Apple: under pressure from their FTC for their practices

Apple’s latest limitations restricting access to their mobile platform are attracting the FTC’s attention, with the regulators looking to investigate the measures Apple has implemented and their relevance in open competition markets.

Its not yet official but the FTC appears to be at the point of launching an investigation against Apple for the measures implemented by the company which limits access to the iPhone OS mobile platforms from both developers and mobile advertising companies.

The main aspect of the investigation is Apples continual refusal to allow the Adobe Flash technology onto their devices and the obligation that developers use conversion tools that transform Flash applications to native iPhone formats.


The FTC and DoJ attacking on multiple fronts
Apples practices in regards to the music market may also be subject to investigation, although this time by the American Department of Justice. But these increased attacks don’t necessarily mean that Apple is wrong. Its more due to the fact that they are a large player that heavily influences markets, with their decisions playing a large role on how balanced, or unbalanced, markets can be

The FTC are also not fooled by Apple’s claims that they are looking to better the world by controlling access to their platform, as a positive result can benefit certain company’s to the detriment of others.

This is the case of the developer’s terms of agreement where access has to be given to analyse information collected for mobile advertising. In this young market there is a lot of fear about seeing a giant company take an almost stranglehold on the market, as this leads to great difficulties in developing smaller competitors.