Comment by multimoon

It's not about having a dominant position, it's about using your power in one market to further your position in another one. Apple control iOS and macOS which is always bundled with the hardware, and they use that to strengthen their own applications. Competitors cannot do it as they do not have the same access that Apple does regarding APIs and other features.

> Your list of services where you claim Apple has a dominant position is entirely products where it does not have a dominant position.

I am not claiming that. I am claiming that Apple has a very dominant position over the most important sales channel lots of companies have to rely on to compete.

Just one example is the at this point famous App Store tax. From a 10$ Apple Music subscription, 9.8$ (lets use these cents for processing) goes to Apple.

For a 10$ Spotify subscription, Spotify makes 7$ after Apple takes their 30% fee. Sure one may say, hey, but Spotify isn't forced to use Apple's service for payments, except they are. Otherwise they loose access to *the* platform most people listen to their music nowadays. Spotify also isn't allow to make Apple subscriptions more expensive and inform users about cheaper subscriptions on their website, because otherwise they'd loose access to the important platform. I guess one can see how this could be considered a abuse of the dominant marked position?

Strictly speaking, for this example past tense would have been fitting. Not because Apple is so generous, but because the EU also considered much of this behavior to be anti-competitive. Hence me wondering if the US courts would be following this line of thinking.

What frustrates me the most is Apple's double dipping. They argue that those fees are required for the development of the platform and technology, pretending as if they didn't already charge a hefty price tag on the products they sell. And in the end, its still the user who is getting screwed. It's not like Spotify or any other provider is eating the platform cost, they charge it up to the user by making their services more expensive.

Also, in their defense in the EU hearings Apple argued that Spotify's success is in large part thanks to the App Store, so it would only be fair for them to pay that amount. The amount of arrogance in that statement is astonishing imho. Developing for a platform is a mutually beneficial relationship, not an altruistic development aid by Apple. What would iPhone sales look like if there was no third party Mail client, no Twitter app and no Instagram or Facebook for their phones?

TD;DR: easy demonstration of how Apple makes more money selling the same product, not because they're more efficient but because they make all the rules.

Totally agreed. And does Apple has a "dominant position" in text messaging? They have around 60% of total phone market share [1], but that seems like a far cry from, say, 80% or 90%, which is what I'd consider "dominant."

Microsoft had over 90% market share of the world's personal computers in the 1990s [2], which I'd also consider dominant... and which did result in some similar antitrust lawsuits.

1. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft

> The entire premise of punishing a company for success when they haven’t violated any laws is insane to me

I'm not clear on what you're implying here, this is a lawsuit, so a punishment will literally only apply if the judge finds Apple in violation of the law.

Is your issue with the law not being 100% specific about this ahead of time? Because I would argue that it's by design - law should lag behind innovation (in both tech and business practices) rather than try to predict and potentially stifle it.

> The entire premise of punishing a company for success when they haven’t violated any laws is insane to me

The government is arguing they have violated the laws, that's the entire point of a lawsuit. Apple has become a private regulator in the mobile app space, and the government is correct to break this power.

> I think dangerous to the market because you’ll stifle companies wanting to try new things for fear of someone attacking them for success.

This is the corporate equivalent of "Oh won't someone pleeeeeeeease think of the children". Give me one example where innovation was stifled because of antitrust action. It almost always goes the other way - corporate regulation is broken and small businesses and new ideas are able to flourish in its' absence.

As to your last point - having a single alternative is hardly a flourishing marketplace where the best ideas win. Distributors should not have the power to determine winners in the marketplace, and Apple's private power as a distributor of hardware and mobile apps has become such that they can ensure their own success regardless of whether they innovate or their customers love them.

Oh no, will someone think of the checks notes $2.6 trillion dollar company. No one would try to do what Apple did for that little financial incentive!

Regulation =/= punishment. Its the government's job to look out for the whole of society, not to make the market as free as possible.

Let’s pretend there’s a world where Apple can’t ban android from getting installed on an iPhone.

Is Apple going to quit making iPhones then?

Their financial incentive is that they’re effectively the default OS on these devices. How many people are installing Linux or ChromeOS on a laptop that was preinstalled with windows?

What this does mean though is that if Apple makes the consumer experience worse, switching OSes doesn’t mean buying a new phone. It means reinstalling with a third party OS.

Graphene OS ftw