> "The difference is that Apple is not a government."
That means they are not an organization that is accountable to the public. That means they are an organization that cares more about profit and market share, than about human/civil rights.
You started by comparing Apple to a government. The difference is that the government represents you, while Apple represents their share holders.
Of course my local coffeeshop also represents their owner (no idea if they have share holders), so what's the difference with Apple? Size. I don't know what your local coffeeshop is like, but mine is not a trillion dollar company. Apple is. And Apple's products are used by millions of people all over the world. That means Apple wields a lot of power. They may not be able to lock you in prison, but they are able to block or restrict your usage of your electronic devices. They have a lot of power over other companies that want to provide services through those devices.
And without regulation, all of that power is unchecked; they wield that power for the profit of their shareholders, not for the public good. They have in the past harmed users and companies because Apple saw a way to make more money by monopolising certain functionality.
All businesses have owners, with equity as a proxy for who owns how much. A coffee shop might have one equity holder or it might have a dozen or it might be Starbucks with as many shareholders as they have. As far as the difference goes, it is the difference between an S-Corp or a C-Corp and each has their own tax advantages and disadvantages from a tax perspective.
Each has one thing in common though: if you don’t like their crap, you don’t buy it. If the coffee sucks or you can’t install the software you want, you buy something else. Apple’s power is over the products they sold and the services they continue to provide after the purchase. You can install any kind of software that you can get working, what Apple doesn’t do is promise any kind of support for getting every type of software to run on the products they sold, nor are they obligated to. Those are the terms, they are fairly well known, you can take that information with you into the marketplace and choose from what’s available or try to scrape something together that will do the same thing from parts. Might not be as nice as Apple’s stuff, but it will have as much capability as you put into it.
I seriously don’t get the siren song of regulation as it is sung here. I see value in some laws, I don’t see value in laws as a reaction to every move a corporation makes to try to bend them to the public’s will. Corporations aren’t people, but they represent the private interests, time and money of real people, but that concept seems so abstract to people that they can treat large organizations as public bodies with all the responsibilities of something that has much more power over their lives and many more people under their employ which can abuse that power when in reality, Apple has no more power over your life than your coffee shop, just whatever power you choose to give it.
> You started by comparing Apple to a government.
I know these threads can run long and it is easy to list the thread but here is what I originally responded to:
>> Another interesting tidbit is the answer to the common trope that 'private platform can act as they wish since they are private' :
> Now the EU is saying the same thing to Apple. It is their market, and they dictate the rules. Which is perhaps a taste of Apple's own medicine?
> I wonder what those people who keep saying it is Apple's platform they can do what ever they want had to say?
I didn’t like the mindset this commentary reflected, in particular the idea that the EU or any of its member nations “own their markets” the way Apple owns the App Store, because that is dangerously close to saying governments own people. Markets are reflective of the individual choices of people. You can own the NASDAQ, but you can’t own the people trading on the NASDAQ and you don’t own the companies listed on the NASDAQ merely by owning the NASDAQ, but you can set the criteria by which you list companies on the NASDAQ.
A nation can have jurisdiction over its internal market, businesses, a place where their laws are enforced, and don’t get me wrong, their laws, good or bad, are still their laws. I won’t dispute that, but having jurisdiction is not the same as ownership, and the market is some kind of central body or organization you can own, it’s all the people in a market who trade with all the other people in a market, whether that market is a dozen people or all the people in the world.
No problem - the local coffee shop is also subject to regulations and needs to pay tax, need to respect hard fought worker laws (at least in most countries) and needs to respect the law.
Now there are some new regulations for bigger entities. What's the problem?
Is the problem the license plates or the license plate readers?
This is not a strong argument for the merits of “size” of business in the context of lawmaking. This demonstrates the privacy defects of what is a law enforcement tool intended for vehicle identification.
Arbitrary? Size correlates directly to power, monetary power, platform power. If size was arbitrary and meritless then why there are regulations on antitrust that are basically based on size of market capture?
Let me put it differently, market share does not equal profit share does not equal revenue share does not equal total number of people employed by does not equal share of ownership in a particular store or platform. So what is the measure?
Apple owns 100% of the App Store, but they do not recognize 100% of the revenue from the App Store on their financials.
An arbitrary number of people like 45M EU citizens choosing to use your service or buy your products or shop in your stores? I don’t see the merits for this distinction.
That means they are not an organization that is accountable to the public. That means they are an organization that cares more about profit and market share, than about human/civil rights.