> Given that iPhones account for just 35% of US mobile phones [1] and only around 15% of phone shipments worldwide [2], this is in no way monopolistic

Why do you think that? You are only arguing that "monopoly laws" should be called "oligopoly laws". These laws require abuse of a dominant market position, not a majority share.

I think you have it backwards. "Mono" as a prefix means one, while "oligo" means several. Therefore monopoly is a market with a single dominant player, while "oligopoly" would be a market with few but more than one dominate players.

IMO, it is time to redefine monopoly. Something, that affects a billion of users should not be let policing things like this.

Suppose a majority of those users are perfectly fine with it, and enjoy the benefits of a carefully curated system? The fact that Apples policies are widely known and people still buy iPhones in the millions is pretty good evidence that Apple has a much better grip on what their users prefer than you do.

At the same time (as an example) I have something like 150 movies I've bought on iTunes that I cannot bring to any other platform.

So Apple locks-in users to their platform (as is everyone else) then they are using the control they have over their user base to lock out competition.

This is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.

And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with anti-competitive behavior.

If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.

Until a monopoly (or a collaborative effort by members of an oligopoly - in the case of price fixing) abuses these things we don’t care - and rightly so.

Plus, when it comes to media like movies, you really should complain about the movie studios & their licensing. That’s why Apple locks down videos - they have to or they wouldn’t be able to offer the content. You can see their free & easily shareable approach to music purchasing as a counter example to movies.

Patents, copyrights, trademarks etc all keep competition from from benefiting from your hard work (or stealing it) to give first to market a true advantage. This is not anti-competitive but rather things built into the system to reward investments in innovation.

If Apple had an open platform then they'd be required to compete on quality and services. Instead they lock-in users and lock-out competing services from even being able to exist in their platform. This is anti-competitive.

Note that I say this as a user with a MBP, iPhones, AppleTV, iPad, etc... I admit I would probably be fine switching to Android (for example) if I felt the quality of the platform was better without fear of not having access to other services (but IMO the quality isn't there).

Let's look within the platform itself, though. This is a platform en-composing millions upon millions of users across over a billion active devices (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10835748/apple-devices-ac...).

Apple leverages its control of the platform to give Apple services an advantage over the competition. If Apple is not careful this will almost certainly end in anti-trust litigation.

> If there was then patents, copyrights, trademarks, and fit of licensing, etc would all be wrong to the same degree.

Patents and copyright exist novel and interesting works and ideas for a limited amount of time. It's an obvious argument that it would be anti-competitive to allow a giant competitor to steal novel ideas from their creators without recourse. It's not obvious to me how protecting serendipity is clearly anti-competitive.

Trademarks are in no way anti-competitive. They exist to support fair business practices, in particular to prevent malicious actors from falsely claiming they represent a business. It would be anti-competitive to allow anyone to steal your trademark and sell products under it.

Apple has been very clear that they would prefer to sell open formats, they managed to convince the music labels but not the video industry. So is your position that they should have refused to sell movies with those restrictions? If so, how do you reconcile that with you choosing to buy them?

Oy, it's an example, but I'll bite...

Apple does not make their services available on anything other than Apple devices, nor do they allow other providers on their devices.

Regardless of an open format for the content, I cannot choose to use another service without also completely changing platforms, and if I change platforms I cannot use Apple's service.

On the first point again DRM is foisted on Apple against their preference. We’ve seen what an unholy mess multi-vendor DRM systems look like from the debacle that was “Play For Sure” with every vendor blaming all the others for nothing working properly. Can you really blame Apple for not wanting to wade blindly into a quagmire like that?

Secondly, you can absolutely use other services on Apple devices such as playing music bought from Amazon in the Amazon Music app, or using Pandora or Spotify. I use audible on my iPhone, and there's a perfectly usable kindle app. Apple Music works on Android, and you can transfer music bought in iTunes to any other device. Sure there are some limitations, there's no native iCloud client for Linux and it's support on Windows through iTunes is limited, but eh. There's a limit to what I think it's reasonable to expect them to do to make life more tolerable on other people's stuff.

Antitrust laws may affect monopolies and oligopolies. oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.

> Given that iPhones account for just 35% of US mobile phones [1] and only around 15% of phone shipments worldwide [2], this is in no way monopolistic.

What is monopolistic to you? Does it need to be over 50%? I don't think economists define it that way, they only argue that one company has excessive influence in a market, which means more power than the other companies in that market. That does seem to be true of Apple in the mobile app market.

Your statement reminds me of a reporter who said that Walmart can't possibly be a monopoly because it's revenues are "only" 5% of US consumer spending. It's scares me to death that a single company takes that much of the total, and it's silly to suggest that the largest company in the world by revenue can't possibly be a monopoly.

FWIW, the distribution of phones isn't the same as the distribution of revenue from apps. Apple brings in more app revenue than Google, even though more phones sold run Android.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/259510/revenue-distribut...

Economists / anti-trust lawyers (at least in the US) look at a butt-ton of variables, and there is significant literature on the topic (source: I have a graduate degree in Economics - and love to talk about this type of stuff,) but just some of the top variables included:

1) Market definition (to your point - in the tech world, this can get problematic very fast.) 2) Market share 3) Market share rank (i.e. 4% among a million competitors who all have <1% would be pretty significant) 4) Ease of entry into a market (i.e. Google gets a lot of scrutiny in the search market because of the consensus that to build a good search engine competitor, you need a lot of data for machine learning models, which a startup can't just get $ to buy and/or cleverly build with IP.) 5) Ease of customer switching 6) Pricing behavior ...among many others.

Historically, a lot of analysis & literature to demonstrate market dominance has been on elasticity of demand: e.g. if I as dominant company X adjust prices, and customer demand doesn't change (probably because there are no substitutes and/or the switching cost is too high,) then anti-trust regulators would probably be all on my ass. But in the tech world, new models are still being developed I think, as that concept is not 100% applicable.

That reporter is right though: Walmart isn’t a monopoly. Not generally.

It can have a local monopoly of course (and often does in many more rural areas) but that’s not the same.

I think I’ve been to a Walmart once in the last 10 years. I’m not even trying to avoid them: there’s no reason or need for me to go there and I have plenty of other (just as cheap) options.

That’s not a monopoly.

They’re a massive business and a dominant national brand but that’s also not a monopoly.

In case it wasn't clear, my point was that the percentage is not the indicator of monopoly or non-monopoly. I'm not arguing that you should agree Walmart is a monopoly.

That said, your experience and you having other purchasing options isn't the only criteria, as @s3r3nity pointed out. Being on Hacker News probably means you're not in the lower 50% of the US population socioeconomically.

Being a massive business is precisely one way Walmart might be considered a monopoly. They're not a dominant national brand, they are the single largest global brand on the planet by revenue. The fact that if Walmart closed tomorrow, it would have a significant negative impact on the US economy is alone enough to warrant asking the question. When a company is "too big to fail" that automatically puts it in the potential monopoly category.

Also, there have been anti-trust cases against Walmart, some of which Walmart has settled. So it's really not super clear cut that Walmart isn't a monopoly.

Is "mobile phone" even a relevant category? What's Apple's share of the high end smart phone market?