Apple cuts out AdMob with new iOS regulations

One might expect Apple to be a bit smarter about how it conducts its business with the clouds of antitrust looming on the horizon.
With investigators circling over the firm’s alleged monopolistic practices and approaches to doing business, one would think Apple would be a bit more cautious, but the Cupertino firm seems intent on continuing on the course to hell, revising the rules on its iOS 4 yet again to cut out outside advertisers in favour of Apple’s own iAD mobile advertising platform.
Giving with one hand and taking away with another, Apple updated its regulations for the iOS platform to allow outside advertisers to collect stats for ads, while also cutting out iAD’s main competitor, AdMob, owned by bitter rival, Google.
The updated rules state:
3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:


– The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent, You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.


– The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.


What this means is that essentially AdMob – one of the largest mobile advertisers on the market, serving up more than 7.1 billion mobile banner and text ads per month – will be cut out by virtue of being owned by Google.
One might suggest this is a case of sour apples since the Jobs mob itself had once wanted to buy AdMob, only to have Google swoop in and snatch it away. One can imagine this didn’t go down too well in castle Cupertino.
Whatever the motive, Apple’s move is sure to raise red flags to any antitrust investigators currently clawing their way through the firm’s business practices. It certainly seems rather anti-competitive to us, anyway.