved the IAP exception for Kindle under the assumption that buying eBooks on iPhone would be a very rare use case. After that Apple launched the iPad and their own books app, making Kindle a much more direct competitor. So they made Amazon follow the standard rules, which led to them removing the ability to buy books from the Kindle app altogether.

dkonofalski19• 5 years ago

This was before the iPad launched and right around the time that iPhone sales began to dwarf Kindle sales so you're close but not entirely correct.

jasode• 5 years ago

Is it because they could be bought through the Kindle app on Android and then accessed on an iPhone?

No, you got that backwards. According the email screenshots, the above scenario you wrote was actually "ok" with Apple and they allowed an exception for not using Apple payments: mostly buy a bunch of books on a non-Apple device and then later read them on the iPhone.

But Phil and Steve are complaining because Amazon commercials are showing how to do the opposite: buy books first on the iPhone to read elsewhere. Apple wants a cut of that because that bypasses the Apple Payments exception they had in mind.

ethbr04• 5 years ago

+ Minor point

Per the emails, that exception was originally granted because Amazon wanted users to be able to purchase books (into their Kindle account) on Kindles, but still be able to read them in Kindle-on-iOS.

At the time, this apparently seemed reasonable to Apple.

In the time between that and the email, Apple sold a ton of iPhones and iPads. Amazon did not sell an equal ton of Kindles.

Consequently, Apple looked at the deal as "You're getting value, based on a device count parity that no longer exists. So when you spit in our eye in an advertisement, we're going to alter the terms of our deal."

vishnugupta• 5 years ago

Is it because they could be bought through the Kindle app on Android and then accessed on an iPhone?

It's the other way round. Back then one could purchase books on Kindle iOS app going through Amazon's payment processor bypassing Apple's payment option. There was quite a big furore around this. After a few back and forth they reached a compromise of sorts where Amazon removed the book purchase flow from Kindle iOS app and Apple was OK with letting customers download and read books purchased outside of Apple ecosystem (through Android for example).

At one point, Apple took an extreme position of only allowing books purchased through their payment option to be read on Kindle iOS app. This was obvious not acceptable to Amazon.

post_break• 5 years ago

Don't forget Apple got caught red handed price fixing ebooks.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

Don’t forget Apple got caught red handed fixing engineers’ salaries by colluding with Google.

echelon2• 5 years ago

Call Apple what it is.

An evil, overpowered marketplace.

Anti-stallman, anti-web, anti-computing freedom, anti-engineer, anti-privacy, spy panopticon.

Poser.

zsmi• 5 years ago

To be fair, there were a number of defendants in that law suit. And they're probably just the ones that got caught.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

"The defendants are Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, all high-technology companies with a principal place of business in the San Francisco–Silicon Valley area of California."

moogleii• 5 years ago

That whole debacle was an interesting, if illegal, counter-attack against Amazon: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/apple-claiming-v...

The meat of it: "As Apple prepared to launch the iPad, it offered a deal to the six biggest publishers in the U.S. The publishers could set the retail prices of e-books sold by Apple, up to a cap of $14.99, and they would get seventy per cent of the sale price. But if any other retailer was selling a given e-book at a lower price than the one a publisher had set, Apple could match it."

Contrast that with Amazon which could set the retail price freely "often at or even below the original wholesale price. Amazon didn’t mind losing money on each sale, as long as the strategy helped sell Kindles and expand the e-book market."

mcphage3• 5 years ago

That definitely worked out best for us. We all win when Amazon is the only significant ebook seller. The justice department cementing Amazon’s business position was a good thing that happened.

twobitshifter3• 5 years ago

This is not a good look for Apple but par for the course for a ruthless company.

As an aside, it’s totally different seeing “Sent from my iPhone” when it’s Steve Jobs sending it from his iPhone.

echelon2• 5 years ago

Apple is a ruthless company.

We should stop personifying them and idolizing the products they make. Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.

It should terrify you that some of the best products on the market are owned by a company that wants to extract as much as it can from the rest of us. They're no different from Oracle, just with good products. It's a winning strategy, and they're now positioned to sink their claws deeper.

They've decimated the competition leaving you with a device that costs too much, isn't repairable, doesn't run untaxed software, and spies on you. The next moves will lock you down even harder.

