Comment by siavosh

I’m not claiming CEOs are legally required to chase every conceivable revenue dollar or that they’d lose a lawsuit if they don’t. Corporate law doesn’t work that way, and no serious person thinks it does.

What does exist is a well-understood governance and incentive regime: boards evaluate CEOs on long-term shareholder value, compensation is tied to financial performance, and strategic restraint has to be justified in those terms. That doesn’t require lawsuits, and it doesn’t require explicit mandates. It’s how large public companies are run.

The fact that Apple could charge 50% and chooses not to doesn’t refute this — it just shows that extraction is constrained by regulation, backlash, and platform risk. But once those constraints weaken, dominant platforms reliably increase extraction. That’s an empirical pattern, not a legal theory.