YouSaid · the spoken record

Horacio Gutierrez

lines on the record: 59
first: 2021-06-01
most recent: 2021-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think you've seen companies from every slice of the technology industry come out, you've seen media companies come out, you've seen a number of companies come out. I think this is irreversible. I think the calls for sound but effective regulation are unstoppable. And I think a couple of years from now, there will be strong pieces of legislation as well as law enforcement and competition law enforcement decisions that will begin the process of laying the foundations for how competition in technology markets should be conducted in the future.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they bought beach music, rebranded it, and launched it at $9.99. So now they were undercutting us in price because we had to pay them the 30%. So at that point, it was inevitable. We had no choice. We had to take the IAP down and we didn't in compliance with the rules. What did they do? They changed the rules the month after toteractively make the step that we had taken a violation of the rules. And since then, they've amended the rules two more times in ways that give them ever-expanding powers to basically control the way in which we run our business. Look, the facts speak for themselves, whatever you think about Apple as a company and the history of Apple, I have a lot of respect for it. I actually have a lot of respect for a number of friends that I know who work for Apple and very loyal Apple employees, but you have to call out the areas in which...”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we're, you know, obviously if we can avoid having to pay the Apple tax, we will do it. We will create ways consistent with the law and consistent with sound business practices that would allow us to create that. We thought we did that in 2016 when we took Apple's in a payment system down. We did it. One of the first things we did when I joined Spotify was actually look at the rules, the app developer guidelines. And it was, I think, section 311 at the time. And we spent weeks looking at that rule. And all it required for us was not to have a buy button on the app for subscriptions. All we had to do was not to have an explicit link to an external payment side. So we took down IAP and the reason we took it down is when I joined Spotify, we were in this situation where they had forced us to increase our consumer prices to 1299 per month.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you also know that we've announced that the rollout of paid podcast opportunities, I think tomorrow begins actually the rollout of the program. So in terms of podcast monetization, the ability of podcasters to be able to monetize on our platform by having their direct subscription and payment relationship with users. That is something that we have announced. So we are trying to create those opportunities and we're trying to actually learn from Apple's mistakes and trying not to replicate them in the way we run our business.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I won't say that we will never offer it. I think it is hard because of the set of rules that Apple has, but I can't comment on what might or might not be in the product roadmap. And there is nothing intrinsically related to tipping that would cause us not to consider it if we can make it work from a technology and economic perspective. And some of that means trying to figure out these app store rules and some of it is making sure that the market is there for that. So we are looking for different ways in which we can create monetization avenue for creators. And, you know, when we have something to say about that, we'll come out and announce it.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because now there are tools that they can benefit from where in some respects they don't need some of those terms. So I take exception to the comparison. I know it's very easy to say, well, these people are a platform. You guys are saying you want to be a two-sided platform. Ergo, you're equally bad as somebody else who's behaving badly, but that's not a real comparison.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, nobody's provided more data transparency in the music industry than we have. We created Spotify for artists. We provided it to artists for free. They get the ability to get real-time data on how their music is performing. We actually added transparency in an area that was really characterized by tremendous opacity when it comes to data. And this data is incredibly valuable. It's data that we are able to pull together because we have this incredibly large user base and we have the technology tools to create it. So we are providing that data to artists and the feedback that we get from artists is incredibly positive when it comes to that. We are allowing artists to find audiences that would have been very hard for them to find, including artists that have chosen to be independent and that are not signed by one of the major”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, I just have to tell you what this sort of moral equivalence between what Apple has done with the App Store and Spotify and some other platform, I just think is not based on fact. We would be equivalent to Apple if we told artists and labels that they couldn't be on the Spotify platform unless they paid us rather than we pay them. They paid us 30% of all the revenue that gets generated and we get to promote certain artists that we pick over somebody else and we get to make it super hard for artists to be able to find an audience on the platform. If we did all those things, then the parallels that you're trying to draw.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm asking these questions because I see your relationship with Apple somewhat mirrored by the relationship creators might have with Spotify. So beyond music, right, Spotify's large position in podcasting. You've bought a number of companies, Gimlet, the Ringer, Anchor, Megaphone. Megaphone is like the central player in the podcast ecosystem. Our show is distributed on Megaphone. This is great synergy for you. You're going to talk on decoder and then Megaphone is going to distribute it. But gives you a huge amount of data insight into the podcast industry that almost no one else can get, right? And then you could use that to inform programming decisions. I could take that, abstract that out and say, okay, that's the criticism of Amazon, right? And if I was an EU regulator looking at a law like the DMA, I might say, well, Megaphone is a gatekeeper. Do you feel that pressure as well?”