Like seriously people. We're empowering "I have no mouth and want to scream". We're making it come true.

An Orwellian, Stallman-killing nightmare. The anti-web. In a posh, glossy finish.

czzr4• 5 years ago

Unlike Google and Facebook, say, Apple doesn’t have a strong network effect lock-in. If they stop making the best products they’re much easier to switch away from.

They have some weak network effects with iMessage (in some markets) and convenience around iPhotos, but nothing serious.

josho• 5 years ago

Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.

Brilliantly said. In the early days of MP3s I ripped all my CDs and refused to get that content locked into Microsoft's platform as I wanted control. Today I find myself so deeply tied to Apple's platform that I don't think I can get out.

I think we need the government to step in and require open APIs when a company is vertically integrated to allow competition in. E.g. you built the phone and the cloud service. Fine every cloud service app on the phone has to support an API that allows me to use the phone with a different vendor's cloud service. And we have precedent for this too, e.g. at one point I could only buy a landline phone from Bell, the gov. came along and told ATT they had to allow other companies to provide landline phones that would run on Bell's network.

My photos library is larger than disk space, so if I wanted to export photos out of the cloud I'd probably have to do it manually in stages. And I've lost my original MP3s somewhere along the line. Yikes.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Outside the USA , apple is not that much of a big deal. But it s interesting how disproportionately influential They became, because of their appeal to developers and technologists and their bubble

geniium• 5 years ago

Ouch, that sounds true and hurt

mcphage3• 5 years ago

We're empowering "I have no mouth and want to scream". We're making it come true.

I really don’t think Siri will ever be that effective.

mikeryan• 5 years ago

It’s very important to note that Apple isn’t doing something special to Amazon. They’re removing an exception that Amazon enjoyed that others did not.

It’s not that bad a look.

zchrykng3• 5 years ago

They should have gone the other direction. There is zero good arguments for why Apple deserves 30% of gross transactions for ebooks, music, movies, etc that are merely purchased on their customer's phones.

GeekyBear• 5 years ago

One of the interesting things to come out of the Fortnight trial was that Nintendo and Sony did not allow you to spend V-Bucks bought off of their platform (where they didn't take a cut), while Apple allowed it.

So there are more ruthless companies out there.

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

Console manufacturers are way more ruthless than even that. Sony locked your entire Fortnite account if you logged into it on PS4; and wouldn't let you even play with Xbox players. Even now, if you sell a cross-play game on PS4, and too many people buy microtransactions on Xbox, you owe Sony money.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 5 years ago

It's been amazing how fast they can burn so much goodwill.

Up until recently I was on the verge of switching from Pixel to iPhone. There's no way in hell I'm switching now.

granzymes• 5 years ago

An email chain from 2010 has an impact on what phone you want to buy?

johnnypangs• 5 years ago

How much better is Google? Sure you can buy kindle books on android but they have done many a shady practice. There is always pinephone :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

esalman• 5 years ago

I had fascination for Apple products until I tried to use Xcode for some development. That was back in 2010. I never tried again or bought an Apple product since. The idea of tying users down into a walled garden and control their behaviors through not only software but also hardware that they pay for doesn't sit well with me and this is not how technology should progress.

ignoramous• 5 years ago

Philip Schiller: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010)

ftfy

hitekker• 5 years ago

The second screenshot shows Steve saying "force them to use our far superior payment system" and the fourth one is him ordering his subordinate to make it so.

Hamuko5• 5 years ago

That part about the superior payment system cracks me up when we recently had this: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/02/each-twitter-super-foll...

The App Store does not allow for multiple instances of the same subscription, leading other platforms such as YouTube and Twitch to get around this by effectively allowing users to buy a sub-token that can be directed toward a specific creator.

Invictus0• 5 years ago

The title comes from the second image.

TradingPlaces• 5 years ago

This email is Mecha Jobs

ydnaclementine• 5 years ago

Want to do a mini PSA that you should (probably) read Steve Jobs' biography if you haven't, it makes posts like this much, much more interesting when you have a fuller background.

I wasn't a Steve Jobs fan so I never read it till recently. Still not a huge fan, but you can still see the tendrils of his influence that still affect today's world (adobe flash EOL last year, this stuff by not allowing you to buy books on the kindle/amazon app on iphone, continuing to control hardware and software experience). And you can see how it's gone (4 different ipads, etc)

ethbr04• 5 years ago

I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Jobs deserves all the credit that goes his way for killing Flash.

