Comment by lapcat
3 days ago
> Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The criticism of monopolies is that market forces aren't able to let a failing system fail.
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.
Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.
If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.
In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.
No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s.
Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.
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He's myopic to the actual conflict. The system isn't failing, it's a very profitable business for Apple.
One of my issues with this is that the market is often pretty slow. With a lot of things, it feels like the market won't have resolved it until I've been dead for 150 years, and, to me, that's just about as good as not solving the problem at all.
Oof. Gets screwed by a monopoly, defends monopolies: idealism is a chain. It frustrates me how some people are buried in this ideology, given 90% of it would be denied with Economics 101.
Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism.
Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy.
Why couldn’t the competitor make customers aware?