Tag: Editorials

The U.S. Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general – including California’s – last week filed a far-reaching and dubious antitrust lawsuit against Apple accusing it of monopolizing smartphone markets. The legal action is less an indictment of Apple’s business practices and more of an indictment of the Biden administration’s anti-business philosophy – and its ignorance of how the market economy functions and benefits consumers.

“Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers,” the feds allege in a statement last week summarizing its legal complaint. The government accuses one of the tech industry’s most innovative companies of stifling innovation. The first obvious point is our government doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “monopoly.”

The iPhone has a 60-percent market share in the United States, which hardly makes it a monopoly. Across the globe, Android phones have a much higher share, approximately 70 percent. A monopoly suggests that a company has total control of a commodity or service – not a dominant share. For comparison’s sake, Harley Davidson controls 50 percent of the above-600cc motorcycle market in the United States, but buyers can still choose from dozens of other brands.

Specifically, the complaint claims that Apple charges too high of a price to app developers for access to their Apple App Store. It says Apple blocks companies that offer apps that can be used on other types of smartphones, blocks mobile cloud-streaming services, excludes cross-platform messaging, limits the functionality of non-Apple smartwatches and halts third-party payment processes (digital wallets). As a result, the lawsuit alleges, this harms competition.

But how does this differ from how any business operates? “When I walk into Target, I know I’m going to be presented with a finite number of products that Target bigwigs somewhere have approved for sale,” explains Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown. “Not just anyone can walk into Target and start selling their own stuff. Nor are rival retailers like Walmart or Kohl’s able to set up shop within Target stores.”

That’s exactly right. Apple has every right to determine who sells what products on its device. If it allows payment systems that don’t conform to its security standards, it will upset consumers and undermine the trustworthiness of its iPhones. If it allows its store to be inundated with trashy apps, then its consumers will lose confidence in its system. Consumers have myriad choices in smartphones, so there’s no governmental interest here.

The next time a city of Los Angeles public official or homeless-bureaucracy staffer gets the urge to say something, or write something, or pass a law about something related to the decades-long tragedy of homelessness on their streets, they need to stifle the urge.

Stop talking, writing, passing laws. Instead, do something. Anything.

Or, take the few successful physical manifestations of projects that in fact do something about homelessness, and replicate them. Go check out the Eagle Rock Tiny Home Village that opened two years ago with 48 8-by-8 prefab houses that provide beds every night to 93 people, many of whom used to live in tents on the sidewalk just down the block on Figueroa Street at the 134 Freeway underpass. The houses were built on a little-used former parking lot owned by Los Angeles County, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks and Southern California Edison. It’s not fancy. But it’s working.

Last week, a little-seen report on the city’s much-vaunted homelessness enforcement policy aimed at getting people off the streets and into shelter was leaked. It claims the city “has failed in key goals to keep areas clear of encampments and get people housed,” as LAist reports. The policy is known in bureaucratese as 41.18, a city ordinance that allows council members themselves to designate areas in their district where unhoused people can’t camp.

The race to replace Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, in the 30th Congressional District — which stretches from west Pasadena to the Miracle Mile — as the longtime congressman steps down to seek a Senate seat is a contest in which the candidates must strive for name recognition, and campaign dollars, from vastly different constituencies who don’t necessarily know their records or even who they are.

People who live near LACMA mostly do not know from a La Canada Flintridge-area legislator, just as the Glendale voters have little reason to know much about a former Los Angeles city attorney or an LAUSD school board member.

But after reviewing the records and the campaigns of all the candidates for the seat in this wide-open race, and speaking to many of them, we are pleased to endorse the candidacy of the one who does happen to be a Los Angeles school board member, lawyer and former teacher Nick Melvoin.

A registered Democrat in a district that skews heavily Democratic, but probably the most truly moderate candidate in the running, and the one elected who just has experience at the schools level rather than in Sacramento or in a local city hall, Melvoin explained to us that he actually sees that as a plus.

“I’ve just spent seven years on the L.A. school board, so I know something about dysfunction,” Melvoin said, with a half-laugh. That’s because his support of adding charter schools into the education mix and pushing for fiscal discipline over teacher union demands has put him at odds with some colleagues. “And I don’t know that we want to promote someone who has been working in Sacramento for years.” Melvoin said that he actually thinks he has the advantage over other candidates who have been state legislators in a one-party Capitol, since they have never had to compromise, whereas he often has, and will be able to work across the aisle with Republicans, who currently are the majority in the House of Representatives

Melvoin notes that he is by far the youngest of the candidates seen as having a chance to win the race. “I am 38,” he said, “and we are the first generation of Americans ever to generally feel that we will have opportunities less promising than our parents have. But unlike some who have gone into despair over that, I am using my work in politics to be practical and get things done.”

Melvoin says that his agenda includes making investments in affordable housing for working families and for mental health and workforce training support for those who are unhoused. He wants to see “fewer regulations for small businesses,” and wants more “investment in their resilience,” key points that most California Democrats fail to highlight as important issues.