Microsoft in the late 1990's and early 2000's was in a similar situation. They abused their position in the PC operating system market in an anticompetitive manner to prevent competition in the browser market[1]. Microsoft built their OS and Internet Explorer, so who has the right to tell them what they can and cannot do with them? It turns out that the federal government and regulators around the world have that right.
This is like asking why regulators have right to prevent Standard Oil from engaging in anticompetitive behavior, given that Standard Oil built their own pipelines and railroads, after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Should e.g. a restaurant have to provide an open market for silverware providers?
You could argue that the restaurant shouldn’t be a gatekeeper. Other parties could let me enjoy a cheaper meal, competing to offer the most discounted silverware. My $10 burger could be $9 if I could rent a paper plate from a third party and eat on the floor. After all, the restaurant shouldn’t abuse it’s monopoly, right?
Even there are many Apple App developer on the world doesn't mean they cannot choose to left.
If I build my career on a supplier company I don’t control, that’s my problem.
EU politicians seem to disagree. Mostly (I bet) to protect their own.
And I could force you to buy silverware made in X.
There isn't any inherently correct answer just a variety of possible answers with various outlooks for many parties.
I don't think anyone regards a restaurant as a market for silverware and plates where different vendors compete but Apple explicitly clearly runs a market for apps which is a notably different situation from selling burgers.
There is everyone reason to suppose that burgers ought to be regulated differently from software and regulators, lawmakers, and courts aren't robots required to interpret law like code. Reasonable results require both the literal text of the law and common sense.
A lawsuit attempting to force Burgerville to allow third party plate rental would run into the common sense conclusion that the Burgerville isn't presenting plates inc an opportunity to do business with customers they are simply offering them an opportunity to sell n plates to Burgerville for usage in their business.
Apple runs a store, not a market. This is the key distinction to my mind. In a store I expect curation and payola. On a market I expect independent hagglers.
I imagine if Plateify, a hot startup from the EU, wanted to get into the American Burger King “plate market”, they could get all sort of different attention from lawmakers.
Anyway, where’s the line to a “sub market”? If it’s the soda brand that goes with your burger? Should consumers always be able to get Pepsi cheaper than Coke? The whole reasoning is complex and arbitrary. I’d much rather just let companies decide what they want to bundle and unbundle.
Apple is the only seller of apps on my Apple phone.
Burger King is the only seller/provider of plates and cutlery at my local Burger King.
Even if you forget the sunk cost you just have two providers to choose from.
But this meal is locked in. If I don’t like the pickles on my whopper, they don’t provide McDonald’s pickles, do they? The don’t allow me to get a McFlurry with my Chicken Sandwich?
Bundling is allowed in every other instance and is key to many great products. Apple can do it too.
I'm not smart enough to make an argument about food pricing but some restaurants let you bring your own bottle of wine as long as you pay a 'corkage fee'
This does not concern setting precedents. The antitrust laws are already there, this is just a case of them being applied.
More broadly speaking, I'm not really sensitive to the argument "they built the platform, so they should get to choose to do with it whatever they want". Network effects are so large that there is effectively zero competition. What little competition there is can be easily squashed by Apple throwing a minuscule portion of its capital at it.
We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance.
Can we please stop pretending corporations have feeling and liberties the way natural persons do? It reads like collective insanity "stones have feeling too".
Then are these network effects worth paying 30% for or not? If yes, you've just conceded the price is fair. If no, then Purism's Librem exists (and will not be bought by Apple).
> We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance.
The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom? National legislation historically has been a method of pulling up the ladder behind robber barons, not of giving the little guy a chance.
EU forcing Apple to lower app store fees to 5% or something similar wouldn't remove the network effect though, there is no incentive for EU to allow Apple to extract that fee. Tell me this, what would EU lose by capping App store fees in general? App stores would still operate there, App store companies would still be very profitable, they would just be less of a leech on the economy.
> The same way it gave small railroad companies a chance? Or small oil, or small pharmaceutical, or small telecom?
Regulating those companies greatly reduced their ability to extract money from the market and therefore contributed to the plethora of small companies in other domains we see today. We don't see small companies in oil or pharma since those domains requires scale, which is why we instead of forcing competition force regulations on them to make them do the right thing.
I mean, imagine if we let the oil companies take 30% of GDP as revenue, it would totally ruin the economy and prevent us from progressing as a society. You could argue that those oil companies deserved to get that much money since without them how would we get to work? But, fact is that giving large companies that much money doesn't benefit anyone but their shareholders.
We are setting no new precedent. In the US, internet provider are regulated as utilities and are stripped of any power on the content they serve, and the platform thrived as a result. What would Internet look like today if AOL had applied Apple's policies?
If we go by that precedent, destroying the closed gardens around platforms is the best thing that could happen.
If we choose to ignore it, then shouldn't we welcome that network carriers demand their 30% share of Apple's profits?
About the same as it looks today. AOL was a walled garden, and unregulated internet was so compelling that AOL was forced to offer it, or die, like so many other services did; of course, AOL still pretty much died, but it lasted the longest of the pre-internet national information services. Incidentally, that was back when it was easy to switch between competitive ISPs or set up your own and there was not much in the way of regulation. Now, we live under the threat of the cable and telephone companies pushing their products. Not a whole lot of clear regulation now, and not even the basis for local loop unbundling like congress provided in 1996, but the FCC watered down until it meant hardly anything.
They key word is 'platform'.
It's designed for 'broad public consumption', this is different than other, purely internal aspects of their service.
So Ford or GM cannot stop you from buying other vendors stuff and tweaking your car. The very thought would be absurd. A car is designed to be at very least maintained, they can void warranties etc. but not have absolute control.
BMW is stricter about those things, which is fine, but it's still outside of their control.
Finally, I think the reach of the platforms actually does matter - once something becomes a public good, we treat it differently.
Imagine if the electric company in 1921 only ever let you buy appliances 'made by them' suited for 'their electricity', it's just not good.
A similar situation is MS using their platform monopoly to dominate other areas, such as MS Office, which I think should have been regulated as well. Using a platform monopoly, companies can definitely dominating adjacent economies - even while providing an inferior product or experience, which is bad for everyone.
To your point, it's probably worthwhile for us to start defining in legal terms what we mean by 'platform' so the rules can be applied fairly.
Also, there is the network effect and there is vendor lock-in. In the past other companies could not use Bell's telephone network, so the government stepped in. The same could happen with OSes.
Moreover, users pay a high premium for their device to access the platform. Why should companies also pay in addition to the annual subscription fee to their developer program?
Even for my day-to-day uses there’s only one or two third-party apps that really “add value” for me (Slack, Taskmator and Signal)
Apps are the difference between “A phone with extra tricks” and “A computer in your pocket.”
But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it?
It's one thing to mandate how much pollution a factory may leak into a shared water supply. But the Apple app store is not a utility or natural resource. Apple built it from nothing and they're its sole owner. If it's a crappy experience, the solution to me still seems to be to migrate to a competitor (I'm toying with the idea of trading my Galaxy for a Librem 5).
There seems to be a mentality that megacorps have to have their hand held to not be public menaces, but by doing this my fear is we fortify Goliath rather than giving David a shot to kill him. The main reason I see this hasn't happened yet is that we've let the giants get away with corporate murder (e.g. Facebook's acquisition of both Instagram and WhatsApp), not because innovation is dead.
And national regulation is a pretty patchwork solution anyway to corporations that can (and sometimes do) go toe-to-toe with national governments.