Apple's really been acting in bad faith with moves like this and the 27% fee on external payments. Regulators took these actions for a reason, and Apple's doing its best to just barely comply, at the cost of bringing even more attention to itself.
The Apple apologia anti regulation response to this comment is ironic because without anti monopoly protections Apple wouldn’t even exist right now.
Microsoft bailed out Apple with an investment entirely because of anti monopoly regulations.
More importantly, MS kept producing versions of Office and even Internet Explorer IIRC that allowed the Mac to remain an option because of their fear of being regulation.
Then after that it was EU anti monopolist regulations that struck down MS and prevented it from strangling the open web, which allowed the web to become an open platform which made it possible for both the Mac and iPhone (which didn’t even have an App Store on launch and relied entirely on web apps) to exist.
The only success Apple can claim credit that wasn’t directly the result of anti monopoly regulation was the iPod and even that wouldn’t have happened because Apple would have folded if Apple hadn’t been protected by anti monopolist regulations.
Imagine if MS had done the shit Apple is doing and blocked iTunes from Windows because it didn’t “add enough new functionality”.
And then when it eventually did allow a gimped version of iTunes charged Apple 30% of all the music and movies sold on it.
If they were being Apple like they would probably have even started charging 20% of the album price of every music CD users ripped to their iPods using iTunes.
And MS was a far more ruthless company. If it wasn’t afraid of anti monopolistic regulation it would have come up with other ideas I can’t imagine in a 1000 years to have absolutely destroyed Apple.
Global market share hardly matters though. UN isn’t regulated monopolies national agencies/EU are. Not that it should matter it’s still an oligopoly which is not that different
this is a super slippery slope. this would mean most manufacturers are actually monopolies because they have control over their own products. i don’t see how this makes any sense.
Not only that, many people that only know Apple after they managed to survive, seem completly unaware that old Apple was always siloed into their own stuff, A/UX and the timid attempt to having clones being officially supported, were the only exceptions to their vertical integration.
Even Atari and Commodore were somehow more open to third party vendors in that regard.
Not disputing anything you're saying, but in hindsight, the web as an open platform was only viable from ~2005-2010 in the window where most people had at-home broadband, but smart phones hadn't taken over.
