There never was a browser monopoly on Windows just a bunch of tech illiterates who don't seem bothered by MS's "monopoly" with notepad.exe or anti-competitive moves like taking away the ability to use an alternate graphical shell.
Only one popular consumer OS has prevented the installation of alternate browsers and everyone looks the other way.
I'm not entirely interested in relitigating a past I literally lived through.
On the other hand, it is objectively true that there is only one browser platform for iOS. WebKit or nothing. If they actually supported chrome or Firefox instead of requiring them to be wrappers on webkit renderers, I would not have this complaint.
Of course, the reason this isnt being taken up by anti-trust folks is that iOS doesn't dominate the market the way windows did. So: i guess the answer is to convince my users to stop buying idevices. Whee.
Of course, the reason this isnt being taken up by anti-trust folks is that iOS doesn't dominate the market the way windows did. So: i guess the answer is to convince my users to stop buying idevices. Whee.
No. Monopolies themselves aren't illegal, especially when they're natural monopolies.
It is illegal for a company to use its monopoly to stifle competition in other, unrelated markets.
The classic case is Microsoft using its monopoly in operating systems when Windows had 95% marketshare in the emerging browser market. Remember that Microsoft threatened to cancel HP and Compaq’s Windows licenses if they continued to ship Netscape Navigator instead of IE. That's illegal.
It's not illegal to have a rules and guidelines for a platform a particular company owns. Game consoles are way more restrictive than the iOS App Store and nobody is suing them.
If I really wanted to, I could have built another browser using PNaCl and run it and distributed it on ChromeOS even before it supported Android apps where users trivially have access to other browsers. That remains impossible on iDevices to this day.
If you can't see the difference, you are only deceiving yourself.
> Only one popular consumer OS has prevented the installation of alternate browsers and everyone looks the other way.
iOS doesn't prevent the installation of alternate browsers. It prevents alternate browsers from running their own HTML renderer. Preventing alternate browsers might be legally actionable if Apple had a monopoly; preventing alternate HTML renderers is decidedly not.
Only one popular consumer OS has prevented the installation of alternate browsers and everyone looks the other way.