[Nevermark]

> Consumers are indeed able to decide for themselves

> they can buy any number of Android phones

I can imagine a world in which iPhone's and Android phones were drop in replacements for each other.

And I can imagine Apple selling many wonderful interoperable products into an open standards ecosystem, with a tiny fraction of its current market cap.

But we live in a world with a huge global corporation with a highly knit ecosystem, quietly investing billions of dollars retarding threatening innovation, continually raising switching costs, and the costs of interoperability with alternatives, growing a tax base of third party efforts having little to do with Apple's efforts (streaming media and games, third party stores, creator economy, ...), shifting inconveniences from users to third parties, etc.

There are worse forms of coercion, i.e. the systematic privacy violations and manipulative media of the surveillance economy (run in part by Google the major benefactor of Android, and which even Apple dips its toes into).

But the choice between iOS and Android ecosystems is anything but a simple easily informed choice, free of supplier leverage, conflicts of interest, with predictable long term implications in cost efficiency and future freedoms of choice for most users.

[gms]

That's clearly not the world most consumers want, otherwise they would have directed their money towards Android in the early days. They didn't.

For the minority who do want this world, again, there is a laundry list of Android variants they can buy.

Coercion implies the threat of violence due to non-compliance. There is no coercion here. Apple, Google, etc aren't governments.

[danShumway]

Arguably it is clearly the world that most consumers want or they wouldn't have voted for a government that enacted these policies.

I think it's a little silly to argue that purchasing decisions for a device are an endorsement of every single aspect of that device. There are features that are desirable on iOS that would be enough to influence a consumer to buy an iOS device that have nothing to do with whether or not the device supports sideloading.

But if we are arguing that purchasing decisions are an endorsement of every corporate decision about a device, then it seems silly to argue that voting decisions are not a similar endorsement of government policy. And of course, Apple is not legally obligated to serve the EU, they're one of richest companies on the entire planet so if anyone is equipped to be choosy about the markets they support, it's Apple. However, Apple has freely chosen to do business in the EU, and EU residents have freely chosen to vote for politicians that have imposed regulations on Apple's presence in the market.

Of course I don't actually think it's that simple. But ignoring the lock-in present in government policy and market participation is no less silly than ignoring the lock-in on in a device where moving away from the ecosystem can cause your credit card to stop working. A more reasonable take is that consumers make purchasing decisions for complicated reasons, some of them having nothing to do with lock-in (if they are even aware of lock-in or security or user freedom debates to begin with, which is usually not the case), and their preferences about these systems can change wildly depending on the circumstances and affordances and research that they do.

As an example, Facebook argued that users were clearly opting in to tracking on iOS by choosing to use the Facebook service instead of the many other available social networks they could sign up for. Thankfully, Apple didn't agree, and when users were offered a more clear choice about whether to share advertising IDs with Facebook, many of them said no. If we took a view that participation in an ecosystem was endorsement of the entire ecosystem, we'd be arguing that Apple adding privacy controls in front of Facebook was somehow circumventing the social-media market. But as it turns out many users did want privacy controls in front of Facebook, just not so much that they were willing to avoid Facebook entirely. When offered the best of both worlds, they were happy to use Facebook while sharing less information with the service.

[gms]

You can switch vendors any time (e.g. to Samsung, LG, Google, or any other Android/Microsoft variants). That's not the same as governments - that feedback loop is way longer. Especially with something as sprawling as the European Commission.

Given the size of Facebook's userbase and its revenue growth over many years, most people don't care about the tracking that goes on there.

[danShumway]

> You can switch vendors any time (e.g. to Samsung, LG, Google, or any other Android/Microsoft variants)

You'll have to dig yourself back out of the vendor lock-in in order to do so. If you have an Apple device and you use an Apple credit card, switching to Android means changing your credit card and changing your subscriptions. It means different compatibility rules between devices, it means different app availability. Sometimes it means giving up related services that are not available on other platforms (almost like the switching costs inherent in bundling services together is part of what this debate is about).

Of course, you can do all that. But you can also emigrate between countries in many cases. The EU and US will allow you to move someplace else if you want to. It'll be expensive, it might be prohibitively expensive, there might be large switching costs and things you have to give up -- but that's just another system of vendor lock-in. The United States will not (generally) say that it's illegal for you to move to France.

And note that with Apple in particular, Apple has the resources to move out of countries if it wants to. Apple is not a single family struggling to make ends meet that can't afford legal advice on how to exit a market. Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. If Apple doesn't want to be part of the EU market, Apple has the freedom to walk away from that market -- and in fact, corporations have done this before, they have exited markets over policy. There are few companies in the world where participation in a market is more of a choice than it is with Apple.

