Examples of platforms: A phone operating system, a desktop operating system, a browser.
Examples of 3rd party products and services: A site with apps reviewed and upvoted by users, a curated app review site, an app store that's not affiliated with the hardware or OS maker.
Controlling the former offers real opportunities for anticompetitive behavior. You have buyer lock-in, and you can dictate the terms on which others may develop for your platform. You can push people off your platform when their goals conflict with yours. This is a logical place for some regulation designed to protect and promote a free market.
With the latter, there aren't any special ways to be anticompetitive. By special, I mean distinct from the ways in which, say, a chemical company could be anticompetitive. Your example of a "nice little directory of apps you built" would fall into this category. No industry-specific regulation is warranted for this type of product or service, since you're not in a position to hinder the free market.
The government forcing me to carry your product =/= free market. Let's say I have a platform for kids. Now I can't disapprove adult apps? Are you effing kidding me?
Preserving a free market sometimes requires regulation of anticompetitive behavior. That necessarily impinges on the economic freedoms of the largest players. But the intent is for such regulation to yield a net increase in market freedom.
> Let's say I have a platform for kids. Now I can't disapprove adult apps? Are you effing kidding me?
Presumably, a good law would make some allowances for things like this. It's not that you have to approve literally anything anyone wants to sell.
Apple controls a very big portion of the handheld market and that portion is completely roped off by iTunes. Worse, if they see something they are doing, whether it's better or not, you can't get your competing app onto their device. Was this not the same issue with Sun's Java and IE back in the 90s?
Meanwhile, crazygringo has a website. Sure he controls the content of the site but doesn't prevent anyone else from publishing on the internet. If 'mjbaldwin.net' was one of only a couple portals on the internet, you might have an argument there.
I'm not a legislator, of course, but in my mind it would run something like:
- if you have over x third-party selling participants (say, 50 or 500)
- and the marketplace provides services to the "general public" (e.g. the Apple Store, qualifies, an intranet market would not)
- and the marketplace has revenue over x per day (say, $10,000)
- then participation in the marketplace must be governed by a clear, unambiguous set of rules that gives no advantage to products made/sold by the owner/administrator of the marketplace, and all interpretation of the rules, or challenges to such interpretation, must be made by a neutral, third-party arbitrator without influence from or by the owner/administrator of the marketplace
- and additionally, rules of the marketplace must not be written in order to give any kind of explicit or "implicit" advantage to the owner/administrator of the marketplate (Apple can't always feature its own Maps application over Google's, for example)
These specific rules are totally off the top of my head, but it's just a kind of idea -- once any market reaches a certain size, it's in the general public interest to ensure a level playing field and due process -- I mean, that's what things like court-enforceable contracts, food regulation, stock exchange and public company regulation, etc. are all about.
Heck, Google can cripple or even kill small businesses by excluding them from its search index, and like Apple, it can do exactly what it likes to further its own interests.
There's no penalty for monopolistic behavior unless you are actually found to be a monopoly, in which case stuff you may have thought was legal suddenly becomes illegal and you get dinged for it.
Just no.
Even worse your solution is effectively a government takeover of any store over size X. Trying to force goods on vendors is not the free market, it's central planning lite.
Apple runs it's store the way it wants to. If you don't like it don't sell your wares there, don't shop there, picket their retail locations, call for boycotts online, etc.
The elegant part is that regulation would target the real problem - the tying of the iPhone to Apple's App Store, which, in my opinion, seems pretty fishy for an allegedly general-purpose device. As I understand it, this tying might theoretically be an antitrust violation even in the absence of an iPhone monopoly, but legal requirements for an illegal tying arrangements have become considerably stricter over time.
Oh we'll just force them to program their machine differently is all so that anyone can free ride on the market they invested hundreds of millions to create. Sounds about as noninvasive as a mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound.
Second, should Apple find iDevices and their app store subject to government regulation the idea that Apple would be the one entitled to complain about free riding is just... precious. Even if we only look what Apple gets from the legal system itself (copyright and patent rights, injunctions and import bans, blocking unauthorized clones, trademark protection, license enforcement and so on) some regulation of sideloading and/or third-party stores wouldn't even begin to tip the balance.
Regulation rarely targets the real problem. It targets a problem, creating another one.
However, it is not their iPhone in my pocket anymore. The ownership changed when they got my money. They should not have any control over what it runs, and yet it only runs those things which Apple puts in their store. This is the real problem.
> In competition law the Relevant market defines the market in which one or more goods compete.
There are substitute goods to iOS that compete with it for consumers (Android, Windows, etc). The relevant market is where that competition is occurring: the smartphone and tablet markets.
But McDonalds is analogous to iTunes, not iOS. iOS is more like.. a city when McDonalds operates. If McDonalds also owned the city and banned all other fast food restaurants.
> The relevant market is where that competition is occurring: the smartphone and tablet markets.
But that's an artificial construct. The competition is there because it's the only place competition is allowed.
The owner of the mall decides who else to offer the stalls to and what the terms are and if those terms are too onerous than they will lose business because people will shop elsewhere because of the bad selection.
What we need is to decide whether we, as a society, think what Apple did is OK. That’s it. If we think it’s OK, then we console the developer. And if we don’t, we pass laws to keep Apple (or anyone else in a similar position) from doing that.
All this food court / McDonalds analogizing really can get you only so far.