[bilbo0s]

>but their influence on businesses, markets, policies, etc. is massive and is basically indistinguishable from a market monopoly...

That won't hold up well in a court of law. That's the problem, we need to change the law. Because the law as it is currently written, just doesn't see something like Apple as anything close to a monopoly.

[ethbro]

Imho, the modern monopoly phrasing should be "a substantial market share" (where substantial is defined both in absolute terms AND as a userbase large enough to be self-sufficient and fund best-of-breed category development).

Iff that is true, you should be prohibited from preinstalling, offering, or endorsing any marketplace... without a customer being able to substitute another at their discretion.

Thereby requiring that you make any and all technical considerations necessary for an alternate marketplace to interface with the end user in exactly the same way your marketplace does. (Aka a public, dogfooded API, and no secret internal API shenanigans).

[bilbo0s]

That wouldn't fly. A small company could release a best of breed product, and everyone could say it meets the definition of a monopoly. Unless you mean that the company would have to have a certain minimum marketshare AND ALSO would have to have best of breed product. (But even that would be problematic. We could likely get courts to go for something like 60%+, or even 50%+ with effort. But the courts are just gonna have a big problem with anything less than 50%.)

[ethbro]

I'm not saying these businesses should be illegal, simply that there are additional responsibilities on them once they scale. Post-monopoly, maybe "significant market participant" would be better terminology.

There are two considerations that contribute to the ultimate consumer ills:

(1) Do I, as a user, have robust choice of alternatives with equivalent functionality? (Absolute market share * , coupled with self-sustainability)

In the case of the Android / iOS duopoly, I do not.

(2) Is the owner of the product using its dominance in such a way that users of the product must contribute post-initial-sale revenue to that owner?

In the case of Android & iOS, I must.

Monopolies will arise naturally in technology. And they're healthy: FAANMG deliver amazing technologies.

But a single choice should not allow a company to passively leverage your demand ever after (e.g. by attracting suppliers, from whom they can then take a cut). This extends beyond marketplaces and app stores, but they're the current offenders.

Amazon's shopping marketplace is the trickiest example. Is Amazon a "significant market participant" in online sales? Yes. Does the Amazon seller marketplace allow Amazon to extract additional revenue from suppliers by gatekeeping access to Amazon users' demand? Yes.

In Amazon and Walmart's cases, they should probably have retail cleaved from their logistics chains.

* I'd put this number low enough that the total number of large competitors should be sufficient to promote true choice. By gut, 2 is probably too small, 3 seems dicey, so let's say 25%.

[bilbo0s]

>In the case of the Android / iOS duopoly, I do not...

???

Why's that?

Serious question.

And

>But a single choice should not allow a company to passively leverage your demand ever after...

That's how things have always worked though. And I'm not only talking about the tech industry now. I'm talking about nearly everything. Literally everything from Automobile manufacturers obliging you to buy accessories which fit only their vehicles, to sewing machines, even simple things like shaving razors.

We have to narrow our focus if we want the government and the courts to take us seriously. These shotgun approaches that qualify nearly every major corporation in nearly every market sector for a breakup just make us seem like amateurs.

You can't have a marketplace that you participate in? That just makes no sense. I mean think about it, you've just snared Walmart, Target, and dozens of other retailers with similar web presences in your net. You have to have something more tailored to tech companies, or you have to go with the laws as they stand. You can't say, "Oh, I just want to handicap companies comprising the top 25% of every market sector in the country." That makes you seem unreasonable.

[Jommi]

>Why's that? >Serious question.

It stems from the second bundling problem about iOS: They bundled the OS and the device. If switching OSs were easier, it wouldn't be such a problem.

[amelius]

I think that's why the term "quasi-monopoly" is often used instead.

[nikofeyn]

i wasn't necessarily making a legal argument, but i agree with you. our government has stopped caring about corporate influence because they benefit from it while it hurts society as a whole.