Comment by choilive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choilive | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is confusing monopolies and being the only effective player in a market.

Apple did not have a monopoly on podcasts, they were basically the default option for consumption on iOS and a LOT of people have iOS devices. Anyone can make a competing podcast app - that is not to undermine the difficulty of getting any significant market share here - but the barriers are not that high.

True monopolies have built in market barriers that is impossible without nearly unlimited monetary and political capital.

An example of a true monopoly might be your local electric utility company. They have a monopoly on delivering electricity to your home and (in certain areas) a monopoly on generation as well.

Even if you had the political backing - the enormous amount capex to acquire any amount of marketshare just to deliver a commodity with relatively slim margins means no startup could ever tackle it.

Using your position in other markets to eliminate competition in other areas is acting like a monopoly. Apple does it in your example and many others areas.

> a true monopoly

a natural monopoly.

You're saying that with the benefit of hindsight. If their dominance was broken, then retroactively they were never a monopoly.

Lets say in a town there is a McDonalds. Its open for 10 years with no competition. Someone might claim that McDonalds has a monopoly on the burger market because they're the only game in town. Now lets say the population of that town grew 2x in that time. If Burger King then opens up across the street, was there ever a monopoly or was there simply no incentive for competition to show up?

For at least a decade - nobody made any significant money off podcasting - neither service providers nor the shows themselves. It wasn't until probably 2015 that it really started taking off (with the likes of Joe Rogan) and Apple did not truly monetize it until 2019 when they introduced subscriptions.

Now that podcasting is a multi-billion dollar industry, its easy for people to point the finger and cry that Apple has had a "monopoly" on podcasting since 2005 when in reality it was a very niche market for a very very long time and there was no competition simply because there wasn't much money to be made.

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