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A tremendous number of artists, international artists, you look at K-pop, you look at all these Latin crossover and things that are now popular because we've created this large audience of globally minded users that are willing to experience it. And we've developed personalization and discovery tools that expose people to music in ways that the radio model of music marketing would have never been able to allow. We're very proud of that. And we'll continue to change and learn and try new things. And we'll also continue to add transparency to the way the economics of the music streaming world work because we believe that the value of our contribution is not necessarily completely obvious for some people. talk about it and understand the economic structure of the industry for people to get it.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Belgian hip hop scene. And, you know, I'm not kidding about it. You go to the Netherlands and places like that. These are things that have been enabled because the barriers to entry into the market and to achieve global distributions have been dismantled because of the streaming business model and technology. And we've now have over 300 million users that are listening to music that is being monetized and that is benefiting the creators of music and the organizations that represent them. So look, it's a constant negotiation. Everyone always wants a little bit more, you know, their slides to be a little bit bigger, but the reality is when you look at the economic situation of the music industry today, the industry is much better. You're seeing a tremendous explosion of creativity.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number of artists. And when you're talking about independent artists, the growth of independent artists on our platforms have been remarkable. There are some of the artists that benefited the most from the music streaming infrastructure. In 2020 alone, there were 76,000 artists that were added to Spotify playlists for the first time. And the large majority of these were discovered because they were pitching music through our playlist pitching tool. Last year, 57,000 artists represent 90% of the monthly streams on Spotify. So essentially the bottom of what used to be the bottom of the pyramid has actually moved up and there's a much larger number of artists that are now being streamed. Artists are able to find niche audiences that were not available to them before. You look at the”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, listen, the reality is when you look at the numbers of artists that are making it, what streaming has done and what technology in general has done is that there were some bottlenecks in the music industry before. You really had to be discovered by a label or create your own label, which was really the exception rather than the rule. And then you had to sign these deals. And then there was only a small percentage of artists every year. They had to be marketed through radio and you had to truck the vinyl records to the record stores and things like that. What the internet has done is really eliminated a lot of the friction and a lot of the cost associated with both creating and then distributing and marketing music. And what that has created is a world in which they're now an increase.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I think I talk about this with every executive from a service that distributes culture, whether it's Fimeo or Instagram or you from Spotify. If you're an artist, if you're an artist in the 70s or 80s, you could spend like two years in the studio and then release your record, sell a lot of copies of your record, and that would make all of your money for you. If you're an artist now, your music is actually devalued because of streaming and widespread access. And you're on tour all the time. Right. And so I hear the idea that you would grow the whole pie, but I think the average indie artist is saying, how do I negotiate with Spotify? I don't have a label. I don't have a publishing organization. I'm just trying to make money as a musician.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm happy to talk about that because it is not the same dynamic. The reality is 80% of the content on our platform is provided essentially by three or four content suppliers, four labels if you think about it, the three majors plus one company that because of their share we treat as majors. These companies, as I said, they control 80% of the content that gets streamed, the musical content that gets streamed on our platform. These companies have tremendous leverage.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to take one more break, but when we come back, I'll ask Coracio about the criticisms of Apple compared to the criticisms we hear about Spotify today. Okay, we're back with decoder Flip this around on you. You mentioned apples a two trillion dollar company. Spotify is up against Apple. That's two orders of magnitude bigger than Spotify. Spotify, though, is a $45 billion company. I just looked up your market cap. We hear a lot from musicians. There's a musicians union that's very mad at Spotify all the time that your rates are too low, that deal making with labels is opaque, that you'll cut deals with big artists and labels, but you won't negotiate with smaller ones. Do you feel competitive pressure as Spotify to make better deals with artists and labels? I feel like we had the whole first half of this conversation, and I could turn it around from the artist's perspective and level many of the same critiques at Spotify.