It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.

mrkramer2• 5 years ago

How many bugs Flash had? Hundreds? Thousands? Anybody knows?

yarcob• 5 years ago

Poor performance on Mac was also an issue. Web browsers on the Mac were held back by the fact that Adobes plugin was extremely slow on the Mac, and Adobe didn't care. Apple could write the fastest web browser in the world, but it wouldn't matter if Flash on the Mac had only a fraction of the performance of the Windows version.

It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.

0x456• 5 years ago

A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...

bityard• 5 years ago

Jobs deserves credit for a lot of the way things went in the computing world but I don't think "killing flash" is one of them. Apple and Flash only (publicly) crossed paths when the iPhone was released in 2007. Even then, Flash was widely disliked by users for a bunch of very good reasons:

* It was yet another thing to install. (Most non-tech-savvy users didn't know how to install a web browser, let alone a browser-specific plugin.) I was an "expert" computer user and I still had trouble getting it to work quite often.

* Flash apps were very resource-hungry on the slow machines at the time. Not quite as bad as Java, but still pretty bad. You had to wait for them to load, and when they consumed an outsize amount of CPU and memory compared to the value delivered.

* A lot of enterprise software started getting written in Flash (vSphere 6, anyone?). I feel bad for every IT department that had to put up with this. Of course, before and alongside that it was Java.

* The Flash runtime was a huge source of computer-pwning exploits. "Click to play" flash was a good idea but about a decade too late to make any difference.

No, Flash was never particularly well-liked by ANYONE except animators, web video game companies, and web ad companies. It was going to die eventually. Even if we were to accept "Jobs killed Flash" as true, that would make it one of his _least_ successful endeavors since Flash only went EOL this year, 14 years later!

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile.

Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was.

Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later.

As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.

I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.

dwild2• 5 years ago

It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.

The amount of zero-days zero-click remote code execution that came out of iOS on the past few months...

Zerodium had to stop buying zero-days for iOS last year, as they had too many of them.

I means I won't say that Adobe did a great job on security, just that it wasn't a good justification to kill the whole product.

Flash didn't get taken down because of security issue, but because of Jobs manipulative tactics.

fortran772• 5 years ago

But Jobs didn't kill it because of "security." He didn't like it because it allowed another way for people to write "applications" that could run on his phone, and a related issue of it being bad for battery life.

shrimpx3• 5 years ago

I spent half a day watching multiple Jobs interviews on YouTube and there is an interesting effect across these interviews: the interviewers sound dated in their assumptions, while Jobs sounds fresh and contemporary. Even though these interviews were 20-30 years ago.

One example is when Steve is being grilled about buying a “search engine company” called “Siri” and the surrounding rumors being certain that Apple obviously bought this search company to go to war with Google. Steve laughed and said “that’s not a search company, it’s an AI company.”

justapassenger3• 5 years ago

TBH, I wouldn't call Siri a search company nor an AI company. They were (and still are, a decade later) mediocre at both.

aborsy• 5 years ago

Can you send the link?

Siira• 5 years ago

So the boss “predicted” his future employee’s jobs. Well done, Jobs!

markstos• 5 years ago

What's the issue with four iPad models? iPads practically are the tablet market. Is four options too many?

There were dozens of different Android tablets at the peak. That didn't go well for any of the Android tablet vendors.

jeromegv• 5 years ago

I follow Apple news a lot and still get confused with the differences between each iPads nowadays. iPad Pro.. iPad Air.. iPad "normal". iPad mini is the only one easy to understand. Some models support Apple Pencil 1st gen... some models support Apple Pencil 2nd gen. WHYYYYYY? It should all be the same.

Which iPad support the smart keyboard? What about the "magic" keyboard?

LeoPanthera3• 5 years ago

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were better described. OK so there’s the “iPad” and “iPad Pro”, I guess I can figure that out, the Pro probably has better specs.

Then there’s the “mini”, which implies smaller, but is it a mini iPad or a mini iPad Pro? It turns out that it used to be a mini iPad, but today it is a mini iPad Pro. That’s confusing.

