The Apple App Store for its IPhone has become a serious new kind of cyberspace marketplace. So when the lords of that marketplace, Apple Computers decided to carve out a segment of it just for themselves, that smells of dirty pool. The niche that Apple has carved out for themselves is the GPS location aware advertising. And they handily blocked the competition by turning down any apps that tread in that territory to be part of the Apps Store.

To be rejected for the Apps Store by Apple, the app doesn’t have to deal in multi location advertising. As long as the capabilities to support multi location advertising is part of the functioning of the app, Apple will reject it flat out and that developer is out of luck to make any money from their hard work developing that app.

Apple has been stalking this market for a while so this manoeuvre to protect this part of the app world for itself is not hard to figure out. It is blatantly clear they are refusing to compete with other apps when it comes to GPS location aware advertising so they can monopolize all of that revenue for themselves. Not long ago, Apple had its eye on AdMob, which would have give them the foothold in that market they wanted. Google beat Apple out by purchasing AdMob to go after that revenue itself. So Apple is hungry and not in the mood for sharing.

The losers in this kind of greedy approach to the market are the developers and the uses of products from the App Store. Developers who thrive on innovating great apps for this market now have a big block of revenue denied to them. And anytime competition is shut down, it is the market itself that suffers and that market is you and I. But, sadly, this is not the first time that Apple has pulled this kind of stunt and got away with it. And it probably won’t be the last.