India Refuses to Let Apple Pause App Store Antitrust Case

Apple should have put the foot down in Europe while they had the chance. Suspending services for just a few hours would have caused enough outcry from the public that the clueless politicians would have backed off.

It’s worth remembering that the public didn’t ask for regulations; greedy corporations did, under the guise that it would lower consumer prices. Of course that was a boldfaced lie, like trickle down economics. In reality, corporations just wanted higher profits, despite already making millions off Apple’s hardware, infrastructure, and customers.

Now everyone and their goat wants to force arbitrary regulations on Apple (and Google). What’s going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

probably gets censored for this but India has a terrible reputation for enforcing legal standards regarding industrial planning and zoning laws, pollution, labor welfare and rights, only standards they have are double standards, this is just a shakedown for cold hard cash worthy of the Mafia or Yakuza, if I were Apple I'd get out of there fast

Total opposite is happening. 👇

India is one of Apple's most important growth markets. Counterpoint Research puts the company's iPhone market share there at 9%, up from just 4% two years ago. Apple has also been ramping up iPhone manufacturing in the country through Foxconn and Tata as it reduces its dependence on China.

So pretty much the world hates a-Inc’s App Store policy.
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These governments are like Burger King and want it their way, user experience be damned. I can’t imagine how Apple with a 7% market is dominant. It must be a really fragmented market in India for Apple to hold a dominate position at 7%.

Hope Apple prevails in some way. Maybe Apple should just leave India as the handwriting is in the wall. India doesn’t need Apple plants or jobs and Apple has china.

There is a lot of legal complexity here about regulations of what governments are perceiving as infrastructure. I'll not address that. I will mention, however, that global regulators are on their way to breaking the underlying tech of iOS and Android.

By forcing Apple and Google to comply with dozens of uncoordinated regional laws (EU’s DMA, Japan, South Korea, India), we are heading toward geographical OS fragmentation. We have some of that already, but this can turn into a major headache for developers and users. A few of the issues are this:
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* The developers lose uniformity across countries. Instead of "write once, run anywhere," engineering teams now have to spend hundreds of hours building, geo-fencing, and maintaining region-specific codebases to handle different local fee structures and APIs.
* There can be user experience issues. The "it just works" seamlessness dies when our phone's features change or apps break because we cross a physical border or change our region settings. We have some of this already, but it's an issue for people who travel regularly. Smartphones are way more ubiquitous than laptops with regional/locale rules. There are also privacy implications here.
* There are security issues. Maintaining dozens of different regional forks of an operating system creates more room for bugs and zero-day vulnerabilities. Developers will need to restrict their apps to a certain location or deal with the added overhead of all this.

So part of what's happening is we are headed away from the global uniformity that made smartphones particularly useful in the first place. We are now moving toward a place where governments (ostensibly trying to "free" the market in their region) are creating digital borders on what's otherwise a borderless ecosystem. The web and smartphones have been great democratic equalizers (not really using that in the political sense), allowing global access. It looks like much of that is at risk with regional regulations.

Whatever people think about potential regulations like this, I hope everyone can recognize that we are headed towards something different from what we've had for years. It's unclear if it's going to be better.

Apple should have put the foot down in Europe while they had the chance. Suspending services for just a few hours would have caused enough outcry from the public that the clueless politicians would have backed off.

It’s worth remembering that the public didn’t ask for regulations; greedy corporations did, under the guise that it would lower consumer prices. Of course that was a boldfaced lie, like trickle down economics. In reality, corporations just wanted higher profits, despite already making millions off Apple’s hardware, infrastructure, and customers.

Now everyone and their goat wants to force arbitrary regulations on Apple (and Google). What’s going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

Yes people want these regulations. Force apple to remove all barriers, split services into a different entity, force apis to be accessible by any third party, etc.
If Apple is not happy about the rules we set, they can just leave and write off 20% of their profit. And our wallets will be much better off that way.