> The one where the set of customers is almost completely disjoint.
This does not constitute an industry. Industries are defined by product space.
The Pixel and iPhone compete in the same industry. The Play Store and the App Store compete in the same industry. There’s no question around this.
> You don't have to make it easier, just don't actively make it difficult or take steps to purposely impair competition.
This completely ignores the concept of a physical security model. The owner cannot be trusted. Enabling the owner to modify their device arbitrarily introduces physical security bugs.
Your model prevents anyone from making secure devices. At least - not without a lot of extra thought and engineering time, which they should not be obligated to in the first place.
> it means that somebody else exists who is reasonably able to take your customers by undercutting your price as long as doing so is still profitable enough to exceed their own capital costs.
Case in point: Android and the Play Store which directly compete with iOS and the App Store. You cannot claim that Android and iOS compete while simultaneously claiming that the App Store and the Play Store constitute different industries. And there are few more obvious examples of competition than Android and iOS, or the Play Store and App Store.
> Once you have one device or the other, your data ends up on that vendor's services in those data formats
This is no different from me not being able to transfer my purchases from the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. No platform is obligated to give you the tools necessary to switch off said platform. If you buy a game on the PS4, you have no reasonable expectation of getting it on PC for free, regardless of how nice a feature that may be.
Transfer of purchase has never been an expectation of any storefront.
> This does not constitute an industry. Industries are defined by product space.
And you're back to arguing that brick and mortar retailers in Florida compete with ones in California because they sell largely the same products.
> The Pixel and iPhone compete in the same industry. The Play Store and the App Store compete in the same industry. There’s no question around this.
By this logic, if Samsung announced a competing phone platform that nobody uses and a competing app store that only works on that platform and has no apps but charges 5% fees, everyone could switch to that app store and sell/get all their apps there even though it has no users and no developers.
> This completely ignores the concept of a physical security model. The owner cannot be trusted. Enabling the owner to modify their device arbitrarily introduces physical security bugs.
The vendor cannot be trusted. The owner is you. If you can't trust yourself then you've already lost.
> Case in point: Android and the Play Store which directly compete with iOS and the App Store.
So you expect that if Google Play reduced their fee from 30% to 15%, developers would switch from distributing their apps on iOS to distributing them on Google Play? How is that even possible when they already distribute them on both?
> You cannot claim that Android and iOS compete while simultaneously claiming that the App Store and the Play Store constitute different industries.
Suppose that two companies make power plants. They all burn carbon to make heat to make steam to make electricity. One company's burns coal, the other natural gas.
When you're buying a power plant, there is competition between them. You can buy either one and they both burn carbon to make electricity.
But suppose, Standard Oil style, that the company making coal fired power plants has a monopoly on coal and the one making natural gas fired power plants has a monopoly on natural gas. Then those are two separate markets -- once you've bought your power plant you're locked into one or the other. Trying to combine them into the "fuel market" only works if you can switch from one to the other without replacing your very expensive power plant, but you can't. Which is why they're two different markets.
> This is no different from me not being able to transfer my purchases from the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. No platform is obligated to give you the tools necessary to switch off said platform.
It's not a matter of being obligated to help you switch. It's a matter of the switching cost being a barrier that segments the app market.
> By this logic, if Samsung announced a competing phone platform that nobody uses and a competing app store that only works on that platform and has no apps but charges 5% fees, everyone could switch to that app store and sell/get all their apps there even though it has no users and no developers.
Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there. This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store.
> The vendor cannot be trusted. The owner is you. If you can't trust yourself then you've already lost.
How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not.
Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought.
> Then those are two separate markets -- once you've bought your power plant you're locked into one or the other.
You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant.
But let’s avoid silly analogies. The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone. Buying an iPhone does not segment them into a different industry. They can easily get the same apps from an Android phone. The barrier to entry via device cost does not create an industry. Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps.
That it is expensive to switch from an iOS App Store to an Android App Store is a factor that is left to the user to make when they decide to choose one of the app stores. This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry.
