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Comment by SpaceX_Tech | Hacker News Reader

You bring up the exact point that I was just thinking about, namely why market share is used as a criteria for defining whether certain behaviors fall into the anticompetitive realm but profit share isn’t.

Apple taking 90% of overall worldwide smartphone profits may not be good for competition or the consumer, yet that isn’t regulated, not that I am suggesting that it should be. Apple obviously has enormous power due to its profitability that gives it a competitive advantage.

I guess the thing I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is exactly when normal competitive practices become anticompetitive, requiring legal intervention from regulators, and why these seem to center solely around market share and not other things like profits.

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> Apple obviously has enormous power due to its profitability that gives it a competitive advantage.

The law doesn't care about competitive advantage. It cares about making sure that your competitive dominance doesn't translate into dominating other markets.

For instance, Microsoft dominating personal OS market and making sure that their product stays on top is OK. Microsoft using their domination of that market to drive competition out of other markets is not.

That makes a lot of sense but just to play devil's advocate are we considering the OS/App market separate from the hardware market? If so, and considering Apple makes a not insignificant amount from the App Store and doesn't allow competing stores on iPhone hardware, wouldn't that be an example of trying to dominate another market?

Again, I don't want to come off as needlessly argumentative, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of this topic.

In my opinion, it's less problematic to run a closed environment, than to run an "open" environment, only to swindle the people that you just invited in your backyard.

The whole idea is that if you're going to let people build on your platform but compete with them and leverage your platform in order to do so, you effectively lured people into thinking that it was possible to build on your platform when in fact it was not, and that you benefit from this misunderstanding. And that's dishonest. If you open a "public market", then you should be accountable for keeping it fair and unbiased.

Keep in mind that the last part about how it "should" be is an opinion and not fact on the law.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. You make an especially good point about being accountable when running a "public market" that I hadn't really considered.

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