U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal, Marsha Blackburn, and Amy Klobuchar crack down on Apple and Google by introducing the Open Markets Act. This new bipartisan, antitrust legislation acts on its own accord to prevent the dominance of Google and Apple over the App Store market. This act by the Senators came in after a realization that the heavily oligopolized apps store industry would come to see no end as one half of phone users run on Google’s Android Operating System while the other half runs on Apple’s macOS operating system. With the companies controlling the operating systems, they also control what their store are used by these phones and therefore the entire mobile application developers market. This was termed by the three senators as the Gate Keeper control which was rendering the development of the developer industry to be halted.
The introduction of the bill revolves around creating a guide with crystal clear implementable rules on the play store market. The bill identifies that any company that controls a play store with more than 50 million users would not have developers use their own purchase systems and would be allowing the developers to spread their applications on other play stores as well. For Apple, this means that they would now have to allow users with the means to download and install applications from sources outside of the Apple Store. This would also mean an option to provide the choice to the users for a default app over their own play stores as well.
The bill also protects the developers if there is any action that acts in to negative for them on distributing apps through a second source. It also applied to the giants to provide the developers with operating system interfaces, development information, and hardware and software features.
Not only that Senator Blumenthal went on to state that this bill would break down the hold of these big organizations and allow the competitiveness of the digital market to return. It would also pay as a reminder to these organizations that they might lack behind if they do not keep up with the standards of the industry. The Senator went on to say that the behavior exhibited by these companies is predatory in nature and offended him on many different levels.
These changes are a result of the 16 month antitrust investigation going on on the huge digital firms. Apple in light of the act took to media to highlight that their play store secures the application and delivers it in a safe method to the users across the globe and that is only done by rigorous guidelines privacy policies.
Read next: Somebody’s Watching You: 6 Tips to Stop Being Tracked Online
The introduction of the bill revolves around creating a guide with crystal clear implementable rules on the play store market. The bill identifies that any company that controls a play store with more than 50 million users would not have developers use their own purchase systems and would be allowing the developers to spread their applications on other play stores as well. For Apple, this means that they would now have to allow users with the means to download and install applications from sources outside of the Apple Store. This would also mean an option to provide the choice to the users for a default app over their own play stores as well.
The bill also protects the developers if there is any action that acts in to negative for them on distributing apps through a second source. It also applied to the giants to provide the developers with operating system interfaces, development information, and hardware and software features.
Not only that Senator Blumenthal went on to state that this bill would break down the hold of these big organizations and allow the competitiveness of the digital market to return. It would also pay as a reminder to these organizations that they might lack behind if they do not keep up with the standards of the industry. The Senator went on to say that the behavior exhibited by these companies is predatory in nature and offended him on many different levels.
These changes are a result of the 16 month antitrust investigation going on on the huge digital firms. Apple in light of the act took to media to highlight that their play store secures the application and delivers it in a safe method to the users across the globe and that is only done by rigorous guidelines privacy policies.
Read next: Somebody’s Watching You: 6 Tips to Stop Being Tracked Online
