Why is the EU fighting iTunes?
So this whole EU vs iTunes thing is hopefully winding it’s way down. The whole thing though strikes me as a lot of posturing and politics w/out any real caring about the “people.” Ostensibly the EU complains about the lockin that happens when you buy and iPod and iTunes and buy music from the iTunes music store. With Apple’s closed ecosystem, once you buy in you are, or so goes the theory, locked into it. And it’s true to an extent. But if all this is being done on behalf of the consumer, why are they not fighting against DRM directly? They are complaining that FairPlay isn’t open enough, but that’s just a symptom. The cause is that there has to be DRM in the first place. DRM is anti-thetical to consumer rights - it restricts their ability to use the media they are buying, it makes companies waste time and resources developing and evolving DRM to combat the constant cracking of said DRM, a cost that I am sure is passed quietly along to the consumer.
With all this, though, I also started wondering if I was just knee jerk defending Apple. Is this different than the bundling involved when MS was tieing IE directly into the OS? And happily, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is. In the MS case the consumer had no choice, IE was bundled and could not be removed. In this case, no one is requiring that people use iTunes or buy iPods or buy music from Apple. You can buy a mac and never even look sideways at an iPod. Phew.
March 16th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
They’re not fighting against DRM because DRM is an anti-piracy measure and you just gotta have something in place against those nasty pirates. ;-p FairPlay is fair game because they don’t understand why Apple doesn’t want to make it available to other companies to use. Hell, Apple can make money by licensing it! More money! What’s the problem? =p
And while the difference between Windows/IE and iPod/iTunes is as you say, I think the overall effect is similar though. Path of least resistance. People used IE cause it was there and it worked fine for the most part. iTunes, while not exactly bundled with every iPod, is pretty much THE de facto way to organize and download content with the iPod, so naturally people don’t have too much of a choice but to download and use it. If you’re saying MS/IE was worse because because you couldn’t remove it, sure, but you didn’t have to use it either. In some ways the iPod/iTunes tie-in is more restrictive than the MS/IE one because IE was just another browser. I could browse the web just fine without it for the most part (except for those stupid IE-only/ActiveX sites). Without iTunes, what can you do with an iPod? How do you get your music and videos onto it? There probably is some way to do it but for the average consumer, it’s just easier to use iTunes.
Not that I’m complaining, I happen to like iTunes and iPod (c’mon widescreen iPod!) but I’m just sayin’.