Or like the ISPs
Tech is always the soft target for governments worldwide.
Banking, credit, and defense all have a pretty good balance of competition and regulation. That's not to say there aren't areas that should be targeted by governments, but tech is hardly a "soft target." It's never been hit!
lol. Take a look at credit card regulation in Europe and the amount of regulation passed on banks in the last 20 years alone (for good reasons).
The only thing that's soft about tech is the industry's constant whinging because they're finally recognizing that the good old days of getting away with everything might be over.
Credit cards are actually a good example. Let's slap the 0.2% interchange cap that is the legal limit in the EU on the Apple store and see what happens then.
That's exactly the wrong solution, because it implies within it that they get to continue holding a monopoly as long as they're a regulated one. And then the regulations address the most visible seven of the two hundred thousand problems that are caused by monopolies and leave all of the other ones.
What's needed is to reintroduce meaningful competition.
That's a pretty common solution when infrastructure is concerned, which platforms basically are. Having 20 stores on your phone to me makes about as much sense as having 50 postal services driving on the streets.
Not really sure what's wrong with basically making two regulations. Apple/Google get to charge ~1% or whatever for running the store, and they don't get to ban stuff other than content that's unlawful. To me it seems like that solves 99% of the issues we've been hearing about.
It's pretty common for physical infrastructure because it has high fixed costs. Building a water distribution network is billion dollar enterprise. App stores are the complete opposite of that -- if it weren't for the platforms purposely interfering with competing stores, an individual would be able to set one up in a weekend.
> Having 20 stores on your phone to me makes about as much sense as having 50 postal services driving on the streets.
But we do have 50 postal services driving on the streets. Or at least more than one anyway -- USPS, FedEx, UPS, Amazon, plus private couriers, trucking companies and so on.
You might as well ask why we have multiple retailers. "Wouldn't it be more efficient if everybody had to buy everything at Walmart and we just regulated them as a monopoly?" Some minor theoretical increase in efficiency is not worth the crushing oppression that would inevitably bring.
> Not really sure what's wrong with basically making two regulations. Apple/Google get to charge ~1% or whatever for running the store, and they don't get to ban stuff other than content that's unlawful. To me it seems like that solves 99% of the issues we've been hearing about.
Which means you're putting the role of vetting apps onto some other third parties -- good, now there will be competition and you won't be screwed if the monopoly store rejects something they shouldn't. But then what is the Google or Apple store even supposed to be doing? Hosting the app? Anybody can do that. Payment processing? There are a dozen companies that already do that.
The only reason they have a monopoly is that they use control over the platform to purposely put barriers in front of app store competitors. It's not a natural monopoly whatsoever.
And you're just proving the point about how the regulations only solve the most obvious problems and leave all the other ones. For example, if you let them exclude app store competitors, even if they can't charge high fees or exclude apps they don't like, they could still bury them in an unfindable hole by eliminating direct links and putting it on page 5000 of any search results, or cover anything they don't like in arbitrarily scary warning prompts, or find a hundred other ways to make your life hard unless you bend the knee. Whereas if their being unreasonable could be remedied by just going to another store, it actually puts a check on unreasonable behavior in general by way of competitive pressure, without you having to predict and explicitly prohibit it ahead of time.
Android actually allows different stores without too much hassle and everyone is still on Google Play.
The problem with competition is that competition requires choice and choice comes with cost, and people don't like having to make decisions every five minutes, that's the secret sauce behind TikTok's success, it abstracted all the nasty choice away you have to make in social networks, or why twitter beats Mastodon.
Point being you're ending up with Amazon/Walmart/Megacorp XY anyway because that's just how advanced economies roll, they tend towards more concentration, I absolutely won't be surprised if the retail sector is going to consolidate next and small retail just gets wiped out by tech, covid has given us a taste of that already.
It's either regulated behemoths or unregulated ones, the 90s internet isn't coming back.
Competition is the only thing standing in the way of serfdom. Choice is the only thing that allows you to say no to anything because you can get what you need somewhere else. Without it your only option is to say yes to anything no matter how little you want it.
> there's actual research that digital customers are even stickier than physical ones and less likely to shop for alternatives (just ask your aunt how often she goes shopping for web browsers).
Even when this is true, it doesn't mean that competition isn't working. When switching costs are low and people don't switch anyway, it means that it's working well -- in an efficient market all the producers are required to make their products equally good to avoid losing business to the others. Sticking with what you have because the ability to easily switch caused the producer to make it just as good as the alternatives is a very different thing than sticking with what you have even though it's terrible because switching costs are high.
You use browsers as an example, but remember that when Internet Explorer was stagnating, your aunt and half the world switched to Firefox.
Moreover, this is still also a reflection of their anti-competitive behavior rather than actual consumer choice. If when you bought a phone it came with a "web" icon and the first time you click on it, it listed all the popular browsers and had you choose one, that would be a whole different landscape than the one we have where your phone comes with one chosen for you and then suspiciously a disproportionate number of iOS users use Safari and a disproportionate number of Android users use Chrome. If switching costs were actually low, the browser share on each platform should be about the same.
> Android actually allows different stores without too much hassle and everyone is still on Google Play.
This is to some extent the same thing -- Google Play is less abusive than Apple because the competitive pressure keeps them in check more.
But even there, the amount of hassle of installing another store is too much -- if you try to install anything but the default, you not only get scary warnings, the other stores can't actually update the apps they install. And Google privileges themselves immensely by being installed as the default.
> The problem with competition is that competition requires choice and choice comes with cost, and people don't like having to make decisions every five minutes
That's not the problem with competition, it's the mechanism that incumbents use to destroy it.
"People don't want choices" is only true when there are many choices but all the choices are roughly equivalent, so that the gain from a better choice is smaller than the cost of taking the time to evaluate the alternatives. It's only true when the efficient market hypothesis is true. But the efficient market hypothesis requires people to be evaluating their alternatives, or it won't be true.
So if you give everyone a reasonable choice by default, at a time when competition exists, they take it. Because that option is about as good as the others and it saves them time. But when you give the same default to everyone, that destroys competition -- tomorrow none of the other alternatives will exist, because they can't survive just by being as good as the competition when something else is the default. And without them there is nothing left to prevent the default choice from becoming a stagnant and abusive monopoly.
> Point being you're ending up with Amazon/Walmart/Megacorp XY anyway because that's just how advanced economies roll, they tend towards more concentration
They tend towards more concentration because of the unconscionable lack of antitrust enforcement. This isn't a feature of "advanced economies" -- it's just Standard Oil and US Steel all over again.
> I absolutely won't be surprised if the retail sector is going to consolidate next and small retail just gets wiped out by tech, covid has given us a taste of that already.
"Small retail" has been getting wiped out by Walmart and Home Depot for decades. Economies of scale exist. But Walmart doesn't have an anti-competitive moat, it only has low prices. And it still has to compete with Amazon, Target, Costco, CVS, Best Buy, Dollar General, etc. None of which is "small retail" but that doesn't mean any of them is going without effective competition.
> It's either regulated behemoths or unregulated ones, the 90s internet isn't coming back.
Smash the behemoths into non-vertically-integrated pieces and watch the 90s internet come back.