The FTC has launched an investigation into Apple’s dealings with competing music streaming services in its App Store, according to multiple sources. The investigation is targeting Apple’s 30 percent fee charged to subscription services who sign up new users through the App Store. This has been a major point of conflict between Apple and rival music services as The Verge reported back in May.
The FTC’s inquiries have picked up over the recent weeks, on the heels of its initial investigation into whether Apple pressured labels to kill Spotify’s free streaming tier. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell The Verge that the FTC has already issued subpoenas to music streaming services as it gathers more information to determine whether Apple’s App Store rules are anticompetitive.
The sooner they crack open the App Store, the better.
They won’t as the problem the FTC is investigating is only about the 30% Apple cut for music streaming apps.
Worst case scenario for Apple is to forget the 30% for those apps and the worst worst case it to forget the 30% for all apps. Which would makes very little difference for Apple in fact.
Crooks investigating crooks? What a novelty.
Why would anybody have the legal right to crack open the App Store and who would it be better for if they did?
You don’t like the Apple App Store set up – fine – but to suggest that that someone should make it against the law is just ridiculous. What next? I don’t like the way Amazon Prime works – lets ban it. Microsoft Windows licensing structure annoys me – lets call the cops. You don’t have to buy Apple products, Apple does not have a monopoly in any product sector and Apple’s business model is not based on monopolistic manipulations of the market.
The App Store has actually delivered vast choice to hundreds of millions of people, a choice they obviously appreciate because App downloads are through the roof.
Please – this tendency to retreat into pompous pontification about what should and should not be suppressed through the legal system based on nothing more than your personal preferences it very, very tedious.
Nobody is suggesting this at all. Stop putting words into my mouth. I know you have a creepy obsession with making shit up, but please, it’s getting old.
Your statement implies that this will somehow impact the App Store as a whole. It won’t.
The FTC is investigating if the 30% revenue requirement of non-Apple music services is anti-competitive, not the App Store as a whole.
If the FTC does find it anti-competitive it would be limited to music as Apple does not dominate in any other market ( it’s profit dominance of said market segments does not count ).
It’s important to remember that Apple has a fraction of the global phone market and set top box market, a smaller fraction of the PC market, a trivial fraction of the server market, software market, book market, and so on an so forth. It’s really only dominant in music.
Incidentally at this point, Apple probably won’t be able to dominate any of these markets. If it did it would immediately face all sort of legal issues, similar to the ones Google is facing.
Edited 2015-07-24 17:42 UTC
Tony Swash,
Have you considered that the lack of choice will inflate the downloads as well? Seriously you can’t use app store downloads as a metric of appreciation when apple doesn’t give customers a choice to go elsewhere.
I think apple could still do well with some direct app store competition from other retail app stores, they’d just have to be more competitive. It is disappointing for consumers and app developers alike that such competition is being prohibited by apple.
Edited 2015-07-22 14:19 UTC
Is there a law in the US like Competition law similar to what our president currently signed:
http://www.philstar.com/business/2015/07/21/1479362/pnoy-oks-landma…
I think a law such as this will prevent Apple and other companies to monopoly. Example, if Apple has already earned large profit from their business, and yet offer and add services on top of their devices to directly compete with other small companies doing the same service. This act might be perceived early on as a healthy competition, but as we know this story about Apple’s music service, it is no longer the case. It is anti-competitive, wherein they will use their dominance to staple competition. So Apple’s music service needs to be stopped or at least play fair relative to other services.
“they will use their dominance”
But Apple is not dominant in this market (mobile phones/apps): Android is. Because such laws apply to a market as a whole and not to a random piece of a market which suits your point of view. With 80% worldwide market for Android, I think competition is quite healthy.
Would someone bother should this case happen on the Mac platform instead? I think not. But Apple has 8% market share in the PC market and less than 20% in the mobile phone market which is not that different.
But in this very specific case, I think the only real issue is not even the 30% cut because Spotify can already sell their subscription outside the app store on their web site without the Apple cut and then users can just login from the app.
The only point is that Apple prevent direct link to the external web site to appear in the app.
Apple does apply the usual rule to music streaming apps and the FTC is now investigating only because of Apple Music. So Apple may have to apply different rules for those apps in the future, but overall this is really a very minor competitive advantage for Apple.