[chacham15]

I HATE these arguments. Peter Thiel talked about this in one of his lectures. He said: when you're a small company you define your market as small as possible in order to compete; when youre a large company, you define your market as large as possible in order to avoid antitrust. To illustrate the example, if you're the only grocery chain in California, you'd argue that "the united states has many grocery chains and we're just one of them!" thats true, but it doesnt mean that you arent acting monopolistically from within California. To bring this analogy back to Apple, we have to look at areas of competition: the area of competition that Apple meaningfully engages in is the apple app store. This would be the equivalent of california. Is any app in the apple app store prevented from meaningfully competing with Apple? Yes! 1. higher prices via app store fees 2. not allowed access to the same apis (e.g. files syncing in the background or no native messaging capabilities) 3. browser + messaging restrictions (e.g. cant link to a website which has any way of spending money). The reason I look at the "app store" as a place of competition is because apple is allowing competition in the space. If Apple removed the app store, or ONLY had Apple apps in the app store, then they would be acting perfectly fine IMO. But they allow this competition because it allows their platform to succeed, but they behave monopolistically wrt that competition to gain the upper hand over time.

[kayodelycaon]

Interesting, I haven't quite seen that perspective before. The reasoning of Apple creating a market is the first argument that actually makes sense to me. And I actually agree with the spirit of it. I definitely lean very heavily on Apple's valid security issues, but the fees and deliberate blocking of things that have absolutely no security concerns are a problem.

[r00fus]

The grocery chain example has one very important difference: You can choose to buy Apple - they aren't a monopoly by any means in any market. Whereas with the grocery chains - you must go to the store in California or not get groceries.

I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).

Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.

[orwin]

They should remove non-apple apps from their 'marketplace' if this is not a market then. Or single out apps: only one tuner, only one recording, only one scanner... If they allow competition for everyone but themselves, it's anticompetitive behavior.