> an abuse of Microsoft's market position
Apple has no such market position to abuse.
It's perfectly legal to put restrictions on your product. It's perfectly legal to be a monopoly. It's only a problem when you abuse your monopoly position to restrict competitors.
It depends how you want to measure things, in US iOS has more then 50% mobile market share but Apple fanboys will use only this numbers (or how many more purchases are on Apple sore) in the conversations about how cool Apple is, when we talk about the monopoly/duopoly then world wide numbers are used, maybe throw more type of devices in there...
I would say that Apple is clearly anti-competitive, not allowing other browsers, giving their own apps access to private APIs, their own apps ignoring the users firewall and security rules etc, but judges will have to decide on this and if they still consider is legal we might need to update some laws .
IMO the society is more important then a company, so if we decide that we no longer want this bullshit we will advocate and hopefully have the issue corrected.
The Apple situation looks to me similar to when mobile providers would lock phones to their network, then charge you to unlock them, this was made illegal , if you own your phone then the unlock should be possible for free, exception is if you are still renting/paying for the device so you are not owning it fully.
Also judge rejected comparison of open and closed platforms. So she asked Epic lawyers what's the difference between Apple's closed platform and Xbox/PlayStation and Nintendo.
Epic lawyers failed badly without answering. Also failed to answer question when did Apple become monopoly.
That sort of puts it into the realm of a utility; like power or water.
The idea of a utility, is that it is deliberately allowed to become a monopoly, sometimes, with state enforcement. The flip side, is that it is now required to provide a lot of services.
For example, if some old folks can't pay their electric, in winter, the utility might be required to supply them with electricity anyway, and eat the cost, or claim it as a tax deduction.
That's the downside. The upside is...MONOPOLY, BABY! WOO-HOO! PAAAARTAAAY!
So there's a big carrot, as well as stick. People who own utilities tend to get pretty damn rich.
This all kinda breaks down, if the utility is already a monopoly, so the state assigning them monopoly status means nothing. No carrot; only stick. It also breaks down, if the utility manages to corrupt the regulators, thus eliminating the stick.
Facebook is already a monopoly. It doesn't need the state to give it anything; certainly not with a stick, attached. Thus, the "Standard Oil" remedy.
Apple isn't quite like Facebook, but it's getting there. The problem is that a lot of what gives its products value, is that iron-fisted control Apple has over their configuration. If that control is diluted, then it would also reduce the value of Apple products.
Not in any meaningful sense that I can understand. Seems hard to argue that all the people on HN who've plainly stated that they left Facebook can be considered dead or struggling to survive. That's not a sensible definition of survival. Also, Facebook cannot and does not prevent anyone from reaching its users. Facebook users often use other products and platforms as well.
Like what Spotify is suing them over, for example.
