House Antitrust Committee chairman David Cicilline yesterday:

“Because of the market power that Apple has, it is charging exorbitant rents — highway robbery, basically — bullying people to pay 30 percent or denying access to their market,” said Rep. Cicilline. “It’s crushing small developers who simply can’t survive with those kinds of payments. If there were real competition in this marketplace, this wouldn’t happen.”

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295778/apple-app-store-...

Oh it is possible to get Apple to change. Not by asking nicely, but perhaps by carrying a big stick. The arrogance Apple displays today is much the same as Microsoft back in the day. Let's hope for a similar outcome as back then, which fundamentally changed Microsoft for the better. It's possible, but not if we don't try.

But again a court is unlikely to accept that reasoning. And if you think about it for 3 seconds it's obvious why: Apple's "monopoly" was established when the App Store was launched in 2008 when the iPhone was an insignificant share of the market. That would also mean that any future product (like the AR glasses, or from any other company) would have "monopoly power" in their platform as soon as they ship 1 unit. This is obviously an absurd outcome.

In the video "Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel", Peter Thiel discusses this. The problem here is in how you define "monopoly". If you're a large company, you want to say that the market is a lot larger than what you are operating in. To take this to an extreme, you could say that you're a technology company and if people dont like cell phones, they can use tablets/laptops/desktops. Conversly, if you narrow the definition of monopoly, there are tons of them. E.g. how many supermarkets are there within a 4 block radius of my house?

Because of this, instead of simply looking at scope, a common method is to look at what sort of behavior is the company taking. Is the supermarket lowering its prices below profitable to not allow another supermarket to survive in my neighborhood? In the case of Apple, I think people see the behavior of controlling the App Market as a monopolistic behavior which prevents others from competing.

If you're going to exclude all potential products where you have to go through apple to be a major player (given the competition), you're excluding most of the software market. Maybe developers don't really have a choice?

And yeah, apple is not a monopoly, but apple/google for sure is a duopoly, and google is only incrementally better than apple.

But as the parent comment you're replying to said, the situations aren't comparable.

Microsoft had over 90% of the market in the 90s. You could not stop using Windows, because there was simply no credible alternative for most consumers. That's not true for iOS.

If Microsoft at the time had, say, 50% of the market the outcome would likely have been extremely different.

I doubt ms had 90% of consumer electronics market or even os.

> I doubt ms had 90% of consumer electronics market or even os.

You should probably look that up then, instead of "doubting": https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

Government worked out the correct action a long time ago. When you see a trust, you destroy it, when you still get collusion between the separate companies that is manageable since collusion has prisoners dilemmas.

I’m sure the government has to technical wherewithal to make sure that Apple is compliant with browser standards....

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

In the US, "The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance."

By having full access to the API, MS could no longer give IE special privileges (for example, being the only default browser choice when a link is clicked to be opened). At any rate, it's not a stretch to imagine similar movements towards Apple's app store. The parallels are quite similar.

The parallels aren’t similar. Apple has less than 50% market share in the US and even less in Europe. Every console maker does the same as Apple.

So they creted a platforn and enforce service. Thats creating playground, rules and playing the game.

Remember microsoft was subjected to antitrust regulations for providing web browser with the os. This was considered unfair practice. Forcing people to give up 30 of revenue goes much much further.

By giving customers no choice, it's limiting hardware capabilities of your device.

This only became an issue when their market share was far greater than the competition, which is simply not the case.

This is just developer sour grapes. You want more money. Just say it.

Sure, if you're just counting units sold. But by total app store revenue, the metric that actually matters, they account for well over two thirds of the market.

Their users devices.

[1] Apple owns less than 10 % of the laptop market.

15 years ago when I did they had great cost-performance, i.e. they held their value relative to the competition, remained usable for longer for a number of reasons and when sold actually yielded better value over the full lifecycle. Has this changed?

Surely indicative of the shoddy quality Apple is known for...

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-users-spend-twice-apps...

Their existing monopolistic actions like “preventing interoperability at any cost” feeds this viscous cycle where high school kids are embarrassed to send text message to iPhone from an Android device.

I own Apple stock, would love then to crush competition, but let us not twist facts.

Remove the gate, the quality dips. I'd imagine the amount willing to pay goes down too.

Citations missing since I‘m on mobile.

That’s not how monopolies work.

Not sure why everyone has rose colored glasses for Apple's hardware enforced software monopoly.