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With companies that are two trillion dollar companies with a global footprint, how do you equip those regulators with tools that can bring about a fair and effective result in a shorter amount of time as opposed to, like you said, a case against Google lasting 10 years, you know, we filed our complaint two years ago. They announced the opening of an investigation a year ago. Only recently they issued a preliminary finding in the form of a statement of objections. We're still a number of years away from a decision. And we will prosecute that case until the end. But the fact that you have to wait in the best of cases, five to ten years to resolution tells you that currently the antitrust enforcement tools are not really up to the challenge of protecting The competitive process in the face of this massive online platforms”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From everyone. That's not a world that we want to live in. And the problem with trying to address the modern technology competition challenges with the pre-existing tools is that there's a risk of it becoming like an archaeological expedition. It's like, you know, there's regulators trying to dig out the bones of a dinosaur and then pondering whether it was another dinosaur or a meteorite that killed it. By the time that that happens, it's ancient history that there would be scores of technology startups and innovative companies that would have been essentially extinct by that time. So how do you equip competition enforcers with the tools that they need considering they're facing this enormous information asymmetries, they're dealing”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“problems that the technology industry has today is the fact that trust to a certain extent has been lost with users because there's so many things there. And having a set of minimum standards in terms of how user data is used is something that we think would build and restore that trust. But turning to the digital markets act, look at the end of the day, the reality is that unless there is a new, more effective set of rules that take into account the complexity and the magnitude of these companies and the economic impact that they have and that can actually bring about a resolution in a timely fashion, you know, we're going to be in trouble. We're going to end up in a world in which a couple of companies are going to control most of the user data and most of internet commerce and they're going to essentially accept”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, as the person who was responsible as Spotify for ensuring we were compliant with GDPR and who had to persuade our CEO that we needed to dedicate dozens and dozens of engineers for almost a couple of years to build the systems, I sort of can definitely attest to how hard it was to get to a point where we feel we're compliant with it. But I would disagree that it didn't achieve anything. I think the GDPR, you know, we can always find things that should work better or could criticize, but the realities become the standard by which we measure user data protection practices and has really elevated the significance of this issue and made sure that companies were prioritizing it and as painful as it is and was for us to be able to comply with it and it's an ongoing job that we have to do every day you know we actually think it's worth it you know one of the biggest things that”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned the word gatekeepers earlier, which I'm guessing is a reference to the proposed digital markets act in Europe. That law would basically lay out a set of rules by which dominant platforms would be classified as gatekeepers, and then they would have to do a bunch of things around interoperability. There would be prohibitions against self-preferencing their own services. A lot of the themes that you and I have talked about. The last big EU regulation was the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. I have a vantage point in the United States. You know, I don't see it. Spotify is obviously based in Europe. You probably feel it a lot more directly than I do. But I see the GDPR created a lot of compliance costs, a lot of I accept buttons on the web, maybe not in more privacy. As you think about the DMA, what do you think its opportunities are and where do you think it will needs to be beefed up?”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That outcome. What you have to do is create the environment for competition and then see if the market decides. And again, these companies are very innovative and a lot of what they do is legitimate. And frankly, the more competition there is, the more they will invest in innovation and the better their products will be. That is the virtual cycle that you want to create.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I also think that sometimes the problem you're trying to solve, the evidence of it being solved is not necessarily going to be market share. You know, there's many reasons why a company might have reached a high market share based on completely legitimate pro-competitive reasons because they have a really good product. I'm not saying about a particular case. So the measure cannot be has the market share come down. That is the wrong way to judge these cases. The measure needs to be are you creating space for competition? Are you creating space for market to compete? But it's incumbent upon the competitors to have products that are good enough, innovative enough and economically attractive enough to actually go and challenge for market share a particular product. And I don't know that you can burden one or a set of antitrust decisions with creators.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but the problem in Europe is that Google has 90% market share and then eight companies have a slice of 10%. One of those companies is Microsoft, which is not hurting for money, and their interventions have not changed that number in 10 years. So it might be a targeted remedy.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Draconian remedies, you and I would be having a completely different conversation today. I think what you're seeing is the result of regulators that are trying to grapple with the economic implications of these things and trying to tailor remedies that solve the core of the problem without creating all of the collateral damage that we would decry.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're right, there have been sort of a little bit of trial and error, especially when it comes to remedies. I think when you look at the cases in Europe, you may think that the particular approach that they took to try to remedy the anti-competitive behavior and try to restore market conditions, in some cases were not effective. In other cases, they were somewhat effective. In some cases, they might have been effective, especially when you're talking about mergers and some structural remedies and things like that. But, you know, trying to balance an effective remedy that doesn't overshoot the mark and create more harm is very hard. So there is a learning process. There is a trial and error process. And sometimes these cases take long because the rights of defense of the companies involved want to be respected. So if they were shooting from the hip and they were imposing drugs.