Anti-monopoly legislation seems like a good starting place. Game console app stores are, at least in my opinion, equally exploitative, but Apple is one of the most problematic publishers out there. Being able to run whatever software you want on general purpose hardware isn't what this is about (although you should be able to, as the FSF has been saying for years). It's that Apple can't monopolise the market like this, so the government should be able to force them to allow competing app stores.

Apple has a monopoly on designing the features of it's products and on deciding who they do business with and on what terms, that's all. What other monopoly do they have?

Youre not actually answering my questions. Exactly what features should Apple, Samsung, Pinephone, etc be required to implement? How should we decide what products these new requirements should apply to? Who gets to specify those features and certify compliance?

I'd advocate for letting customers choose where they get their software after they've bought a device. Artificially coupling device and software repository increases switching cost, stifling competition.

I'm not a legislator, but I'd like to be able to run an app store of my choosing. I'd like to be able to use my general purpose computing device as a general purpose computer, instead of Apple's business connections deciding who I get to do business with. So far as not implementing features, if the bare tech were exposed, I'm sure people would be very happy to implement it outside of Apple. Just because they perpetuate the platform doesn't mean they should control how I use it. As to implementation (i.e. enforcement), that's just whataboutism because the government is more than capable of regulation.

I think this is where we get into the weeds. How do we specify what is a general purpose computer? How do we specify a legally mandated mechanism for installing software? I'm not expecting you to do so now obviously, but isn't the fact that it's so hard part of the problem? This is an incredibly tricky area to start legislating about. Theres much more to this to hitting Apple with a 'monopolist' stick.

This is why there are regulatory bodies and people's entire career devoted to this. The government can create regulatory bodies to answer these questions and then regulate companies.

I don’t think saying it’s someone else’s problem to sweat the details cuts it. It sounds too much to me like wanting to wave a magic wand to make the problem go away, but there is no magic wand. Never, in any of the debates I’ve had on this, any of the blog posts a I’ve read about it, even the EFF articles about this (and organisation I have enormous respect for), has anyone actually tackled this issue of saying how a law like this would work in any specific way and what devices it should or should not apply to, specifically.

OP didn't say Apple was breaking the law. They said that they need to be regulated. There's a difference. Make all the equivalences you want, at the end of the day the government has a mandate to regulate business practice to benefit the consumer. If that means treating a mobile phone as a platform but not a game console, so be it.

It's different when TV manufactures put Dolby in charge of advertising and supporting the feature. Then charge them a cut of their profit, with little to no recourse or dispute mechanisms.

Besides that, it could be argued that running software is the feature. What software does is not a feature of the iPhone. Like a recipe is not a feature of a stove.

We are buying the device, it's a tool, and we should control how it's used.

Apple's view is that the third party software that runs on their phones, which they provide to you and which they charge you for, very much is a feature of their phones.

I agree it's a tool and you should control how it's used, but you're demanding that Apple implement specific features for you that they don't want to implement. How do you intend to coerce them into doing that? Who gets to specify precisely how those features are implemented?

I agree that what you do with your phone after you bought it should be up to you. If you can find a way to jailbreak it, I think you should be allowed to do that. In fact I've jai-broken iPhones and iPod Touches before. However I don't think I have a right to tell apple how they make their products, or to force them to implement features for me that I get to specify.

A stove is not a satisfying example. The recipe in this case is developed using Apple's kitchen utensils and delivered in a recipe book printed by Apple. There are entanglements between Apple and the Developer that go beyond the "tool vs method" abstraction. Some of these are forced on the Developer.

> There is no law requiring that...

So, let's make them!

Saying that there is "no law" is the weakest argument ever.

We the people make the laws, we can decide whatever we want, and we can certainly vote into law the regulations we think are necessary.

Power is power, and power needs to be accountable to those subject to that power. A company that makes commodity screws and bolts has no power over me: I can find a different commodity screw and bolt company. A company providing key tech infrastructure had quite a bit of power over me. We live in an information society. Why should a few people in the bay area unilaterally get to kick people out of that society?

Common carrier regulations on railroads provide a model for regulating critical tech infrastructure that happens to be privately held. I'm as big a fan as it gets of the capitalist market-based way of organizing society, but even I acknowledge that at large scales, companies need to play by a different set of rules, one that makes them accountable to the public. The alternative is essentially the subversion of democracy. You can take a purist approach to corporate autonomy all the way to its natural feudal end, but I'm not going with you.

A lot of this disconnect has to do with values.

Please understand I don't in any way mean to pick on you. The comment has 8 paragraphs that are mostly a description of how property rights work. Analogies to how they worked in other markets, examination of the law, etc. This detail is all very clear and I appreciate it because it helps me understand your point of view.

It is less clear to me, why the current situation of property rights is good. Of course many bad things (and for that matter many good things) have been done in the name of how property rights worked at one time. But in democratic societies we decide how things work, so in that sense we are the author of things like property rights, we decide how we want them to be based on our values.

> If you think Apple has failed to comply with some law in the way they implemented their products, I'd appreciate some clarity about exactly what you think Apple has done wrong, and how that should be redressed.

I don't know if they have "broken the law" but there are certainly similarities to historical situations.

You discuss game consoles and licensing games. I might suggest from Sega v. Accolade that a hardware marker's ability to license games exclusively was quite controversial at that time, was ultimately reversed by courts.

In DOJ vs MS, Microsoft was convicted as an illegal monopoly for (among other things) illegally bundling software with Windows, and using technical means to keep Netscape off the platform.

I am sure that Apple has great arguments for why they are different than these cases, and a lot has changed since then. At the same time, some things are similar. It's really about our values. Is the law about encouraging companies to innovate new ways to lock out all their competitors? Or is it about helping competitors? Or helping the large companies? Society has not yet decided, so the question has no answer.

> What kinds of requirements should be put on manufacturers? Under what criteria should they apply and to what devices?

Personally? My designer regulation is one where we have a tiered regime which gets worse the bigger you are.

So, for a small startup that serves basically nobody, we have the current regime, or maybe even we remove some things. There's still regulation on things like HIPAA and SEC rules, fraud, etc. I would also be in favor of much stronger privacy regulation, and limiting arbitration clauses, mostly because a lot of adtech is fly-by-night.

Once you reach some threshold, we regulate at a basic level. This is probably defined as some combination of revenue, daily active users, units sold, subscribers, employee/contractor headcount, but let's just call it a $10m company. Here you fill out a form once a year with an address the regulators can write letters to you, send in your EULA and privacy policy, and there's a list of basic rules like "don't sell user data", "make your software accessible", that are mostly on the honor system unless someone complains in which case the regulator writes you letters.

As we go up in orders of magnitude it becomes a bigger deal. By the time we get to FAANG, you have a regulatory team looking at individual products full-time, the same way we have inspectors in food or finance or anything else. For Apple specifically, maybe "users can jailbreak their device, subject to certain warranty consequences", "all first-party apps will only use public APIs", "developers of first-party apps will find out about new APIs the same time as everyone else", etc.