The point is that what Apple did is as bad or worse from the perspective of promoting competition in healthy markets, but it's more difficult to prove and quantify the harm, so it doesn't get punished.
Re:Epic vs. Google: Google Loses
by ApolloFortyNine on Monday December 11, 2023 @11:25PM
(#38609467)
On one of the platforms it was possible for epic to make a third party app store, and on another it wasn't.
That alone should tell any sane person which platform was 'worse'. It's absolutely wild and a failing of our legal system somewhere that the company with the worst effect actually won their own case.
One company was honest about what their platform allows and disallows. You might not like how they choose to run it, but they did what they said.
Another company made claims about their platform (both to end users and to business partners) being "open" and then acted directly counter to those claims, in efforts to prevent competition.
This isn't Google being "punished for being more open" it's punishing them for claiming to be open and then doing a heap of hidden deals to prevent competition.