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had Senator Amy Klobachar in the show a few weeks ago. She gave me the long history of American antitrust law. And certainly Europe imported a lot of that and then the US diverged. I take that point. But I look at the EU approach over the past 10 years and I see a lot of direct interventions in how products work in an effort to introduce competition. They introduced a browser ballot on Windows. They broke apart Chrome and searched from Android. There's now a search ballot in Android. The EU has been chasing after Google for a decade and they have not managed to create the conditions for there to be a meaningful competitor to search. Is any of this working? Like that's the question I have. In the United States, we've done nothing in Google's the dominant search engine. In Europe, they've done a lot of things in Google's the dominant search engine. Is there another way forward that actually creates competition?”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue to improve technology, including incentives for Apple to continue to improve their products, needs to be protected and needs to be there. But it isn't an either-or thing. It isn't an all or nothing thing. We're talking about surgical things that go after specific decisions Apple made for self-serving purposes that we think can and should be reversed. We're not talking about taking away Apple's well-earned right to enjoy the fruits of their labor and their innovation and the great products that they've created.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DOJ you can tell that there is a we are witnessing another step in the evolution of our policy when it comes to these things which is normal considering that we're facing this unprecedented technological revolution with mobile computing and these platforms achieving a level of success and influence over every aspect of the economy that not even standard oil or AT&T had at their time. I mean, these platforms affect every aspect of our lives to an extent that not even the Windows operating system did 20 years ago or AT&T or any of these other companies. So these are unprecedented challenges that requires thoughtful thinking through. And by the way, we are not advocates of some radical set of rules. We are super sensitive to the fact that the incentive to continue to innovate, to”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things. But in many respects, while you could say the sources of the legal philosophy and the legal history of the two systems has been slightly different, they're more similar than they're different. And I think right now what we're reacting to is the fact that over the last decade or so, there has been little enforcement in the US when it comes to this unilateral conduct cases, which in Europe are called abuse of dominance. Part of that is there's a series of case law that has really created a very differential sort of approach in which it is super hard for the Department of Justice or the FTC or somebody else to bring cases, but that's just a moment in history. If you listen to the policy debates that's happening right now on Capitol Hill and universities, if you look at the people who are leading this work in the FTC and”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, when I think of antitrust policy in the US, I really think you have to take a broad lens and look at the long history of antitrust enforcement. People say, well, you know, we have a more Darwinian mindset when it comes to competition. And so it's a more or less affair thing. But the reality is, you know, antitrust law was created in this country. And at some times the US has been at the forefront of that and in some kind, you know, there's a kind of a pendulum swing that it goes to the appetite of governments to take certain cases on it. You see the Microsoft case was the last one that went through the appeals process, but now you see the DOJ, even during the last administration, file cases against other technology companies. And the EU likewise has tried a number of things and it's developed their own set of cases and their own line of”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Horacio Gutierrez, Chief Legal Officer at Spotify. So let's talk about the US and the EU. We are living through what a handful of very smart people have told me is like a natural A-B test in regulatory policy. The United States has a very deregulatory approach. Our antitrust policy is based in something called consumer welfare, which is very focused on pricing effects. That means we've done virtually no regulation at all. The EU has antitrust policy based on ensuring competition, which means those regulators are very active in ensuring competition. They do a lot of things all of the time. How do you see those approaches playing out right now? And do you worry that one of the promises of the internet is kind of this immediate global market access? Do you worry that as those approaches splinter, that the power of the internet market is going to shrink over time?”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some aspect of this, and then there'll be other cases that we'll solve. Other aspects of this for some other industries, if we lose, it will just strengthen the calls for legislative reform, because if we lose, it is because the current antitrust legal system hasn't kept up to speed with internet economy and the power that these gatekeeper companies can have on a global perspective. So one way or the other, there are going to be changes. There is a realization that in the US it's remarkably bipartisan that these online platform companies are just too powerful, that self-regulation has not worked and is not going to work because the economic incentives of these platform companies are just too strong and that the government needs to step in and needs to take steps to restore competition. As has happened in the history in the U.S.