> Exactly. This is how the free market works. If Samsung’s App Store is more palatable to developers and users, they will move there.
Except that they can't do that when they have to create an entire ecosystem in order to compete in app stores, because of the network effects. Microsoft tried and failed with Windows phone, despite having its own desktop monopoly to leverage, pouring a fortune into it and by most accounts creating something that was actually quite good, because you can't get developers without users or users without developers. The barrier to entry is a mile high.
> This is what we see with Epic Games moving Fortnite off of the Play Store.
Which is only possible because Google doesn't prohibit that. Apple does.
> How do you define ownership? Physically owning the device? If a thief steals your phone, should they have the same permissions as you do over the device? Absolutely not.
> Physical security matters. Ownership should be linked to a secret in your brain, not the fact that your hands are on it. And this model of ownership restricts quite a bit of modification without extra engineering or thought.
That's all software. As soon as you lock the device, the decryption key should no longer exist and require the thing in your brain to recreate it.
If the software is designed correctly -- and nothing about that needs to be a secret -- there is nothing the thief can do to decrypt the locked device even with unlimited control over the hardware.
The thing hardware lets you do is allow you to use weak authentication, by having the hardware remain in possession of the real decryption key but rate limit the number of authentication attempts.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with app stores or anything like that. All you need for that is a tiny piece of special purpose tamper-resistant hardware that can store a strong key and then release it in response to successful authentication, while rate limiting the number of authentication attempts. Then when you lock the device the main processor discards the key and the only way to get it back is the rate limiting authentication hardware, which can be completely independent of the rest of the device.
> You are not buying a power plant. You are buying energy. There is a front-loaded one-time cost to switching to another power plant.
But that's the point. If you have to spend hundreds to have a choice of where to buy a $1 app, that isn't a real choice. If the alternative app store has the same app for $.01 instead of $1 -- a 99% discount -- all you can do is shrug because it's not worth spending hundreds of dollars to save $0.99. There is no amount of discount the other app store can offer to get you to switch. They could pay you $1 instead of charging you $1 and the switching cost would still put you deep in the red. That's what a lack of competition looks like.
> The costs associated are obvious and visible to the users before they decide on Android or iPhone.
If Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida, you can know that before you decide where to live, and pick whichever state you like, but either way you're living somewhere with a monopoly.
> Industries have always been and will always be defined by product space - what is being sold. In this case, apps.
So you can't have a monopoly in California if there is a brick and mortar competitor in Florida, because you both sell similar products?
> This is little different from switching from Steam to the PlayStation store with respect to the games industry.
Yes, that is exactly the same, and the consoles should not be doing it either.
This does not constitute an industry. Industries are defined by product space.
The Pixel and iPhone compete in the same industry. The Play Store and the App Store compete in the same industry. There’s no question around this.
> You don't have to make it easier, just don't actively make it difficult or take steps to purposely impair competition.
This completely ignores the concept of a physical security model. The owner cannot be trusted. Enabling the owner to modify their device arbitrarily introduces physical security bugs.
Your model prevents anyone from making secure devices. At least - not without a lot of extra thought and engineering time, which they should not be obligated to in the first place.
> it means that somebody else exists who is reasonably able to take your customers by undercutting your price as long as doing so is still profitable enough to exceed their own capital costs.
Case in point: Android and the Play Store which directly compete with iOS and the App Store. You cannot claim that Android and iOS compete while simultaneously claiming that the App Store and the Play Store constitute different industries. And there are few more obvious examples of competition than Android and iOS, or the Play Store and App Store.
> Once you have one device or the other, your data ends up on that vendor's services in those data formats
This is no different from me not being able to transfer my purchases from the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. No platform is obligated to give you the tools necessary to switch off said platform. If you buy a game on the PS4, you have no reasonable expectation of getting it on PC for free, regardless of how nice a feature that may be.
Transfer of purchase has never been an expectation of any storefront.