You said you side with Apple, but why? Better analogy is that Apple is a country with a single party, no elections, that dictates who can make money and how much tax they pay. These ecosystems need regulation to enable multiple stores and open APIs.
the dictionary definition of the word analogy does not include those stipulations that you stated.
Any explanation that compares two things meets the definition of analogy. I think you're being pedantic. You can disagree with the comparison, but that doesn't mean it can't be called an analogy.
If I was to make an analogy, I might say Walmart is a better analogy. Walmart is the biggest store in town, but you do have alternatives and nobody is forcing you to shop there, even if it's kind of hard not to. Walmart does all the legwork of getting customers into the shop, then puts other companies' products on its shelves and sells them for a markup. Their markup? Pretty similar to Apple's fee, roughly 25%.
In what way is this different than a country or a state? Nobody is forcing you to live in California, you could sell your house and get a different job and a different social cohort and move to Florida. Nobody is forcing you to use an iPhone, you could sell your phone and replace all your apps and convince everyone you know to switch away from iMessage.
> where you are forced to abide by its laws and pay its taxes.
How are you distinguishing the app store rules and fees from laws and taxes?
> Walmart is the biggest store in town, but you do have alternatives and nobody is forcing you to shop there, even if it's kind of hard not to.
Walmart doesn't own all the real estate for a hundred miles and then prohibit anyone else from building a store that people who shop at Walmart could reasonably patronize. They don't condition your use of their store on buying their car, which in turn refuses to let you drive to any other store, so that if you want/need any product from Walmart you have to get every product from there.
> Their markup? Pretty similar to Apple's fee, roughly 25%.
For a brick and mortar store which is paying for local real estate, physical inventory and human cashiers, none of which Apple does and yet they're still charging higher fees.
But you can't sell apps when you switch platforms, so not really sure how this country/state analogy helps
Next, we'll see people complaining how google.com should be displaying alternative search engine links on their frontpage because it's too hard for people to type bing.com.
You don't even need to live indoors either. You don't need a telephone, you don't need oil, you don't need to make things out of steel. You can live without any of it.
Antitrust isn't about how much you need something, it's about competition. It's illegal to abuse a monopoly on cotton candy, regardless of the fact that nobody actually needs cotton candy.
Moreover, the point of the analogy is to demonstrate switching costs. Phone platform transitions are costly. You not only have to replace your device but all your apps, your operating system (which incurs training costs), any services that are only supported or well-supported on one platform including those with network effects that are used by other people, etc. It's not at all trivial and can involve tens of hours of labor. So if that's what you have to do in order to have a choice in where you can buy a $1 app, that isn't really a choice. It's not anywhere close to cost effective to do it even if the competitor is charging $0.70 for the app instead of $1.
And you would have to do it every time. Even if you switched to Android, now you're stuck in a different market -- Google Play doesn't have to worry about you buying the next app from Apple, because to do that you would have to pay to switch back.
> Next, we'll see people complaining how google.com should be displaying alternative search engine links on their frontpage because it's too hard for people to type bing.com.
Does Android only work with Google and if I want to use Bing I have to buy an iPhone? How many hours does it take to type bing.com?