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> but it is not the place of a government to regulate how a company is able to use their own platform that they developed with their own money and tools.

Umm, yes it is. There are plenty of government regulations of companies that are like this but you're so used to it elsewhere that you don't notice or think about it.

I strongly disagree with that. Apple and Google have both spent billions developing and maintaining their respective platforms. A government entity shouldn’t be able to overreach and regulate how they are able to maintain and distribute their own platform.

If Apples decisions were truly so anti-consumer, then consumers would use a different platform, such as android. This is as a developer who has to pay the App Store fees.

All this regulation has done is make the app acquisition experience on iOS worse as a whole and laid a minefield of vague legal regulations and lawsuits yet to come.

Apple (and every other company) is already subject to tons of consumer regulations -- many of them already concerning how they maintain, manage, and distribute their own platform. So why are all those regulations ok but this one isn't? If we remove all consumer protections and regulations then consumers could still -- as you say -- choose to use a different platform.

You could argue this specific regulation itself is bad -- like you can with all other regulations -- but the concept of regulating a business for the benefit of consumers has long been already decided everywhere in the world.

I don’t have any substantive basis to argue some other regulation versus this one that isn’t an emotional basis as a developer without doing further research, but this regulation has now inadvertently made it a worse experience. To my perception this regulation has gone far deeper than any before defining the “market gatekeepers” and attempting to govern how a company can monetize its own market. Regulations are usually “how a company can sell a product in the free market” not “how a company can monetize the services of its already existing product”. That is a consideration of the consumer during purchasing of the product, or a consideration of the developer when developing for it.

At the minimum, this was a poorly planned and executed regulation as displayed by Apple here.

You should read up on the evolution of business regulations in the XIX and XX century.

TL;DR: this is nowhere near the most-reaching one, nor the first to regulate how businesses can sell stuff in their own markets.

Apple and Google (and Facebook, and Amazon, and Adobe, and and and...) are not special: they are just entitled.

Digital services revenue didn’t exist in the 19th and if even at all during the end of the 20th century, so this is still a relatively new space in the timescale of government regulation, and is an entirely new type of market.

Financial services, subscriptions, and other service-based commercial relationships pre-date digitalisation by decades. The main differences for digital products are actually items that Apple are rejecting even today: the fact that national borders are disappearing, and that unregulated everything-as-subscription creates neofeudal relationships. Hopefully we'll address that at some point.

> I strongly disagree with that. Apple and Google have both spent billions developing and maintaining their respective platforms. A government entity shouldn’t be able to overreach and regulate how they are able to maintain and distribute their own platform.

What? That's a large part of most government's responsibility. If we used the logic you described above, then the US government should never of touched Big Tobacco, Bell, Standard Oil, US Steel, ect.

I don't really want to debate if the multi-trillion dollar conglomerate known as Apple is a monopoly, however I'll happily engage with anyone who thinks a government shouldn't regulate a company they concluded to be anti-competitive and monopolistic.

EU citizens are so used to onerous regulation they don't connect it to their non-existent tech sector.

Regulation is not the problem in Europe; lower concentration of capital and higher risk-aversion are.

What kind of "onerous regulation" are we used to, exactly?

So when do I get to set up my own furniture stores in Ikea (HQ: Stockholm, Sweden, European Union) or have my own bakery inside a Carrefour (HQ: Paris, France, European Union)?

Supermarkets and furniture stores are pretty competitive …

I have an example from Germany, though, for you: stores selling newspapers and magazines basically have no choice on what exactly to sell. The goal of this regulation is that no matter where you are, basically all publications are available everywhere easily.

In that sense stores are sort of forced to act sort of like ISPs for print publications. They just have to offer everything.

> The goal from the EU was clearly to make iOS have an android level of openness

And if I’m reading it right, both apple and the eu (and its citizens) can share a cake happily - a nonprofit org can create an app store without any fees (f-droid alternative), where end-users can safely install actually free and not freemium software, while meta/google will be blocked from leeching on the platform due to their network effect, at least doing free apps as a for profit company (aka, where the user itself is what gets sold) will not be financially sensible way, so they have to play by apple’s ways (which is again, both a win for apple and the end-users for stricter privacy regulations).

Also, I do think that certain specialized, commercial software may find its niche on alternative stores, and that’s also a win for everyone - they surely calculated that transaction costs not going through apple is better for them even with the cost.

So, I don’t see the problem.

> The goal from the EU was clearly to make iOS have an android level of openness

If regulation is supposed to help consumers, and a large percentage of consumers have chosen the non-Android option, why was any regulation needed? No one was being forced onto iOS.

I think the (supposedly approved) rules ended up convoluted because many (most?) users are perfectly fine with iOS when given the choice, and the EU had to accept that fact.