>Corporation like Google should have been fined to the edge of bankruptcy for such predatory behaviour.

Google has an alternative at least (can download other app stores, apks, and have been able to for 15 years), I have no idea how Apple has been allowed to get away with what they do.

Better framing in their lawsuits- being a ‘market’ is less a thing in a monoculture- i.e. the market for Apple phones vs the market for all Android phones from a variety of makers.

Also in the worldwide market it most definitely isn’t a monopoly in phones at all- which is exactly why the EU had to reform their laws (DMA ect)to get regulatory powers over them.

"It's not a monopoly" is exactly the framing. Antitrust isn't inherently concerned with monopolies, it's concerned with market power. It's just that a monopolist has no room to move in claiming that they don't have market power.

They also play this trick where they pretend the only market is "phones" and ignore all of the complementary markets they're tying together with their phones, like app distribution and browser engines etc., since the market definitions for those shouldn't be the same as it is for "phones" when an app store that can be used on Google and Samsung phones can't be used (and therefore doesn't compete) on Apple phones and vice versa.

I never understood the argument that Apple's hostility to developers was unfair. The business proposition is simple: "Buy our overpriced hardware with our famously inflexible and invasive software and sign this massive, legally-binding contract agreeing that you understand all of the above to extract further value out of the Apple ecosystem."

The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatekeep and sloppify as much as they want. Apple users agree to this.

I've never felt slighted that I couldn't hack apart my iPad - though I will absolutely do it once somebody cracks the code and gets a proper Linux kernel running.

> The "App Store" is just a natural extension of the club.

If by "club" you mean Apple's digital fiefdom.

We Americans collectively voted for this for decades. Virtually everyone who has cast a ballot for a national race has voted for this state of affairs.

Especially in the software community, overwhelmingly self-described libertarian, all voted for this.

It takes a big government to stop this from happening. (It also takes a big government to stop structural racism, etc., which means higher taxes, which means there's no such thing as a fiscal conservative who is also socially liberal. But I digress.)

Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.

The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.

Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.

The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.