As a consumer of mobile apps, I'm generally farther removed from the argument, and not going to benefit from the decision either way. Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions?

App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. And argue from a "principle" point of view, when really all it is is a price dispute.

> Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions?

Not necessarily, but developers will have a higher margin, which will allow them to continue developing their apps and increase their quality, because they don't have to waste their time thinking about X ways to increase their tiny margins of the product, so they can survive for a little bit longer.

>App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision.

Apple is highly likely to claim that the platform is not monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. See? the statement can be easily inverted, again it's a vacuous statement. Is their behavior anti competitive and in violation of the spirit of the law? That's the essential question.

They also don't have to waste their time doing sales infrastructure, like many J2ME and Symbian developers used to do.

> Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment

It probably wasn't, which is why the government didn't follow through with the breakup of Microsoft.

Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with, Microsoft was outcompeted in a number of areas that the regulators never anticipated, including Google Chrome taking over the browser market, as well as other areas Microsoft directly competed in such as search and smartphones.

It makes you wonder, how can a company be an unassailable monopoly yet get its butt kicked by other companies competing in the same market?

<Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with>

The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out in 2008.

The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.

So again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.

Netscape Navigator and Communicator, Mozilla (the original one), and Opera all existed at the time and were trivially easy to obtain.

Neither Netscape Navigator nor Opera were free. Mozilla took over a decade to become competitive. It wasn't until Safari and Chrome came along that there was any real competition to IE. IE was the web for a long long time.