Is the App Store a monopoly?
One columnist has made the statement that the Apple App Store represents an evil monopoly and now it seems that everyone else is climbing on the bandwagon to let the world sell iPhone apps.
David Coursey is very clear in his rhetoric. To hear him tell it, the iTunes store and Apple App Store are the biggest and most evil monopolies since Standard Oil, and are doing irreparable damage to legions of poor consumers. If one stops to consider the question objectively, however, it is difficult to see where there is any reason to single out Apple and the App Store, as Coursey does in his column. Here’s are Coursey’s points, in a nutshell:
1. It is not in the best interest of customers for Apple to exercise such tight control over apps and music for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
2. Anyone could do as good a job as Apple is in managing the app and music provision business.
3. Apple has not published an open API for iTunes, so that iTunes does not support all of the other music player, like the Zune.Coursey, having begun the controversy with the use of incendiary words like “evil,” “whether Apple likes it or not,” and “monopoly”, finally softens his views at the end of his column. In the end, deflating his earlier rhetoric, he says that he’s certainly not suggesting wrongdoing, and that he hates to ask this question, but he just had to. Okay, I’ll take the column at face value.
But if one is going to start defending customers against monopolies, perhaps one could do better with taking on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Palm, RIM, and Apple for the proprietary, monopolistic deals on smartphones. Those are really keeping prices high. Or perhaps the obvious monopoly and attendant abuse heaped on consumers by the RIAA, rather than the superior technology and marketing offered by the iTunes music store.
As for the speculation that anyone could manage the music download business as well as Apple has with the iTunes store, look at all of the competition that has fallen by the wayside in that arena. Maybe we should let Microsoft do it, since they have such a great track record. Heck, maybe we should let the RIAA run the online music download business! That would be just great for consumers!
As for Apple not publishing an open API for iTunes, where is the open API for all of the other apps and net software, and for all the proprietary hardware on the market? A lot of people are trying to make money in this business. If what one is worried about is the open-source aspect of things, well, get an Android phone with a generic music player and play only mp3’s on it. That’s as close as it’s going to get, and the odds are that none of that software will be truly open source.
Apple is doing what for-profit business do. And it is doing it very well. I would rather have the high quality and leading edge products offered by Apple, and pay their prices wile operating under their rules, than pay the huge prices charged by big pharma, as another example. It’s no different than buying from Microsoft, really. You knew the rules going in. If one is going to campaign against evil, one should at least select an evil target.
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