Comment by ucaetano

> who presumably thought it would be a good, durable, new line of business

Building an app isn't any different from starting a company. If you're a self-employed app developer, there's a strong chance that your app will just be yet another random app with not key differentiation.

Apps are just as competitive as other markets, and often even more as the barriers to entry to creating an app go down. This is the same with content: when creating content became almost free (hosting is free, you have a camera in your phone already, basic video editing is free) that lowered the barriers to entry, dramatically increasing competition and therefore reducing the available profits.

So, by reducing the cost of creating content, Google made its store and the ad business more profitable.

Now on some of the "monopoly" arguments being thrown around: people usually define monopoly in two ways:

1) Causes harm to consumers

2) No harm to consumers (usually benefits) but drives other companies out of business

If you're proposing (2), you're arguing that the government should be protecting less efficient companies.

Now that's a really bad idea.