You've described the counterpoint perfectly to your argument.

It would take billions of dollars and 50+ years of development to have a chance. You would also need phone partners, which wouldn't go with a small OS maker. So you'd need to make the phones + the OS + the app store.

A deli can start anywhere with ~$10k and they'll have clients if they're good enough.

It's not feasible to compete with Android + IOS, even Microsoft and Amazon failed.

They therefore have a duopoly of the mobile app store market.

I did state that nobody is entitled to effectively compete with behemoth companies. They’re going to have to put in the work.

Every behemoth company you see today did not start out that way. Apple was a couple guys in a garage. At that time, IBM was almost 100 years old, had revenues in the tens of billions and was sending hardware and software into outer space with government contracts. Guess how that company started out?

It’s also revealing that you think $10K is a low barrier to entry to a risky business with razor thin margins. And it’s also quite hard work, in terms of physical labor and ongoing time commitment. Most of my life that kind of lump sum was unthinkable, and I have to imagine it still is for many. Yet even in the face of that, some people do find a way.

They should do so with smartphones as well, if they feel strongly about it. I think the scales match in terms of barrier to entry to expertise if you want to compare delis and smartphone manufacturing.

I think the problems with your comparison are at least twofold:

1) it’s much much easier, in a technical sense, to start a deli vs manufacture a smartphone. Just in Apple, there have been tens to hundreds of millenia of person-time poured into the company.

and 2) most people with the expertise necessary to do so are happy with the options available today and would rather spend their time solving other as-yet unsolved problems.

You can absolutely make a huge company from barely anything if you're not impeded by a monopoly. Both the examples you listed were companies going for a new, different market than IBM's.

Microsoft actually lost an antitrust lawsuit for doing something extremely similar to what Apple is doing.

> Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system, which made it difficult for other web browsers to gain market share. Additionally, Microsoft was accused of engaging in exclusionary contracts with computer manufacturers to prevent them from pre-installing competing web browsers and of engaging in other anti-competitive practices.

Remind you of anything?

I do think there are important differences between MS and Apple’s behaviors. MS was getting their product out using other companies products, and then constrained the UX of those OEM’s customers. Apple would have to get an app store on some android devices and windows/linux machines and then try to enforce their rules there to be in the same ballpark. The fact that Apple puts rules on companies that use their platform is the inverse of this scenario: this would be like if a bunch of the OEMs were trying to dictate terms to MS.

What Epic wants to do is have their game store on multiple OSes produced by other companies and then call the shots on those. I actually think they are closer to the spirit of what MS was doing, and given the chance they would leverage any advantageous market position they could achieve (or run to the courts) to shape OS customers’ UX in a fashion that is more similar to what MS did.

Apple wants a sandbox in the world; Epic and MS want the world to be their sandbox. If Apple’s sandbox becomes dominant it will be de facto because of people choosing to use a better competing product; Epic’s and MS’ actions are attempts to create a de jure dominant sandbox.

> You've described the counterpoint perfectly

That we should punish success?

> That we should punish success?

That is a great bullshit whataboutism argument.

Nobody speaks about punishing success here.

Apple and Google de facto Monopoly on the app store gives them a 30% tax on everything that wants to live on the mobile ecosystem.

This is the problem here. And this is what Epic was fighting against.

Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. Antitrust is the abuse of monopoly power. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.

> There could be millions of phone OS makers. Nobody is stopping anyone.

It's actually a patent minefield.

Truthfully, everything... is a patent minefield.

OK, so fix patent law then. We are already talking about idealistic “let’s change the law” scenarios.

Hard work isn't a defense for breaking anti-trust law.

Nobody is entitled to have an abuseable level of market dominance simply because they worked hard.

Who broke anti-trust law? Not Apple.

Considering how high the bar of customer harm has been set, it's doubtful anyone will cross it except maybe Amazon.

Of course it's hard to prove consumer harm when there's so much vertical integration from day one. There's no before to compare it to.

Perhaps if Apple is forced to allow sideloading and other stores in Europe then the harms will be more obvious and comparable.

> There's no before to compare it to.

That's precisely the point. In order for Apple to have abused their monopoly, you would need to point to a change in their business model which occurred during the period in which they held nominal monopoly status.

Epic couldn’t point to any new “abusive” behaviour between when Apple was a ~1% market share minnow to when they became a ~50% market share behemoth. This is critical. In order to abuse a monopoly, you need to have abused your monopoly.