To say that developers have a choice about which ecosystems they work with but that Apple doesn't have a choice about whether it does business in the EU... it's just wildly inconsistent. Oh, Apple would have to give up a lot of revenue, sure. But I wonder if developers making a decision about whether to support iOS have ever faced that conundrum? ;)

I'll concede that the scale is different, but there is no bright line here that makes vendor lock-in fundamentally different, you're just quibbling over where to draw a line on a continuum. And it's a lot simpler and more accurate to the real world to just say, "yes, governments can impose more switching cost but that doesn't mean that switching costs and the concept of coercion stop existing outside of governments." People like to pretend that the extreme power of governments and the extreme danger of government overreach means that they're fundamentally the only system of coercion and that means that markets are always pure expressions of free choice, and it's just obviously not true.

Governments are coercive and are often coercive on a level beyond the market. There is a reason why we care more about freedom of speech as applied to the government than as applied to businesses. Scale matters. But scale is not the same as a binary system. The fact that government has more tools at its disposal to coerce people does not mean that the market (or Apple) has none.

----

> Given the size of Facebook's userbase and its revenue growth over many years, most people don't care about the tracking that goes on there.

And yet, when offered the choice when booting up Facebook on iOS, many users chose to disable tracking. Why? I thought we knew their preference. How do we explain this difference in behavior if using Facebook is an expression of approval over how users are tracked? Are we supposed to believe that all of those users suffered concussions and then suddenly became not OK with the tracking anymore?

It's one thing to say that consumers are choosing to opt into a system, but here we have an example of consumers literally demonstrating two separate choices in opposite directions. So it just doesn't make sense to act like using Facebook means users like being tracked when we have extremely clear signals that those same users immediately opted out of being tracked as soon as they had the opportunity to do so.

The only way to explain that behavior is to say that their usage of Facebook did not provide a clear indicator on their preferences on privacy/tracking and that their decision to use Facebook was a complicated decision based on multiple factors and was not some kind of full endorsement of Facebook's business model.

[Nevermark]

Wow, that was really well stated.

I can only add, that votes for Putin are similarly not simple votes. Centralization and consolidation of power, or product categories, encompassing a myriad of implications, into one, two or three entities, completely derail the meaning of seemingly normal expressions of preference.

[gms]

Sure, but that's not the case with Apple. There are a number of smartphone manufacturers (even 'Android' isn't one category - there are many variants) and there aren't many laws preventing new entries into the market that can be sustained by potentially happy customers.

It's not like governments (which also have a monopoly on legal violence, something no corporation has) or political parties at all.

[danShumway]

> It's not like governments (which also have a monopoly on legal violence, something no corporation has) or political parties at all.

Governments sublease the right on legal violence out to corporations -- The government enforces copyright and legal rights for companies like Apple and allows Apple to dictate the terms of how users interact with phones that they purchased, and the government will commit legal violence if those terms are violated.

It's not so simple as to say that government is completely isolated from business. The government seizing 3rd-party repair parts at the border is on behalf of Apple. Apple definitely has agency over ways in which that monopoly on legal violence is wielded. During Apple's lawsuit with Epic, both parties were operating with the understanding that the government would enforce the outcome of that case using (if necessary) legal violence to do so.

These lines are much blurrier than you suppose; there is a reason why the expansion of the DMCA is often called in some circles "felony contempt of business model." You can't let Apple off the hook here when Apple is able to sic the government on people who break their DRM, run emulators, or otherwise bypass technological controls that have been added to Apple devices. Apple is a part of this. The government is not intervening on Apple's behalf without Apple's permission.

Consent is complicated, people often try to define bright lines between "this is a completely fair outcome that is the result of choice" and "this is a coerced outcome" -- and in reality, there aren't bright lines between those scenarios. The market has plenty of ways to coerce outcomes, some of them completely separate from the government (vendor lock-in does not require a monopoly on legitimate violence) and some of them based on leverage of government systems that allow corporations to compel or ban certain consumer behaviors.

[danShumway]

Very good point.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Apple is the same as Putin; there's different kinds of "voting" in any government system. But I really like the way you phrase that: "consolidation of product categories" is a really good description of how Apple's ecosystem works, and it's clear (to me at least) that this consolidation is purposeful and deliberate; Apple wants iOS to be a composite product that is all-or-nothing. And you're completely right that both votes and purchases are often at best decisions about the entire composite ecosystem as a whole and not about the individual parts of those ecosystems.

The consequence is that once consumers are in a place where there are only a few choices about ecosystems that actually make sense to use, there's no longer pressure to change the parts that people don't like as long as the overall ecosystem still remains better than the alternatives. In the same way that single-issue voting allows parties to pass otherwise unpopular policies in other areas, products can excel in specific important areas that allow companies to ignore other flaws and criticisms in other areas. It's very easy for markets to hit local maximums where having a clear market winner in a particular category removes any incentive for the market to otherwise improve, because improving those areas would require at least temporarily moving away from the current best choice.