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you telling me would I hold out the solution to the problem in one industry until the problem for all industries were solved? Look, it's a hypothetical, I would tell you, I'll take the win, which doesn't mean the battle's over. Doesn't mean the discussion is over. The reality is you look at each and every one of these cases independently, the epic litigation, the Spotify case, or all these things. I'm actually convinced that whether any one of those cases is won or lost is less important than the fact that now this is a topic that's in the forefront of the minds of policymakers and regulators around the world. I actually think that what has started is irreversible. And there is no outcome in the EPIC case or in our case that is going to change the direction of this. If we win, then we'll solve.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In areas where they really didn't have a position before. They're doing it just because they have the power to do it, just because they can. That is something that in the long run is going to help everyone. It is not the market economy system that we want to have in this country and that other countries want to have. And it is not right. At the end of the day, consumers benefit when they can without all these hurdles and friction and artificial things, they can enjoy all the perks of the latest and greatest innovations.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is at that point the incentive to innovate, the incentive to continue to improve your product goes away, prices rise, and that hurts consumers. I know that that sounds like something that might happen in the future, but there is evidence in history of what happened there. When Apple was the only game in town with iTunes and download before music streaming rose because of the things we did and then other companies did later, the reality is it wasn't great. It wasn't great for music labels. It wasn't great for a number of other companies because you are negotiating with what one single player who has all the cards and who has all the control. Competition is good competition ensures there is a pipeline of exciting innovative products. It keeps companies on their toes. So when a company with this amount of power decides that they're going to forbid competition,”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clubhouse or another company to come up with new audio streaming scenarios that weren't there before. Everyone benefits when there's an environment where companies have an incentive to try to think of things that haven't been thought through before. The problem we have right now on how I explain it is you essentially have the world of mobile devices which have become the primary way in which people access the internet and conduct internet commerce and all those things that's controlled essentially by two companies. Two companies that are not only the platform, but also competitors downstream in some of those areas. And consumers know what happens when there's no competition and when there's only one company that's left. We've experienced that in broadband services. We've experienced that in a number of other areas in our lives and in our lifetime. And we know that what happens.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, and I know that that's sometimes hard for consumers to envision it. They're not in this world and they just are judging the reality by the products that they have in front of them. But the reality is that fair competition and open competition is really a prerequisite for more innovation, for new products that will exist a year down the road that don't exist today. It is super hard to say what they are because that's why it's called innovation. Somebody has to invent these things and develop them. But the problem fundamentally and the way I explain it to my relatives and to my friends and to my high school classmates is to say that consumers also enjoy the fact that they have choice, that the fact that there is a thriving competitive environment between different music streaming services that are trying to do new things, that you're allowing a company like a”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is the equivalent of Nilay, you telling people your user base is US and certain parts of Europe, and you're voluntarily going to stop distributing your content on half the world. Essentially threatening with actually taking a step that's going to be suicidal from a business perspective. It's like saying, well, yeah, you can go ahead and sell in Europe, but the US is, you can't touch the U.S., you can't get into the market. There is no reason why a platform provider that's supposed to be a neutral platform provider like Apple would be allowed to create conditions that would force companies like ours to have to make that choice. They say, well, but we built it. Yeah, you built it. But when you built it, it wasn't like that. And it was significantly built on the backs of the work of many app developers that came to the App Store that you touted as the reason why people should come and use your platform. And by the way, whether you built it or not, it really doesn't matter from an antitrust perspective. The railroad companies built railroads and the...”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could use this one that has PayPal as the service technology provider will be 30% cheaper. Let users decide why can't users make that choice based on the information that is transparently provided to them. That's the concern. The market is not operating. So people assume, well, it's always been like that. You kind of knew what the rules were when you came in and that's when I stopped them and I say, well, no, that is not historically correct. It wasn't always like that. It wasn't like that when we joined the App Store. Those rules were bolted onto the system later on by Apple once they knew they had a position where people had no choice but to accept the terms that Apple would impose unilaterally.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, if app developers have the choice of offering more than one payment system, they would decide which one is better for their products and then users ultimately would decide whether they want to use those services or not. So yeah, the decision on which payment systems to incorporate would be left to the apps and the users then will decide which apps they trust. That's the way it has always worked. That's the way it works on most other platforms outside of the mobile operating system device that is actually the way that it should work so that there's real competition. But developers don't have that choice. Developers can't even tell, even if you had a system in which you said, well, you have to offer Apple payment systems as a choice, but you can tell users there are others. And by the way, here's a price difference. You can go with the Apple in-app purchasing system that your product will be 30% more expensive.