Its a bit sad its comes to states suing because Federal governments all over the world seem to have become reluctant to address oligopolistic markets in their various forms.
The obvious answer when players dominate a market like this is government 1) force competition or 2) add regulation.
The easy solution here is to rule that 1) app stores can control how payments are made/received by apps. And then they are forced to put a offering that works vs other payment provider. 2) Possibly, though would have challenges, force Apple/Google app stores to become interoperable over some longer term period.
For the wider market I think a big part is platforms with significant market share need to be either distributors or product owners. For example Amazon should not have amazon products and they are a distributer, this stops them watching some business become profitable on their platform than just replace with their own products or changing search result to favour their own product etc. The same with a company like Netflix, otherwise we are going to see a very small group of streaming companies and it will be near impossible for anyone else to step into that space.
Something else Id also consider though is a bit mixed with pros/cons is make a rule suppliers have to offer standard prices. So I can offer Walmart my pens at $0.05 because they buy 50 million of them and charge $0.40 to the small business that buys 10,000. This would also be great for healthcare such as hospitals having the insurance price vs cash price vs negotiated price etc.
I think people often forget a core role of capitalism of government is to maintain a level playing field. This helps ongoing innovation and to put pressure on entrenched market segments for a more efficient system.
The obvious answer when players dominate a market like this is government 1) force competition or 2) add regulation.
The easy solution here is to rule that 1) app stores can control how payments are made/received by apps. And then they are forced to put a offering that works vs other payment provider. 2) Possibly, though would have challenges, force Apple/Google app stores to become interoperable over some longer term period.
For the wider market I think a big part is platforms with significant market share need to be either distributors or product owners. For example Amazon should not have amazon products and they are a distributer, this stops them watching some business become profitable on their platform than just replace with their own products or changing search result to favour their own product etc. The same with a company like Netflix, otherwise we are going to see a very small group of streaming companies and it will be near impossible for anyone else to step into that space.
Something else Id also consider though is a bit mixed with pros/cons is make a rule suppliers have to offer standard prices. So I can offer Walmart my pens at $0.05 because they buy 50 million of them and charge $0.40 to the small business that buys 10,000. This would also be great for healthcare such as hospitals having the insurance price vs cash price vs negotiated price etc.
I think people often forget a core role of capitalism of government is to maintain a level playing field. This helps ongoing innovation and to put pressure on entrenched market segments for a more efficient system.