Comment by r00fus

It's amusing to think of Apple as a "monopoly" (if anything they have a monopsony on TSMC production) but let's just replace that with "giant" for purposes of discussion.

Tech giants typically devolve local operations to small companies to avoid liability - think petroleum suppliers not owning gas stations (because those typically end up as superfund sites). Not sure if this analogy this works for Google Android and all the manufacturers that deploy it for their smartphones too.

So corporations have been doing this forever, trying to find legal loopholes where they can have their cake and eat it too.