The anti-monopoly case of itunes, the crime and punishment of closed ecology

Although Apple abandoned its monopoly on itunes a few years ago, the antitrust lawsuit that originated in 2005 will be heard this week. Consumers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple, accusing it of violating the federal antitrust law and the California Unfair Competition law, which requires ipod users to buy music only at the itunes Music Store. The plaintiff asked Apple to pay a total of USD 350 million to customers who purchased the ipod series portable players from September 12, 2006 to March 31, 2009. In addition, some of Mr. Jobs's e-mails will be presented to the court as evidence.

Although today's users have long been accustomed to Apple's closed ecosystems, even a lot of fruit powder think that the closed software ecology is Apple's charm, but through this lawsuit, we can see that Apple's closed ecosystem is not perfect, "monopoly", "abuse of dominance" is becoming the Achilles heel of Apple.

The cause of the event

The cause of the lawsuit stems from Apple's Fairplay digital rights management system. Apple has refused to authorize the system to other companies to prevent other companies from selling audio and video products to ipod users by bypassing Apple's itunes Music store. This angered Seattle's RealNetworks company, the developer of the famous RealPlayer player software on Windows, who sued Apple for it, but the lawsuit came to nothing after the company was acquired by Intel shortly thereafter. In addition, Mr. Jobs was concerned that the music match company was about to release its own digital music store platform and wanted to make sure it was unable to provide the ipod with a musical download service, according to Jobs ' mail.

The evidence suggests that Apple, the Steve Jobs era, has been trying to maintain the closed Apple Music Empire built by ipods and itunes. This is the same as Apple's "no see" for iphone and ipad jailbreak users today. Under pressure from all sides, Apple abandoned the Fairplay DRM copyright encryption for the music market in 2009, which makes it easy for us today to import the music files we already have into the ipod and iphone via our computer, Instead of having to buy it on itunes (I'm not encouraging to download piracy, of course, it's just a lot more convenient for users).

The crime of Monopoly

In fact, it's not hard to understand Apple's behavior today, which is essentially the same as buying iphone users using apps from Apple's App store. So why don't we just get used to the former? This is inseparable from the ipod's product attributes. The ipod is essentially a music player, and Apple doesn't have the ability to produce music, and the copyright of the music works is in the hands of a large number of music companies. Apple's itunes-sharing system has made some music companies feel unhappy, and Apple's power to distribute ipod music is entirely in its own hands, making it more than two old digital music distributors such as RealNetworks and music match.

The truth of this is not difficult to explain. In the days when CDs ruled the world of Music, Sony had also launched a number of best-selling CD music players, and Sony Music was one of the most copyrighted companies in the world. But even so, Sony has never moved to allow its own music players to play only the music records of Sony, everyone knows that such behavior will not be supported by users and other publishers, is a suicide. The reason why Apple dared to do so was that the ipod's performance in the market had significantly surpassed the traditional CD players, and in the history of the past there had never been a player with a popularity rate that reached the level of the ipod, The Apple ipod plus itunes model also gives it the ability and the wherewithal to monopolize the ipod music distribution channel.

However, Apple's decision to monopolize the entire ipod music market is inconsistent with the interests of the vast majority of users and music distributors. For the user, this means that the music in the CD that you purchased before, and the music products purchased on other platforms are not playable on the ipod, and repeat purchases are a waste; for music publishers, this means the future of Apple, which will dominate the negotiations, That's what they don't want to see. In addition, the incredible popularity of the ipod has led Apple to face a monopoly in the US antitrust sector and accusations of abuse of market dominance. These eventually led to a miscarriage of Apple's plan to monopolize the ipod music market.

Closed penalty

With the advent of smartphones, the ipod inevitably went into decline. Once popular ipod, now mostly hiding in the desk drawer to eat ash, Apple has long not updated the product line of the ipod, not long ago it is the ipod classic off the shelf, it seems that the ipod out of the market day is not far away. While the ipod has profoundly revolutionized the music market, it is ultimately just a portable player, and the decline of the ipod will be inevitable when alternative products, such as the iphone, are present.

The closed ecology in the circle of users, but also closed their imagination.