No need. Market is functioning reasonably well, as Android, PineOS, FirefoxOS, and similar alternatives exist.
Just because someone purchased a product doesn't mean they were coerced into the purchase. Apple products still function fine and legally, if not ongoing service isn't exactly ethically run by the company management.
I'm not sure I'd like a government (whom at least in theory, exists to protect & provide as much collective good for their constituents as possible) to approach the situation in such a cold strictly economic fashion. Hundreds of millions of people unfairly being taken advantage of to the benefit of a small privileged few is exactly what I think governments ought to be trying to prevent.
>Just because someone purchased a product doesn't mean they were coerced into the purchase.
So what if they weren't coerced? Should government really have to wait until an apple exec points a gun to someone's head while they make a purchase before they can try and help? Isn't it possible a lot (I'd argue most) of these people don't realize all the financial nuances they've unwittingly become party to when choosing a phone. Think about all the grandparents who opted to get iphone because that is the one their grandchildren uses, think of all teenagers who chose IOS because that's what their friend group uses, heck think of all the literal children using IOS because that's what their parents gifted them for Christmas. Should the government really just turn their heads while children, teenagers, elderly, and so on are unwittingly agreeing to participate in a financially abusive arrangement.
I think you and I are running into the classic "is" vs "ought" disagreement. While I agree with you that this is currently legal, I also believe that it ought not to be due to the negative impact it has on hundreds of millions of people.
No, where Apple goes wrong and will lose the market is through the exercise of market access to developers, as they lock the currently largest market down. It's also a implicit tax for purchasing.
But the legal remedies are already stymied. We are stuck with the stupidity of the decision for awhile despite the minor migration inconvenience.
Thus ends the House of Jobs, not with a fight but with a pyhric win.
>Fundamentally, I disagree with the assertion that because a minor consumer purchase goes south and charges an unarguably illegal processing fee (for interchange) now deemed legal for hardware providers that the usual moral justification for this, consumer welfare, is harmed as the BATNA is simple - get a different maker's phone. Varying qualities of substitutes are easily attainable.
Honestly we may just have to agree to disagree. Both from my own personal experience helping friends and family as well as professional experience working in IT the act of switching away from apple is always an incredibly stressful and more often than not a significantly disruptive event for the user.
A good example here is the elderly. The energy and effort that goes into learning how to use a new phone is significant for most people 70+ and a huge factor when they're trying to decide to upgrade or switch their current phone. Very often, this daunting task is legitimately not worth it for them even if it that means letting apple take advantage of them simply because they don't think or truly know that they don't have the bandwidth to take on learning another smart phone.
Here you have a vulnerable class of people who just can't simply switch over to another OS even when they have the means, ripe for financial abuse. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company and governments ought to be doing whatever needs to be done to protect the millions of people who are functionally stuck using their platform from being abused.
In regards to the rest of your comment I don't feel knowledgeable enough to comment. All I really wanted to say is:
(a) millions of people are negatively impacted by this to the benefit of a small few.
(b) a huge majority of those people likely aren't aware that they're being taken advantage of and even if they did, a meaningful amount of them couldn't do much about it without some help and/or incurring considerable amounts of stress throughout the switch.
(c) What Apple is doing here is exactly the behavior I believe governments ought to be trying to prevent.
Can you justify this? These sorts of phones were unthinkable only 20 years ago, even for a billionaire and now they're extremely affordable. That is a net positive impact all of this seems to be at best a tiny dip in.
> a huge majority of those people likely aren't aware that they're being taken advantage of
Let's wait until they are aware, and let them choose. We shouldn't assume other people's choices and "act in their best interests".
> What Apple is doing here is exactly the behavior I believe governments ought to be trying to prevent.
We have endless periods of time where the setup wasn't conducive to the sort of innovation that's happened over the last 20 years in phones. Governments are indeed great at that. It's just hard to notice until you see a country with a government that is conducive to innovation, and then they start creating entirely new industries, and you wonder what happened.
