Reply to a couple hundred comments: You don’t have to be a monopoly to be deemed to be acting in an anti-competitive manner.
Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.
Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.