From Ben Thompson's "The Cicilline Salvo" ($) posted Tuesday on Stratechery:
American Innovation and Choice Online Act: This bill, sponsored by Cicilline (D-RI) and co-sponsored by Lance Gooden (R-TX), bans covered platforms from giving an advantage to their own products, services, and lines of business over competitors; disadvantaging competing products, services, and lines of business; or discriminating between similarly situated business users. It further:
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- Bars any restrictions on interoperability that do not similarly apply to the platform owner
- Explicitly bans tying (i.e. conditioning the use of one product on use of another)
- Bans the use of data about the activities of third-party businesses to improve the platform’s own product
- Forbids the platform from restricting the right of third-party businesses to use their own data generated on the platform
- Requires platform owners to allow users to uninstall pre-installed applications and change defaults
- Bans anti-steering provisions (i.e. Spotify being able to tell iOS users to subscribe online or link to the web)
- Restricts the platform owner from treating the platform’s own products differently in search or rankings
- Restricts the platform owner from controlling a business user’s pricing
- Restricts the platform owner from limiting a business user’s interoperability
- Bans retaliation by the platform owner against any business user that raises concerns with regulators
The bill does provide a privacy exception: actions that violate the above provisions can be legal if the platform owner can prove they were necessary to preserve user privacy while being narrowly tailored, non-discriminatory, and nonpretextual.
My take: Thompson does a good job in the rest of the piece to distinguish between the bills that have a chance and those (like Representative Representative Pramila Jayapal's Ending Platform Monopolies Act) that don't. He writes:
I suspect that Cicilline’s goal is to stake out the most extreme position — the Jayapal bill — with the goal of getting his own bill passed as a compromise... Certainly the tech industry would be right to push back against not only Jayapal’s bill but also Jeffries anti-acquisition bill; I explained in First, Do No Harm why a blanket ban on acquisitions would be so destructive to the Silicon Valley ecosystem and consumer welfare.
IMO, Apple can just develop its own apps and take the financial hit on its services revenue. In exchange, all the complaining IOS developers can also take the financial hit of being happy with not having a 15-30% taken off of ZERO revenue. Developers, your choice.
Those that may be “advantaged” would be subscription-based apps because of ease of transaction vs monthly or annual costs VS the cumulative in-app purchase costs that could be considerably more for impulsive or frequent buyers.
Hmmm…go rogue. Maybe fly a pirate flag high above the Cupertino spaceship.
Sound familiar everyone?
Bars…
Explicitly bans…
Bans…
Forbids…
Requires…
Bans…
Restricts…
Restricts…
Restricts…
Bans…
That this App Store has been such a wonderful marketplace of creation, broad reward and utility, is it in real need of any of this?
And if so, who “benefits”?
Smells more of sour grapes. You certainly don’t see the consumer end of it crying out for such.
Reference my comments to Bart Yee. Your words above are exactly my feelings. There are over 1 billion Apple users. I say the vast majority of us would gladly trade the existing Apple App Store for a closed software & hardware system with Apple developing its own apps with existing employees & through contracting with Developers willing to work with Apple in developing apps. This approach retains my secured and zen-like Wall Garden experience which is the reason I switched many years ago to Apple from Windows.
“…protect the rights of other developers…”
???
It’s a contract that developers have agreed to. Let’s not misconstrue. Soon there’ll be plenty of that to go around from all sides.