The situation currently with both stores is a bit comparible with Microsoft during the internet explorer dominance.
The only way to resolve this is by splitting up playstore and iTunes store. Too much self interest from Google and apple is destroying these ecosystems for small businesses.
No. If you had to live through things back then you could see IE actively undermining the internet and making it MS specific. It wasn't like you use MS or you use an IBM OS or HP OS or something like that.
It was you use MS or piss off. There was no realistic Mac option for the masses due to horrible mismanagement. Linux just was not there yet to be perfectly frank. (Even though techies were over the moon because the slackware had XWindows! So now you could open multiple bash terminals to get your work done! See how usable it is!)
It ended up not mattering anyway. The courts kind of laughed the government out of the room. I'm pretty sure the best they got was a promise to let other browsers be installed. (Keep in mind, they were still going to pre-install IE, so nothing was going to change.) That was one of the biggest farcical scenes I'd witnessed in my lifetime. Equivalent of a slap on the hand. (Actually, maybe more like a tap.)
Microsoft got far more than "a slap on the hand", at least in the EU.
They were fined a total of $1.3bn for anti-competitive behaviour, which would have escalated up to $7.4bn if they hadn't stopped.
The two fines were:
- in 2004, EUR 497m ($611m) for restricting music player access, server APIs, etc, with remedies allowing competitors access to build interoperating products. That was the EU's largest fine ever against a single company.
- in 2013, EUR 561m ($731m) for "inadvertently" removing a browser choice screen in 2011 that had been added in 2010 as a condition of the previous remedy following a complaint by Opera in 2007.
That last fine was a firm warning to Microsoft to take anti-competition provisions seriously. If they hadn't changed, EU laws allowed a fine of up to 10% of global revenue, which would have been $7.4bn based on their 2012 turnover.
I'm sorry, by "government", I meant the American government's attempt to reign in MS. Not really familiar with the EU governmental structure or how antitrust works over there.
Over here, I stand by my assertion, it was a farce. Nothing happened to them. And they went on with business as usual.
All that said though, and not to be too negative on government or anything, but it doesn't sound like too much happened in the EU either. I mean, it took until 2004 for the EU to do anything? And, while I realize it sounds like a hefty fine, a browser choice screen did little to change the tech landscape. And it hurt MS very little to add back in a browser choice screen in 2011, many years into iPhone's Normandy invasion of the tech industry.
In fact, I'd argue that Apple, (along with maybe Amazon), has done more to reign in MS than the US or the EU governments. They're the ones who have changed the computing landscape to give us breathing room away from MS. It's what the government should have insisted on when MS first came under scrutiny. (At the same time of course, you could argue that they were right to do nothing. Because eventually, competition did what it was supposed to do and different sectors and services are now split off from MS.)
