> That’s like complaining that IKEA has a monopoly within IKEA stores.
I feel like the fact that only Apple makes iOS devices is what's confusing people.
Suppose that Tesla is the only company that makes electric cars and also the only company that has any electric car charging ports. (This is a hypothetical; in practice other companies offer both electric cars and charging ports.)
They don't have a monopoly on cars -- you can go buy a Volkswagen diesel if you like, and "electric cars" isn't necessarily a separate market than "cars" at the time of purchase. But once you have an electric car, they do have a monopoly on charging ports, which is a separate market because you can't run your electric car on petroleum.
This is easier to see if you add another electric car company but not another electric car charging company. So you go buy your Nissan Leaf but you still have to use a Tesla charging port with it. Clearly a monopoly on charging ports. But still the exact same charging port monopoly when they're the only company making electric cars.
You can have a monopoly on iOS app stores even if you're the only company that makes iOS devices. Having fewer competitors in the other market doesn't make you less of a monopoly. Even the fact that they compete there at all -- if Amazon was the only company with an iOS app store, they would have a monopoly on iOS app distribution even if they don't even make iOS devices.
The problem with your argument is that electricity is fungible and it's wide available. When you buy you Nissan Leaf, you don't need Tesla's charging ports, you can plug it on any power outlet. You might miss the fast charging, but that's it.
When you go buy a phone, one of the factors you have to decide is "what app store do I want". If you go with Android, you might miss a few apps, but so what ? Most of them are also fungible, just use a similar one.
If it wasn't like that, we could say that Wall Mart is a monopoly because only they sell Great Value branded products.
> The problem with your argument is that electricity is fungible and it's wide available. When you buy you Nissan Leaf, you don't need Tesla's charging ports, you can plug it on any power outlet. You might miss the fast charging, but that's it.
You're explaining why Tesla doesn't have a charging port monopoly in practice. The hypothetical is that they do. You can't use any other power outlet in the same way that you can't install an Android app on an iPhone.
> When you go buy a phone, one of the factors you have to decide is "what app store do I want".
Which is what creates the app store monopoly. There wouldn't be one if you could make that decision independently, which is the whole point. It's classic tying.
Moreover, the "customer" of the app store is as much the developer as the user, given that they're the ones paying all the fees. But they don't get to choose between platforms any more than Walmart chooses to operate in Florida instead of California, because they have to reach their customers in both regions, not just one or the other.
By contrast, Nike can choose Target instead of Walmart because they both operate in both regions, so they can still reach substantially all of their customers through one store if the other is being unreasonable, since it's much easier for the customer to switch stores for a desired product when that doesn't require switching locations/platforms at the same time.
But the market isn’t iOS devices, the market is smart phones. And in that market Apple does not have a monopoly.
If you start declaring that the market is the specific store or product, then literally every single product and service is a monopoly begging for state intervention. Can I sue Netflix because as the monopoly holder of the Netflix network they refuse to carry my home made videos? Is Spotify abusing their monopoly over Spotify by refusing to carry my karaoke? Should I be able to sue them in order to bend them to my will?
The market is what products people actually move to and from in response to Apple pricw changes; if there's a segment of buyers and price range in which Apple has pricing power—price changes do not cause such movement—Apple is an antitrust monopoly. Popular descriptive “markets” like “smartphones” often include many isolated submarkets and are not single markets in which competition exists.
A major purpose of brnad marketing is to create such pocket markets.
So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?
Aside from being extremely silly, under this formulation Rolls Royce might be a monopoly, it lacks factual backing. There are plenty of android offerings that overlap Apple offerings in price, including the Pixel 3 and most of the Galaxy S10 series. If your point is that someone willing to spend $1k on a smart phone has no other choice other than to buy Apple, the $1k+ Galaxy S10+ would like to have a word with you.
If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped, then you’re signing up basically every top company in the every market segment for stringent antitrust enforcement, which is so broad a definition as to be useless. You can’t sue Nike as a monopoly because they’ve built up their own fan base and “pocket market”.
> So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?
Nope. My point to is neither “there are no high priced smart phones” (there are) not “it’s a monopoly” (I have no position on that question). You should be able to tell that because I say nothing similar to either of those anywhere in the post you are responding to.
My point is that the existence of other players in a particular popular framing of what the market is has very little to do with the anti-trust definition of “monopoly”, which has to do with empirical competition (what do consumers move to or from in response to, particularly, price changes), not how markets are popularly described.
> If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped
Again, no. Building a non-competitive market via branding or other means makes you a monopoly, not necessarily an abusive one. You still have to abuse that monopoly to be an abusive monopoly.
That's a lot of words that take literally no stance on the issue. You've slowly shifted back to an incredibly vague definition of a market and an incredibly vague definition of what an abusive monopoly is. At this point it's literally impossible to discuss the issue with you, because the definitions have become uselessly broad.
> You've slowly shifted back to an incredibly vague definition of a market and an incredibly vague definition of what an abusive monopoly is
I've had two posts in this thread, both of which take exactly the same position despite your ridiculous misinterpretation in between them; I haven't shifted, slowly or otherwise.
And the definition of market/monopoly is exactly the one used in antitrust law. That may be inconvenient for your desire to argue, but that doesn't change the facts. And I haven't presented any definition of an abusive monopoly, just corrected your claim that a particular definition of monopoly also meant any company that meant it was also an abusive monopoly, noting that “abusive” actually does have meaning.
It’s their market! Only Apple can make an Apple App Store for the Apple iPhone.
Every company deserves a “monopoly” on their own product, unless they are a common carrier, a designation which is based on the government enabling them to exist through preferential treatment in the first place.
Apple created the Apple iPhone and they should be allowed to determine its destiny, as long as other companies are also allowed a fair shot to create their own competing devices.
That's not remotely comparable. Comparable would be asking if you're allowed to release third party components (hardware or software) for Ford cars without asking for Ford's permission.
Obviously hardware third party components without Ford's permission is a well established industry. Nobody questions it, except maybe a few lunatic capitalists like Elon Musk. Even then though, I think people like him keep their head on straight for the most part. They don't do much to facilitate it, but if you started selling compatible hardware components for his cars, I doubt they'd actually consider trying to stop you. (If I'm wrong about that, he's worse than I thought.)
Your supposition is that software components should be a special case, unlike hardware components, where companies have a right to deny anybody else the right to produce components without their permission. I say that's bullshit. They should be legally forbidden from creating products for which third party components can only exist if given permission.
Apple has about 45% of the US smart phone market with their next competitor being Samsung at about 29%, with both of those companies on track to lose share to Huawei. Globally Apple is about 11% of the market, with Samsung selling well over double of what Apple sells.
Those numbers, combined with the fact that a new competitor is arising to take market share away from Apple strongly implies that Apple is not currently behaving in an anticompetitive fashion.