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that market is really complicated, right? Because the market for payment processing service is not consumers. It's app developers. But the market for privacy and security is consumers. So how do you connect those two markets such that you're saying to regular people, we're investing all of this stuff in keeping you safe, which is Apple's argument, and you're saying to Spotify and Epic and whoever else, our technology solution is better such that it's worth more money than PayPal.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, let me take issue with your premise. The issue is not whether the rate is 30 or 15 or 10. The issue is that the rate is arbitrary and they get to set it unilaterally because they've insulated themselves from competition. What should happen is if Apple should be able to charge 30 or 50%, if they can convince users in a market economy that the value that they provide justifies the 30% or the 15% or the 15%. What we're saying is they actually prevent competitors from coming in and offering alternative payment systems. And therefore, there is no market. There is a monopoly on payment systems, which is why they can afford to impose the 30%. Let the market decide. Enable PayPal and MasterCard and other new payment systems to come in and then let users.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of dollars that they generate from selling devices like iPhones and iPads to keep users safe. That's where the bulk of the revenue comes, having users' data be protected and users be secure is one of the selling point of those devices, of the notion that all of a sudden they would stop investing in privacy and security protections if they didn't have the 30% tax that they imposed on the apps or is just ridiculous and it really defies credulity.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly the point that I was trying to make, which is the connection between the need to charge 30% of all revenues generated by apps that compete with Apple's for the most part in perpetuity, 30% forever of the subscription revenue that is generated. How does that in any way connect to the desire to keep users data protected to keep them secure? If there is a connection, why then they only charge the 30%, mostly to digital content and gaming applications and not to Walmart or Facebook or Uber or other things like that. It's a completely arbitrary construct and it is not justified by privacy security. Let me just say, by the way, Apple should have enough of a powerful incentive in the billion”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But how can it be indispensable for them to do all those things in order to protect privacy and security when they don't even apply those rules to a number of other apps that are on the App Store? If it was that essential, there's really a disconnect between the explanations that they're trying to give and the reality. The other thing that struck me is how disingenuous it is that they would say that nobody's ever looked at the economics of the app store. Nobody's even asked the question how much money does the app store make. I mean, you're talking about tens of billions of dollars of revenue based on the estimates that are out there. This is not like the budget line for your printer toner at Apple. This is a huge sum of revenue. And I think it defies credulity for Apple to say they're not doing this for the money and don't even, they haven't even asked how much money they're making there. So there's another.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, just a couple of things. Obviously, when we filed our case, we didn't have the benefit of going through discovery of a number of documents on internal email that really opened the curtains on the way that Apple was thinking about these things. So there's a lot of very interesting internal communications that really reveal the way Apple executives were thinking about the App Store and the imposition of the Apple's payment system and their intent to lock in users and things like that. So obviously in that sense, the trial has been very revealing. The other thing is, you know, it's remarkable how little we learned about Apple's explanation for these things. They continue to go back to the same protectual explanations for why they do what they do. They continue to say, well, we have to protect the privacy and security of our users. And that's why we have to charge 30% and have all these other restrictions.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you have laid out this case in the EU. You filed a complaint. Obviously, we were talking just a couple days after the epic trial has wrapped up, laid out a very similar story in that trial. What if anything from the trial stood out to you?”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At some point, it just became a chorus of companies pointing out there is a fundamental problem here with the way this company behaves. And it's one that needs to be remedied if we're going to allow the next generation of technology companies to emerge.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that especially with respect to applications on the App Store that were competing with Apple's own services. So people need to be reminded a little bit of history so that they understand the pattern of behavior and the motivations behind those actions on the part of Apple, which is why we felt we needed to tell a story. We were the first ones, I would say, that had the courage to be able to come out. It is not easy to make the decision to take on a $2 trillion company with the global footprint and the power over life and death of an app developer that they have. But now we're not alone. It's like the dam broke and there's all kinds of companies that have come out and in many sectors of technology and media and other areas. And now it's clear. It sort of reminds me a little bit of what happened in the Microsoft case where initially the issues were with some microsystems and a handful of other companies.”
2021-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Spotify’s chief legal officer called Apple a “ruthless bully” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT