I HATE these arguments. Peter Thiel talked about this in one of his lectures. He said: when you're a small company you define your market as small as possible in order to compete; when youre a large company, you define your market as large as possible in order to avoid antitrust. To illustrate the example, if you're the only grocery chain in California, you'd argue that "the united states has many grocery chains and we're just one of them!" thats true, but it doesnt mean that you arent acting monopolistically from within California. To bring this analogy back to Apple, we have to look at areas of competition: the area of competition that Apple meaningfully engages in is the apple app store. This would be the equivalent of california. Is any app in the apple app store prevented from meaningfully competing with Apple? Yes! 1. higher prices via app store fees 2. not allowed access to the same apis (e.g. files syncing in the background or no native messaging capabilities) 3. browser + messaging restrictions (e.g. cant link to a website which has any way of spending money). The reason I look at the "app store" as a place of competition is because apple is allowing competition in the space. If Apple removed the app store, or ONLY had Apple apps in the app store, then they would be acting perfectly fine IMO. But they allow this competition because it allows their platform to succeed, but they behave monopolistically wrt that competition to gain the upper hand over time.

Interesting, I haven't quite seen that perspective before. The reasoning of Apple creating a market is the first argument that actually makes sense to me. And I actually agree with the spirit of it. I definitely lean very heavily on Apple's valid security issues, but the fees and deliberate blocking of things that have absolutely no security concerns are a problem.

The grocery chain example has one very important difference: You can choose to buy Apple - they aren't a monopoly by any means in any market. Whereas with the grocery chains - you must go to the store in California or not get groceries.

I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).

Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.

They should remove non-apple apps from their 'marketplace' if this is not a market then. Or single out apps: only one tuner, only one recording, only one scanner... If they allow competition for everyone but themselves, it's anticompetitive behavior.

Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

This doesn't just affect iOS users - if I want to use Briar to communicate, it's just impossible to involve anyone who has an Apple device. They don't need a total monopoly for this to be anti-competitive. They've made it so that if you have 10 devices and you want some feature like AirDrop, it's impossible for that feature to function unless Apple wrote it, because 4 of the devices are Apple devices and Apple monopolizes all network code to those devices.

That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS.

And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.

Dr Dos was a perfect example of MS trying to squash competitors. MS didn't tolerate ANYONE competing with them.

Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.

Lol. Clearly, the EU should force Apple to allow apps to keep TCP sockets open in their background!!!

You people are delusional.

No, but they control access to nearly 100% of the IOS market (all devices except a tiny number of rooted ones).

That is a sensible definition in some cases because their terms for developers, app store charges etc. apply to that whole market. There is also a lot of lock-in and control: Spotify (much less any smaller business) cannot realistically get people to switch to Android to use their app - and with a duopoly that would not be an effective tactic long term anyway.

Does this apply to any software integrations provided by enterprise vendors? Can I use your logic to force Oracle/SAP to list random software on their "integrations" storefront?

I think the answer would be no, and for good reasons.

Do Oracle lock down devices so you cannot install other software on them?

Via license contracts, very much so (if you assume devices = their software as well as hardware).