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Re:Apple wins the antitrust court battle with Epic Games, co... by paulryanrogers on Monday April 24, 2023 @11:46PM (#35696315)
If argue it's when one has "more leverage than any single other party", either on the buying or selling side. And it could be based on a raw percentage of units or market revenue, whichever portion is bigger.

Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.

Re:Apple wins the antitrust court battle with Epic Games, co... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @12:53AM (#35696639)
This returns us to the problem of defining the market, however. Platforms, specifically, exploit this ambiguity by escaping straightforward definitions of market share.
Re:Apple wins the antitrust court battle with Epic Games, co... by paulryanrogers on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @07:30AM (#35698986)
Most can probably agree that mobile phone gaming is an important market or even just mobile phone ownership.
Re:Apple wins the antitrust court battle with Epic Games, co... by smoldesu on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @11:48AM (#35702119)
> Platforms, specifically, exploit this ambiguity

And they know it's wrong. How do you suggest we compel good behavior?

Re:Apple wins the antitrust court battle with Epic Games, co... by wizzwizz4 on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @11:12AM (#35701588)
I don't think you can measure leverage in revenue. Leverage isn't about money: it's about power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(negotiation)

Leverage isn't about "the market", either. It's about the individual people, and their situations. The iOS App Store doesn't give Apple much leverage over iPhone users, but iCloud does – and, to a lesser extent, iMessage¹ and FaceTime do. (The flipside of the iPhone's many planned obsolescence strategies is that you have to choose whether to remain within Apple's ecosystem every three-to-five years, and iPhones are expensive.)

The iOS App Store does give Apple significant power over the authors of apps. Even if the App Store doesn't provide a chokepoint by itself, the iPhone “ecosystem” as a whole does. It's a different thing to antitrust, though the more egregious offenders might also constitute monopolies for antitrust purposes.

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¹: Perhaps relevant to the Y Combinator gang: https://www.cultofmac.com/743055/why-it-pays-for-startup-fou... https://www.androidauthority.com/google-green-bubble-intervi...

On Cory Doctorow's "competitive compatibility" / "adversarial interoperability" theme, a company called Sunbird Messaging claims to have made an iMessage clone for Android. It's proprietary, and might turn out to be vapourware, but I'm hopeful.