UK antitrust regulators again denied permission to examine Safari dominance

Cloud games are restricted in the App Store

The UK antitrust case against Apple's control over the mobile browser market has been dismissed for a second time after an appeal tribunal upheld its original decision on the matter.

Apple has once again managed to avoid an investigation into its alleged anticompetitive practices regarding cloud gaming applications.

In November, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) declared that it would look into Apple and Google's control over the mobile browser market, with a specific emphasis on mobile gaming. The CMA aimed to investigate Apple's limitation of cloud gaming applications in the App Store.

However, the case was stopped before it ever got going. When Apple appealed the argument, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) agreed with Apple, saying, "it might well be said that the CMA erred in law" when it didn't take action after its June report.

According to Reuters, the CAT refused the CMA's appeal a second time, opting to uphold its original decision.

The CMA may choose to appeal against the tribunal's ruling directly in the Court of Appeal, though it is currently considering its options.

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4 Comments

sflocal

said about 11 months ago

Dooofus said:

Nothing to see here folks, move along. It's the same old story, people buy Apple products of their own free will. If there is something you don't like about their products, be it the mandatory WebKit-based browsers on iOS or anything else, you can buy products from another company.
Apple limits their platform to WebKit because it greatly reduces the number of browser-based attack vectors. Privacy and security are two of the main reasons Apple customers buy Apple products in the first place. It shocks me that so many miss the obvious.

The ones whining about it are not even Apple's customers. It's the developers that feel they should have free-reign to do as they please on a proprietary, closed platform. As a developer myself, I am embarrassed at the childish behavior these developers are exhibiting. If you don't like the rules, go play elsewhere. Android - with all the malware problems it has - is where they should be at.

Apple customers go into the iPhone ecosystem for everything these whiny-developers are against.

There's a reason Apple requires use of WebKit. There's a reason Apple's ecosystem has consistently been far more secure than anything Android can hope to have. It's not perfect, nothing is, but it's a much better place than what the competition has.

command_f

said about 11 months ago

sflocal said:
Apple customers go into the iPhone ecosystem for everything these whiny-developers are against.

Quite right.

And those that aren't informed or interested in the issues go into Apple's ecosystem and just get looked after. Isn't that their right?

EsquireCats

said about 11 months ago

This constant insistence that the customer is some stupid sheep that is tricked into a platform is irritating to the point of nausea. Informed people choose the platform to avoid historical computing hazards. Apple have done an excellent job of maintaining the advantages of personal computing, while isolating the overwhelming majority of security and scam vectors.

Annual malware reports provide irrefutable evidence that supports Apple's decisions for the browser-engine and the app store limitations, yet so frequently these realities and hard-learned lessons on security are hand-waved away as if they're not detrimental to computing.

iOS has the lowest share of malware of any platform, even less than the far less popular macOS. Top of the list is Android with more than 50% of malware, then Windows, then IoT devices, one needs to go to the very end of the list to find iOS, with the platform taking less than 1% of malware despite having a massive install base and a relatively wealthy average customer.

These efforts to crack-open Apple's user protections for the sake of utterly lazy and greedy developers is sickening; it's clear corruption to anyone that has an understanding of computing history and malware threats.