Comment by 3D30497420
2 years ago
I presume the question is about impact: At Apple's scale, restricting competition has a very broad impact on the economy. In contrast, a movie theater not allowing outside food is probably not reducing all that much food-related competition in aggregate.
I don't think there's a good real-world "venue/food" analogy. However, hypothetically: Imagine if half of all homes/apartments were controlled by the same company and they also happened to be the largest food producer. They then decided to limit what food could be brought into your home, saying "We have the safest food, so you can only buy our food." Now, they might even be right that their food is the safest, but the market impact would be significant enough to warrant anti-trust action.
Let's say that a movie theatre chain becomes very successful by selling high-quality food instead of stale popcorn laden with artificial butter flavoring. They also curate movies and refuse to screen low-brow garbage pushed out by the studios. The customers love the good movies and good food, so this chain slowly takes over the market, nearly, but not quite, to a level of monopoly. You can still go to competing theatres, but the seats will be sticky, the food will clog your arteries, and you won't enjoy the movie.
So you're saying in this situation the government should step in and force the successful chain with standards to allow competing movie theatres, junk food sellers, and low-budget movie producers to sell their wares in their theatres?
That's literally what's happening with these moves against Apple.
The peddlers of crap are upset that they're locked out of a well-managed market frequented by discerning customers.
That's it.
You seem pretty certain of your opinion, so I doubt anything I can say will sway you.
Nonetheless, it isn't an issue of "quality" or "discerning customers". A company can earn market-share by providing a better product (or a worse product at a lower price) and that's fine.
The issue is when that company uses their market dominance to limit competition. Then it becomes an anti-trust issue. Movie theaters aren't a good analogy since they're far less central to our day-to-day lives, and therefore will have less overall impact on the economy. Nonetheless, imagine your dominant chain makes deals with film producers to prevent their competition from screening popular movies. This prevents the other chains from competing, even if they wanted to.
That analogy breaks down when you look at the state of Safari on iOS. Even ignoring the features of the browser itself, the way its version is tied to the OS version causes tons of support issues for our customers.
No, that's a totally different analogy. The point is the impact of their market power other people who want to sell food, not other people who want to sell movies. Apple controls a very large share of the app market; no movie theater, however successful, controls a significant part of the food market.
They 100% control the food sold inside their theatres! It’s their shop, they can decide what’s sold in it.
People have a choice: it’s called Android.
I don’t see why a private company that isn’t a monopoly should be forced to open up their proprietary products to direct competitors.
This is a very slippery slope and the people advocating for it in the case of Apple will be screaming about how unfair it is for the government to get involved when it happens to them.
Let’s say you have a successful startup selling something like an API marketplace.
One day the government says: It’s unfair to MalwareAPI Co that you lock them out of the market and require a fee. You now have to let them sell their viruses to your customers and you don’t even get a cut.
Would you make the same arguments? Why not?
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