And also there’s an “iPad Air” - what the hell is that? The name implies it is thinner? Lighter? But it’s not either of those things. I have no idea.

The iPhones are just as bad, today you can buy an iPhone 13, 12, and 11. And there’s also an “SE” which doesn’t have a number and I have absolutely no idea why it’s different.

Jobs would be turning in his grave.

ecshafer• 5 years ago

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held...

What are you talking about? Apple is at 30% market share for tablets. That is a far cry from dominating the market.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 5 years ago

Steve was famous for brutally streamlining Apple's product offerings, and making it stupidly easy to understand the differences between product tiers.

I don't necessarily think four iPad offerings is too many, but I don't think Steve would've ever found it acceptable. He loved debuting with a single product, then adding a cheaper "mini," then eventually creating a holy trinity (mini/regular/pro), and leaving it that way forever.

duxup2• 5 years ago

IMO Flash was as big a mess as Steve said it was at the time and it was already time to move on from it. It was mess even on the desktop (if my browser crashed, it was almost always flash). Adobe let it get that way and there it was.

77pt77• 5 years ago

If you want really revealing information read the redacted security clearance investigation.

https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf

karaterobot3• 5 years ago

I don't understand this series of emails. Schiller is saying he noticed that Amazon ran an ad where someone bought books on iOS and then read them on an Android. Jobs' response is "let's force Amazon to use our payment system". But weren't they already using it in this case? How does Jobs' point follow from Schiller's example?

Schiller then brings up how there's a complementary ad in which an Android user buys books, then reads them on iOS. Jobs' point would make sense if that was the original example, but it wasn't brought up until after he'd responded. Weird. Maybe he was psychic? (j/k)

Another thing that doesn't make sense is Schiller's recommendation to ask Amazon to "get in compliance with the rules". It sounds like they were in compliance with the rules, because an exception had been made for them. It seems (from those emails only) like the issue was that Apple made an exception for Amazon they no longer wanted to abide by.

paxys2• 5 years ago

Apple made an exception for Amazon (to not have to use IAP for books purchased in the Kindle app).

Amazon released an ad showing how easy it was to move books between iOS and Android.

Apple didn't like this ad, so revoked the original exception.

Amazon removed the ability to purchase books from the Kindle app.

End result – experience is shittier for all users, but Apple gets a fraction of a percent more platform lock-in.

karaterobot3• 5 years ago

Thank you, but my question was more about the connection between email 1 and email 2 in that chain. Unless you're saying that Apple had already revoked the exception by the time these emails were sent?

bink• 5 years ago

It went both ways too. When Amazon got pissed at Apple they blocked Apple TVs from being sold on Amazon.

chrischen2• 5 years ago

Phil made it sound like he didn't like the ad, but the reason for the removal of the exception was that Amazon was advertising that people could buy books from their phones, clearly promoting the phone-first use case.

If you have any business understanding that you should understand that no business is a charity: neither Amazon nor Apple. Any money left on the table is just free money for the shareholders of another company.

They made the point that Apple devices were more popular than Kindle, implying that Amazon was basically using Apple devices for lead-gen for book sales without paying Apple their cut. Their original deal was that Kindle was supposed to be a device where you bought the books, and you could just read them through the phone app as a convenience. Since the primary use case shifted they began enforcing that fee.

This seems to be a consistent app store policy, however it's been spun over the years.

AnssiH• 5 years ago

But weren't they already using it in this case?

No, Amazon never used Apple's payment system for books.

blihp3• 5 years ago

You're missing the intent behind 'the rules': Apple gets a cut of everything on the platform. It's never really been a case of 'if you do X we get a cut and if you do Y and we don't'.... they've continually been trying to eliminate the possibility of Y at any real scale.[1] That's been a source of consternation for developers/media companies as Apple has shown time and time again a willingness to alter the rules to eliminate ways in which people could bypass paying Apple. The emails illustrate how they went about it in the early days. (i.e. we're not getting a cut? They're not playing by the rules... it has a very mafia vibe)

[1] The exception has been certain large companies that they viewed as strategic on the platform (at least for a time.) As soon as they weren't viewed as strategic, the rules tended to change.

pixiemaster• 5 years ago

Are C-Level Execs really down to that kind of operational detail level (watching a single Ad, etc)?

cheeze• 5 years ago

It sounds like he saw the ad on TV. Seems pretty normal to me?

