If Apple has a monopoly on the iOS App Store market, then it follows that Epic has a monopoly on the Fortnite add-on market, right?
> the question as to what is anticompetitive and what is simply good business changes as a business scales. A small business can generally be as anticompetitive as it wants to be, while a much larger business is much more constrained in how anticompetitively it can act
The word “monopolize” is used in a specialised way in antitrust; it doesn’t encompass every exclusive right of sale, because that would disrupt many small businesses and law is intended to prevent huge businesses from dominating the economy.
Who are you going to buy from without giving Epic a cut? They're the only ones offering Fortnite items.
How is that argument any different than the one Apple is making?
The physical cards cost money to produce and the retail stores will insist upon a decent cut. And then the cards are often discounted by 10, 15 or even 20%.
So instead, people move the goalposts to an aftermarket of the product (iOS apps) and claim that Apple has a monopoly over that market instead. But every company has a natural monopoly over their own products, and by the very same logic you could claim Epic has a monopoly over the aftermarket of their product (Fortnite skins).
Size of the business is not relevant unless:
1) The business has a dominant market position
Or
2) The behavior of the business is likely to result in the business achieving a dominant market position
Neither of these apply to Apple. They are a minority player in the smartphone market and their market share is shrinking.
If Apple has a monopoly on their own App Store then Epic has a monopoly on their own game. Period.
The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices), while the iPhone only has Android as competition, which is taking the exact same 30% cut.
Oh no it isn't. There are very few successful (and even fewer wildly successful) MMORPGs and countless failed attempts.
Games are not really fungible. It's not like I'm going to go out of Fortnite to buy items in WoW instead and treat them as the same. They are two completely different markets.
> The bottom line is that Fortnight can have practical competition (that for example offer 3rd party plugins or lower prices)
No, unless things change, you need to use the Epic store.
iOS on the other hand has a single serious competitor, Android, and if you have an iPhone you can't install Android on it when you get mad at Apple - you need a whole new phone. From a developer's perspective, you would miss out on all the iPhone users if you ship and Android app and not an iOS one. In that sense, Apple has significant monopoly-like power over the app market; solidified by the fact that you can't just install Google play store and start downloading Android apps on your iPhone if you get fed up with Apple' App store. The switching costs are too high for most users to consider it, except when buying a new phone.
A lot of this comes down to what a meaningful market is. E.g. Border's and Barnes and Noble learned the hard way that they were in the same market as online book selling - you couldn't usefully look at their book store models and ignore Amazon in the last ~decade.