[Dma54rhs]

They have Monopoly over the iPhone market, everyone was free to distribute programs for Windows but MS still got into deep trouble because of IE. In the eyes of the law you don't have to run 90 or 100% market share to be considered to be a monopoly.

[EPWN3D]

> They have Monopoly over the iPhone market

There is no such thing as "the iPhone market" for anti-trust purposes -- there is the mobile phone market. And competition in that market is inarguably healthy. Customers have plenty of choices that aren't iPhones, and largely they seem fine with them. You might as well argue that Chevrolet has a monopoly on the Corvette market.

Microsoft got into trouble because they were found to have a monopoly on the personal computer operating system market and then they deployed that monopoly to shut out competition in a separate market -- web browsers.

No one said that Microsoft had a monopoly on the "Windows market" because that's a tautology.

The fact that they were successful enough to obtain a monopoly in the PC OS market wasn't itself illegal. Their usage of their position in the OS market to gain an advantage in the web browser market is what was found to be illegal.

[error503]

While this is probably an accurate interpretation under current anti-trust practices, I would argue that with the way things have become vertically integrated, the importance of people's 'digital life', and the extremely large amount of friction involved in moving platforms, they absolutely deserve the same amount of anti-trust scrutiny as a more traditional monopoly even if they don't fit the traditional definition. The abuse of that position exercised by these platform owners is pretty blatant, and very clearly anti-consumer.

The fact that either of two tech companies are able to effectively gatekeep whether a given mobile app can for all intents and purposes exist in the market is a problem.

The law and practices need to react to the state of the world, and this situation was simply not a practical concern until recent times. Hell, the courts have historically been on consumers' side in adjacent ways, such as enshrining the right to reverse engineer & various provisions explicitly permitting doing so for interoperability, the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act, and other decisions that protect consumers from getting screwed by the company they chose to buy a product from regardless of their official status as 'monopoly'.