purple_ferret• 5 years ago

It's amazing how 'crude' Jobs was. Perfect for chopping through the early 2000's technology frontier, but one has to wonder if he'd flounder in the modern environment.

duxup2• 5 years ago

His history indicates Steve was pretty flexible in his POV too over time too. Opinionated for sure, but adaptable.

wefarrell• 5 years ago

The FTC has been asleep at the wheel with tech companies in the 21st century and consumers have suffered as a result. Apple's locking consumers into their platform, Google's steering traffic towards its sites, Amazon's forcing its merchants to give them preferential treatment. These companies have too much power and we need a government who's willing to take bold steps to curb them.

ece• 5 years ago

Completely agree here. If you think the acquisitions have been the problem, splitting up those parts makes sense, primarily for Facebook, and possibly certain Amazon/Google/Apple acquisitions too. I think a separate Instagram, Waze, even Youtube, and PA Semi would all be successful on their own currently.

The other common problematic trait I'd say is some form of bad, lack of or preferential moderation with search results, misinformation, products, and apps. I think regulation like "American Innovation and Choice Online Act[1]” handles this well. If you want to be specific about Apple/Google, the OAMA[2] is good too IMO.

[1] https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...

[2] https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/8.11.21%20-%...

llampx• 5 years ago

Sometime after 9/11, the US realized that it was in their best interest to have American tech juggernauts, and if they hamstrung their own tech companies with antitrust and anti-competition laws, other countries (China) would not.

That was the end of antitrust enforcement on a larger scale for US companies.

refenestrator• 5 years ago

That's a backwards projection. In the early 2000s we were still blithely confident that China would just slot into a world order dominated by us. The end of history and all that.

The record was that the Bush administration came in and immediately dropped the MS antitrust case because they were 'pro-business'. I suspect GWB genuinely believed in all this.

CPLX• 5 years ago

That’s a claim that requires evidence. And either way you’re making a classic fallacy via the rational actor model, where you’re personifying the US and asserting that the US “realized” something.

A far more accurate take is that big business continued to consolidate money and power and successfully used political influence to neuter the regulatory agencies.

jasonhansel• 5 years ago

Alternatively: tech companies have used the fear of China to entrench their own power and avoid even the most reasonable forms of regulation.

bmitc• 5 years ago

I fully agree but the implication is that the government is still in control. However, it’s these companies that are in control. They have people (i.e., politicians, lobbyists, judges, and other appointments) embedded into the government to do their bidding. America has been obsessed with communism and socialism infiltrating America all the while corporations have been infiltrating to get us to the current state of affairs, that of a corporatocracy.

I honestly feel that capitalism and the love of the corporation is leading the slow death of the U.S. The only way to fix things is to completely remove conflicts of interests and self-benefits and actually enforce such rules, in addition to setting term limits and other such things. However, the people that need to pass such laws are the ones who currently benefit, so it’s not gonna happen.

It’s rather unbelievable that I, as a minion, have been previously strictly held to gifts less than a certain amount (literally a couple of tens of dollars) and reports of stock holdings, but yet, former head lawyers of corporations can be appointed to now oversee those corporations. It’s mind boggling how anyone thinks that could possibly work for anyone except the corporations.

imglorp• 5 years ago

Yep, cash, lots of cash. Your cash.

https://observer.com/2020/11/big-tech-2020-presidential-elec...

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...

m463• 5 years ago

Personally I would like to reign in all the smaller tech companies. Every device you buy nowadays requires a smartphone app, and they insert themselves into the equation, while doing a data grab.

yakz• 5 years ago

What would you prefer over an app for these devices, especially for those where providing an on-device UI would be too expensive or too limiting?

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

Every device you buy nowadays requires a smartphone app

I refuse to buy those devices.

bastardoperator• 5 years ago

I agree, but none of this happening until we curb lobbying and reform campaign finance laws.

CharlesW2• 5 years ago

Apple's locking consumers into their platform…

How do you mean that Apple users are "locked in" to Apple? I could move to Android tomorrow if I thought it was better for me.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

"What do you mean I'm locked into America, I can travel anywhere I want!"

barbarbar2• 5 years ago

Which government? It is a global problem.

hnfong• 5 years ago

What global problem? The largest tech companies are either US or Chinese companies. The Chinese government is starting to take a hard line on Chinese tech giants. It's only the US government who hasn't made a move yet.

