This isn't about the taxes (which they mostly dodge or pass on to consumers). It's about choice. With a chokehold on market revenue they crowd out competitors which reduces consumer choice over time.
Whose fault is it that Amazon, Facebook and Google - all trillion dollar market cap companies are not able to compete? Amazon and Facebook both tried creating their own phone.
Consumers have choice. They can buy from Apple or any number of much cheaper Android devices. They made a choice to pay Apple more. It’s consumers making a choice that led to Apple’s revenue.
Both Google and Microsoft have better services than Apple and they still can’t compete.
Google is worth a trillion dollars plus, have their own operating system and has the most visited page on the internet and still is estimated to sell as many phones in a year that Apple sells in less than a month.
It’s not Apple being anti-competitive. It’s the competitors - all large companies - being incompetent.
In the computer space, Apple was a nobody and almost bankrupt compared to Dell and HP in 1997 when Jobs came back. Why were they so incompetently run?
Why couldn’t Microsoft make a competitive ARM chip?
As more government and banking requires iOS or Android people are forced into a duopoly. If not for regulated standards like SQL or laws protecting clean room reverse engineering would we still be locked into IBM today?
Apple lucked into a chockpoint. They had plenty of opportunities, even if less than other giants. Now giants sit like bridge trolls demanding a tax to cross.
The market is not healthy when so few players have so much control.
SQL is not a “regulated” standard. Even something as simple as limiting the number of rows returned is different for different databases. Let alone specifying hints and locking semantics.
