Comment by dragonwriter
2 years ago
> Is Apple even a monopoly though?
Do they have pricing power? You can select any boundaries you want for markets to come up with any market share number you want, but the key empirical test is is there actual substitution effect or does Apple have the ability to charge monopoly rents. One of the major points of walled gardens is to create vendor lock-in and prevent price conpetition, and Apple has been masterful at that.
In their App Store they absolutely have pricing power. They take a high tax, which is higher than most actual taxes, on nearly every single application installed despite doing basically nothing. Things like denying a application the ability to even mention services can be bought elsewhere are the worst offender of their misconduct and other offenses would be forcing apps to use their payment system, again with an extremely high fee, even on recurring subscription charges. Normally a payment processor takes 2 to 3 percent, not 30 %.
Sony (PlayStation store), Microsoft (Xbox store), and Valve (steam) all take 30%. No one can speak on what Nintendo takes due to NDA. Why are they never brought up?
Those stores can be abusing their monopoly position as well. Apple has the greatest sales of all of those stores though so it should rightly be targeted first. They flew under the radar for far too long. People are literally going back to using websites rather than apps because of their decision, but Apple even tried to kill progressive web apps recently - which are basically just shortcuts to websites on the Home Screen.
Sony is currently facing antitrust lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions over the Playstation Store.