As Cory Doctorow recently explained[1]:
>> It's how we got Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone lines that had been broken up from AT&T.
>> And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect market, a market where you could make your products with low capital, just with the sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That you could access the global audience of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network. And that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost, because you could always write the code that it would take to to port the old data formats and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world.
>> as these companies acquired new monopolies, they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility.
When talking about monopoly, people tend to focus on price, but modern tech monopolies don't need to use traditional form of rent seeking. Exploitative prices don't make sense when the monopolist undermines the entire market with "free services". Instead, tech monopolies are about control of what is allowed to participate in the market.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11337-what_the_cyberoptimists_got...
The difference is that Microsoft attempted to use its operating system monopoly to win the browser wars. Bundling Internet Explorer with Windows made it difficult for other browsers to compete on an even playing field.
Apple doesn't have an operating system monopoly on the desktop or mobile. MacOS and iOS have a smaller userbase than both of their main competitors. It doesn't have an app store monopoly either.
I don't have an iphone, but don't you have to jailbreak it to install any software not blessed by Apple? That sounds like a monopoly to me.
Agreed, but then Apple/Google and the fans of their walled gardens will argue that without this heavy censorship, grandma will install some malware on her phone that will empty her bank account or that their kids will install some malware that will spy on them (other than the social media apps that already do that).
There is an entire population of humans that hypes companies, franchises, celebrities, etc. and treats them like a member of their own family. With a fondness. And a desire to defend their selection.
There's a technical means to lock down grandma and the kids. Fans are quick to dismiss it and shift the conversation back to why their choice is great.
No, we can't solve the problem that way: the very same problem wound remain: EU and 5/9 Eyes want e2ee backdoored or gone. If you start legislating which apps are allowed, you're putting yourself even more at mercy of gov regulation.
And the regulation would be blanket, with little to no way of sorting things out through unofficial channels as it can be done with Google. It'd be "backdoor or jail", not even sideloading apps to help you.
And in America at least it's almost certainly unconstitutional.
Sure, they built the phones, doesn't mean we can't demand more rights than they decide it's profitable to give us (or put another way, just because the king's ancestors founded the country doesn't mean we shouldn't demand freedom and democracy).