First result on Google: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-...

For other countries, it's hard to regulate foreign companies especially if legislation can't be enforced, or in some cases, those foreign companies just threaten to leave the market. Only the EU has unquestionable power (i.e. market size) to make US companies comply, and they have made various legislation and rulings that limit the power of these tech giants (eg. GDPR).

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I guess it's a natural inertia facing a new wide paradigm. There will be evolution of the FTC for a digitalized society. (maybe)

sorenjan2• 5 years ago

Schiller comes across as needy and with a very low confidence in their own product. Some other company shows that their product works equally well on both Android and iPhone, and his response is that it's not fun to watch?

Also, this should be shown to everyone that says they prefer the Apple ecosystem because "it just works". You really can't get more user hostile than this, where you care more about extracting money from transactions that you're not a part of than making life easier for your paying customers.

Apple let Amazon sell books using their own payment system because Amazon sold a lot of books on their own Kindle platform that Apple wanted users to be able to read on iPhones, but as soon as Apple's platform was the biggest one they altered the deal to squeeze more money out of it. Like a monopoly would do.

jonny_eh3• 5 years ago

Exactly, this was all about leverage, not about the user.

azinman2• 5 years ago

his response is that it's not fun to watch

I read that in reference to it being easy to switch from an iPhone to an Android device.

sorenjan2• 5 years ago

Yes, me too. Is that all he thought it would take to switch? Wasn't Apple's offering good enough that such an insignificant action was all it took for him to get nervous about user flight? I get that he wants his users to be locked in as tightly as possible, but again, it comes across as very low confidence in their own product.

lern_too_spel• 5 years ago

Ironically, the experience of using the Kindle app on Android has been superior to the experience of using the Kindle app on iOS devices ever since this email thread.

Valkhyr3• 5 years ago

Frankly, anybody who thinks that Apple is out for anybody but themselves is living in a dream.

dev_tty01• 5 years ago

Please inform us of any for-profit publicly held companies that are not "out for themselves." Presumably by "themselves" you mean the stockholders. All companies are legally bound to make decisions to benefit the company. Apple is like every other company in this regard.

CharlesW2• 5 years ago

Schiller comes across as needy and with a very low confidence in their own product.

He was definitely neither in my experience, but in 2010 he is (justifiably?) paranoid about dependencies and competitors ganging up on them.

You probably don't remember this era, but here's a representative article from just a month before this email thread: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/microsoft-adobe-apple/

This kind of paranoia became part of Apple's DNA in the late 90s, when Microsoft asked Apple to "knife the baby"[1], when Adobe was threatening Apple with killing their Mac apps, etc.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Microsoft-Asked-Appl...

guiomie• 5 years ago

This twitter account is awesome! I thought this email between Steve Jobs and Adobe CEO was hilarious, the CEO of Adobe refers to his employee as 'population'.

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1407016788240576512

ajaimk• 5 years ago

These seem like reasonable arguments. An exception was made and times are changing.

grishka4• 5 years ago

It's unreasonable for Apple to assume they own a relationship they had no role whatsoever in establishing.

dkonofalski19• 5 years ago

That's exactly what they were debating. The entire point of this exchange was that the initial agreement was about Kindle customers using iOS devices. Once it changed to iPhone customers buying Kindle books, it absolutely was a relationship they established.

chmod775• 5 years ago

Yes.

They're good arguments, if your goal is to maximize user hostility and platform lock-in.

Valkhyr3• 5 years ago

Despicable.

nokya2• 5 years ago

Just curiosity: it seems SJ was including himself in cc to his own emails. Why was that?

I can only guess another email address, or some productivity technique to make sure he also had is own emails sorted in specific folders (i.e., not the "sent items")..

Anyone has the information?

93po• 5 years ago

The previous messages don't list recipients. Someone likely emailed SJ at both his personal and professional email at the same time and it just remained due to reply-all.

Rich and powerful people deliberately separate personal and work emails (e.g. Hillary Clinton). It helps create privacy, control, and legal protection.

nokya2• 5 years ago

Thanks. I see you included sarcasm but I can't tell up to which point ;)

Steve Jobs: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010)

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