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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

iOS revenue is 2x larger than android. There might be more cheap android phones out there but Apple has the majority of high income individuals.

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Which is not relevant. Monopoly is defined on a market, not on income segments (and even if it mattered, still on the high income individuals iOS is hardly above say 70%).

Someone could sell cars for $5K and have 99% of the car market in a small city of 1000 people, while another one sells a single car for 100M and has 20 times the other's revenue. It's still the cheap car guy that has the monopoly.

Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses. Apple pulls in 2/3 of the revenue in the mobile app ecosystem and gets to act as a gatekeeper between most consumer startups and their potential customers.

>Revenue based market share is more relevant than unit market share for most businesses.

It's not relevant for monopoly law and whether it's a monopoly, which is what's discussed here...

Of course it's relevant. A definition of monopoly that only relies on raw unit numbers is obviously incomplete.

Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.

>Of course it's relevant. A definition of monopoly that only relies on raw unit numbers is obviously incomplete.

We don't get to pick our "complete" definition we prefer because "we deserve free money/mobile platform access". There's an actual, legal, one...

>Antitrust is about power, and Apple has a lot of it.

Only in the same sense that McDonalds has power not to sell Burger King burgers, and a shop owner has owner to sell whatever the duck they want.

Not power related to monopoly over the mobile market or the app market in general.

The legal definition of antitrust has changed over time and can change again, especially if Warren becomes president.

So...?

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