Amazon ruined my business around 13 years ago. They kept $30K of my money for 6 months and it forced me to shut the business down. The worst part about it is that there was no real appeals process. I was redirected to either an automated response or another department that never responded to calls or emails.
Sure, you can take them to court. But this will bankrupt most people in lawyer fees.
This ended up being a good thing. This experience forced me into a new space, and I had a much more successful business for many years after.
This is what it means to own a platform for which they have a monopoly and do not answer to anyone but themselves.
I say the initial steps for the EU to force apple to open their store to competition is sorely needed, and more needs to be done to prevent such type of abuse with zero recourse.
This is true of every business. You can't set up a small shop selling fruit from your garden in your local Safeway. They own it, they decide what products are being sold from it. If there were only Safeways then maybe you can have a conversation about monopolies, but there are also Albertsons, Fred Meyers, Wincos, Publixes, etc. so you can't argue that Safeway has a monopoly. Unless you're arguing about a monopoly on Safeways, and then, well, yeah.
Apple controls their ecosystem. Google controls theirs. Amazon controls theirs. Microsoft controls theirs.
Developer account removed by Apple (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38394364) - Nov 2023 (425 comments)
It's incredible how much goodwill AAPL has been burning the past few years under Cook. The brand has been stained by repeated, user-hostile blunders, Apple's attitude towards noncompliance with democratically-established law and governments, and its protective, openly hostile attitude towards the people that make its ecosystem so great (developers, artists, etc).
Maybe it's time someone inside Apple started flying Susan Kare's jolly roger again.
