>Your argument is based on a lay definition and not a legal definition..,From the wikipedia article on us antitrust law:

I’m going to let that sit right there.

The article literally spells out the legal definition, summarizes numerous actual antitrust rulings, with plentiful citations to relevant laws and case law, many with full and well researched articles. Maybe give it a read. You might even find an example where 4 tobacco companies, each with less than 50% market share, were found to be abusing market dominance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

Or, keep on using the definition from your imagination. Whatever works.

You see the part about “collusion”? That’s why random HN posters make horrible lawyers.

As far as IBM (the case was dropped after 13 years and nothing came of it) and MS, they clearly had more than 50%.

You're conveniently ducking that they 100% control the market of software for their phones. And anyway, I didn't say that case was equivalent. You asked for a case where a company with less than 50% was subject to an antitrust ruling and I provided one.

And I'll remind you, I'm not a lawyer. Technically, zero lawyers is a good number of lawyers, so I must insist that makes me a good lawyer. Just, I'd suck in court.

A company that was subject to antitrust because it colluded with other companies in the market has nothing to do with what’s going on in the app market. Collusion is always illegal -except for the sports leagues.

Yes and consoles makers have control of their consoles, Roku has control of their platform, as does LG with their WebOS based TVs.

Yet and still when you were challenged to come up with an analogous example, the best you could come up with is multiple companies colluding.

I can't speak for what other people have posted, but there's, to my mind, a quite analogous case for this situation: Kodak v. Image Technical Services.

The case involved Kodak refusing to sell parts for its copiers to outside repair shops, and they were sued by the shops who claimed this was anticompetitive behavior.

Kodak made a claim that since there was robust competition in the market for copiers, they couldn't have market power in the aftermarkets for "Kodak copier parts and service." The Supreme Court rejected that argument, holding it was possible to show that there was market power (and therefore antitrust liability) in a secondary market even if the primary market is competitive.

The key point in the Kodak case was that Kodak changed their policy on selling repair parts after people bought the original product, and the change in policy is what led the Supreme Court to decide that the market for repair parts was a separate and relevant aftermarket, because the people that bought Kodak copiers lacked information at the time of purchase about Kodak's repair policy and therefore were locked-in to buying repair services from Kodak after the fact.

Subsequent cases since Kodak have continually narrowed the scope in which Kodak is applied, and it likely would not apply here because people who buy iPhones have known since the App Store launched in 2008 that the App Store is the only place they'll be able to install apps from.

Yes, the specifics of the case don't match up perfectly, but the context of the question was "show me a case where a single company had antitrust liability without a majority of the market," not "prove with a single citation that Apple will lose."

Fair enough, my comment was intended for people who were unfamiliar with the case and might misinterpret it to apply here.

Do you realize that I said "if apple gets hit with an antitrust ruling"? I'm not certain of the outcome; I see room for argument on both sides of this. You've apparently picked this 50% hill to die on. I wish that you were taking a curious approach to this conversation, because we might both learn something. Instead, I regret responding to you in the first place.

I recognize your username and I recall seeing good and thoughtful comments from you. I hope to meet you again in a more productive conversation.