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Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
(www.bostonherald.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Technology
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You kinda walked that back by yourself, I think. The point of anticompetitive practices isn't having a 100% market share, it's having a position of strength to enforce your control of the market.
So... you know, being dicks.
Enforcing a single form of in-platform commerce where you get a share and banning all other ways to sell or install software, downgrading the quality of media generated by your competitors, bundling your own unrelated software and adding roadblocks to competing alternatives... all of that is part of what's being discussed here.
The point is that there is a resonable alternative in Android, no one is forcing you to buy an iPhone, nor is the market lacking in available alternatives.
Yes, Apple are dicks, but they don't have a monopoly.
See, that's the problem with modern politics. Warren knows very well that "a monopoly" understood as "the single remaining actor in a market" is imprecise and not the bar needed for antitrust laws to kick in. But she also knows that "an anticompetitive position of strength in the market" will not make the same headlines and confuse people.
So she says "a monopoly".
So you say "not a monopoly".
So this is a sterile conversation.
Antitrust laws are in place to prevent the specific behaviors Apple has been engaging in for ages. From the muscling out of third party repair shops to the attempt to bundle together every piece of software and hardware they make in-house, Apple is blatantly violating competition rules all over the place. The only reason they haven't been more aggressively regulated already elsewhere is their monopolistic price-hiking doesn't play in territories that are more sensitive to pricing for tech. Maybe on purpose? Hard to tell. If Apple had the type of market share across the EU it has in the US one can only imagine what sort of fines or threats to split it up it would have received by this point.