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A lot to unpack here, but I have to be brief. I have a lot of real work to do too. First, current anti-trust law does not care at all whether you are a luxury brand, what your "market influence" is, etc etc etc. Current anti-trust law is mostly about market share and anti-competitive practices. Along with a few ancillary but closely related issues. (Again, another reason we need to change the laws, but that's not happening right now.) Second, being the platform and the gatekeeper is the entire business model I've been talking about. That's the business model that has taken over the US over the past 50 or so years. Which is why I suspect that no one has the balls to go after it. Costco is the platform and the gatekeeper. So is Target. So is Walgreens. Don't even get me started on Amazon and Walmart. Etc etc etc. All, and more businesses to boot, are both the foundation and a competitor in what are effectively markets controlled by themselves. (Again, really good reason to change the law and make owning and participating in the same marketplace illegal. But the scale of the problem is a really good reason not to mess with it. I understand that, but I still think the law should be changed to make that one thing illegal and almost all the problems go away. Well, long term they'll go away. Obviously there would be short term pain.) Finally, yeah, in layman's terms there is the idea of, let's call it, "able competition". I can't claim that my map app failed because Apple and Google were anti-competitive. The reason that claim is going nowhere is because of the idea that I never had a reasonably high chance of success in the first place. All that to say, yes, legally, in a court of law, how much of a competitor you are can absolutely come into play. It's not corruption that makes the law pay more attention to the major players either. You can think of it this way, no one should award me millions in damages because my app failed, unless there was actually some kind of reasonable opportunity for my app to succeed in the absence of Apple's anti-competitive actions. You can probably see where that would go if ruled favorably on those kinds of questions. When you allow those kinds of claims, you just open up the door to frivolous time wasters that would be filed by millions of developers against Apple, and Google, and probably Steam as well. And that doesn't even count the physical world. The guy who made Bob's Bargain Basement Garlic Flavored Mouthwash could claim that Walgreen's and Walmart not giving him shelf space was the reason he failed. But for their anti-competitive practices, he would have made millions. But, um, yeah, he wouldn't have. |