Sen. Elizabeth Warren took shots at Apple, Google and Amazon during a speech in Washington today, claiming Silicon Valley’s big fish are making it impossible for the small fry to compete.
“The opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors,” said Warren. During her rant against Apple, the senator specifically mentioned the unfair advantages Apple Music enjoys against its competitors.
After the speech, Spotify rallied behind Warren with some Apple bashing of its own.
“Apple has long used its control of iOS to squash competition in music, driving up the prices of its competitors, inappropriately forbidding us from telling our customers about lower prices, and giving itself unfair advantages across its platform through everything from the lock screen to Siri,” Spotify’s communication director Jonathan Prince told Recode.
With the release of iOS 10, Apple is giving some money back to subscription services like Spotify by lowering its traditional 30 percent revenue cut down to 15 percent if a customer maintains a subscriber for 12 months.
But Apple is certainly still using its giant cash reserves, and its strong industry connections, to make exclusive deals that boost Apple Music, its streaming music service that has attracted half as many paid users as Spotify in just a year.
That kind of muscle makes it easy for big tech companies to dominate various industries.
“Google, Apple and Amazon have created disruptive technologies that changed the world, and … they deserve to be highly profitable and successful,” Warren said. “But the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again.”
During her speech, Warren complained about how Google uses its search engine to harm rivals of its Google Plus user review feature. Amazon, meanwhile, uses its popular platform to steer customers toward books it has published to the detriment of other publishers, according to the senator.
The speech also mentioned Walmart and Comcast. However, Facebook was left off Warren’s naughty list, even though it’s doing a great job crushing the media industry.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
8 responses to “Spotify and Elizabeth Warren tag-team for some Apple bashing”
Waaaah wahhh!! Help me big government, out big rich company is mad at the other big rich company, and we need the big rich government to help us over them!
More like wannabe big rich company is mad because they’re not the biggest player in music streaming anymore, so ironically, they have to do whatever it takes to stifle competition if they want to be profitable.
You’re going to lose so bad in this election.
I’m not going to lose anything. I don’t have a candidate in the race. They’re both big government liberals and I’m not voting for either of them.
Warren lost all credibility on calling out copprate greed when she endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Really? Just like that, it’s all washed away? She must be devastated.
I see their point – but…
a) iOS is not an open platform like Android so they can’t expect to use Apple’s infrastructure, operating system and services for free. All developers give Apple a cut – I see no reason why streaming should be an exception.
b) Spotify is also treating customers unfair since they raised their subsciption prices for iOS to avoid paying the cut to Apple and instead forcing that onto their customers. Sorry but that’s not OK.
c) You can always buy subscription via their website, and every iOS device has a browser.
d) However, i do see their point – but that’s not Apple’s fault. There are simply no regulations…
Elizabeth Warren is a ok with me and will make a snazzy VP come January. But it’s weird that she singles out Spotify as being the target of unfair business practices by Apple when they have at least twice as many paid subscribers. It seems like she was referring to the 30% cut they take from App Store downloads but that’s just Apple’s cut for being allowed to sell on their official platform. Are they supposed to take less just because they have a competing service? If you take games out of the equation, that’s probably true of 80% of the apps. If you don’t want to pay $3 extra for Spotify, download from the website.