No, this is not even remotely close to a monopoly.

Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.

When Android has 75% market share and multiple competing stores, we’re not even close to monopoly.

>Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.

Would be all well and awesome if you had any freedom of choice on Apple's platform and weren't forced into being locked into their ecosystem where you pay a 15% Apple tax on every purchase. Say what you like about mobile platforms but making ridiculous comparisons like this doesn't help your case.

> Would be all well and awesome if you had any freedom of choice on Apple's platform

I don’t see how that is an argument against ”Yes, Apple can dictate terms in its own store the same way that your local grocer can.”. You don’t have freedom of choice as to who to buy from at your local grocer, either.

I think that, in principle, companies creating a market should be able to decide what gets sold there and demand any cut of sales they want.

That also is what I think laws say in most countries. It’s fairly normal with game consoles, for example, and I expect you can’t sell merchandise from studios competing with Disney (if they still exist) in Disneyland or sell ice cream there without Disney taking a significant cut, or sell Shell products at an Exxon pump.

The big question, though, is whether the market power of a few players in mobile apps is so undesirable that action is necessary, and if so, whether existing laws are sufficient to correct the issue, or whether the rules of the game should change and if so, how.

I think law will be changed, but how, I’m not sure about. Any law saying “this applies only to companies Foo, Bar and Baz” will be shut down in courts, so arguments must be formulated as to what exactly is wrong with the current situation, and decisions will have to be made as to whether those rules also should apply to, for example, game consoles.

> You don’t have freedom of choice as to who to buy from at your local grocer, either.

Exactly, and this isn't a problem because you have plenty of choice as to which grocer you patronize.

There are plenty of mobile app stores. If you don't like Apple's, then grab an Android and use Amazon's.

There should be a hard right that owner of general purpose devices decides what kind of software runs on them. Not the vendor.

Entire business models that most of society are perfectly happy with would disappear. I would include myself in that.

I say this just so that people with strong opinions on HN remember there are two sides to every coin.

> forced into being locked into their ecosystem

Who is forced into using their ecosystem?

So is it a “tax” when every other retail store doesn’t sell at cost?”

Well, we just had a real judge with a real law degree that said the App Store is not a monopoly in the Epic vs Apple case.

Good to know. It's good that judges are never wrong.

Do you have relevant case law that you can cite that the well paid Epic lawyers missed that would have been more convincing?

Microsoft EU antitrust case.

luckily we have real lawyers that don’t just pull up irrelevant cases. The case in both the US and the EU was about MS forcing OEMs to psy for a license on all shipping computers whether or not the computer shipped with Windows.

Apple doesn’t license its operating system to other OEMs, it doesn’t have anywhere near 90% market share and EU case law is irrelevant in the US.

> In 1993, the American software company Novell claimed that Microsoft was blocking its competitors out of the market through anti-competitive practices. The complaint centered on the license practices at the time which required royalties from each computer sold by a supplier of Microsoft's operating system, whether or not the unit actually contained the Windows operating system.

Luckily seems you have forgotten about the Internet Exporer

And absolutely nothing changed about IE in the US - no browser choice, no forced unbundling, nothing.