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by amyjess 1987 days ago
What I want to see is Apple broken up.

Split them into a hardware company, an OS company, an app store company, and an applications company, and permanently forbid those companies from collaborating or moving into new markets.

4 comments

???

Well then I'm glad you're not in charge.

The best thing about my Mac is how well integrated the OS is with the hardware.

And from there how well the applications, which are well-integrated with the hardware, work alongside the corresponding applications on my iPhone.

Not only is this completely ludicrous (the latter part of they can’t work together), I don’t think most Apple customers would want this, only its competition.

Making it illegal to be successful and give customers what they want sure seems to to be a winning economy policy?

What a laughable opinion. Who would break up Apple? The U.S. gov't? Assume they do, what is to stop Apple from moving operations overseas to evade the breakup. That would be a huge loss to the engineering talent in Cupertino.

Also I have noticed this narrative increasing online. A size-able company/mega corp does something the public assumes is done with malice and the ONLY solution is to "break up" the company. I think this narrative is misguided.

Is there any chance of this happening? Heck, even Facebook and Google are taking too long to be broken up. I'm expecting a minor antitrust fine in the order of 10s of millions.
Google has a slight possibility. Facebook larger.

Apple is not a monopoly and has not been anticompetitive by any historic or contemporary legal definition. So no, it won’t get broken up any time soon.

You might see markers get regulated (eg. Mobile app stores) but that’s not antitrust, that’s legislation.