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by acituan 2197 days ago
> Throwing around buzzwords proves nothing

These are technical terms, not buzzwords and calling them so doesn't make much of a counter-argument.

> That's the essence of a free market

No it is not. You seem to equate free market with unregulated market which is not always true. Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition, which is what precisely the App Store on iPhone is. Nearly half of the mobile phone apps in the US comes from a closed market. Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads, e.g. only certain grocery store's trucks can deliver goods over them. That would be far from a free market too.

1 comments

> These are technical terms, not buzzwords

The technical definitions of these terms don't support the claims you are making using them, so you're not using them as technical terms, you're using them as buzzwords.

> You seem to equate free market with unregulated market

Not at all. A free market is regulated by the voluntary choices of market participants.

> Markets fail to self-regulate in the absence of open competition

So your definition of "open competition" is "Apple can't choose the terms on which it is going to provide products and services that it built itself". By that definition, "open competition" has nothing whatever to do with "free market", since in a free market every market participant gets to choose the terms on which it is going to provide goods and services that it built itself. Forcing market participants to provide goods and services on terms they would not choose for themselves is not a free market.

> Imagine instead Apple owned half of the roads in the US and stipulated what businesses could use those roads

Roads are not the same as smartphones or apps; roads are exclusive in a way that smartphones and apps are not.