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Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth.

Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ever have to visit Amazon to buy anything. If they were preventing resellers from selling elsewhere then we would have an issue. Like when Intel was trying to force Dell not to sell AMD. Amazon is in truth their own worst enemy now with so many bad products that venturing off known brands is a risk.

She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money. Not just at the voting booth but by intimidating companies into contributing more the PACs and political campaigns. We see this all the time and sadly people buy into it because using market tested phrases has become standard operating procedure for politicians. They pay to find out how to divide people.

An example of why PACs are truly bad is a recent political office run revealed that one candidate, who could not see fit to pay their taxes on time, nor their school loans, had been on the part time pay roll of a PAC for nearly 200k a year. Seriously, you want to see how politicians roll in the money look how the shake down really pays them.

There are just two phone makers in existence: Google and Apple. If you care about privacy and security, there is just a single phone maker: Apple. The only difference between different brands of Google phones is how much additional insecurity and crap the notional manufacturer adds on top.

Amazon has complete dominance over books in the US and are on their way to abolishing book ownership outright.

>are on their way to abolishing book ownership outright.

This is hyperbolic. There has been a resurgence in small bookstores, and Amazon sells quite a few physical books themselves.

It's not in the least hyperbolic. Physical books are going away. You can't buy ebooks on amazon. They have close to 90% of the us ebook market already.

If apple is the only phone maker to offer privacy and security, why would we break them up?

Amazon is abolishing book ownership because they invented a better way to read books (kindle and audible). How is breaking them up going to make people want to own books again? The only way that would happen is if you make kindle and audible worse. How would that help society?

People also seem to forget that the Apple Bookstore is still a thing. Certainly not as big as Amazon but certainly big enough to matter. Apple also has audiobooks as well. So there is competition.

I'm so glad to hear that should Amazon ever really go overboard with memory-holing ebooks, I can always rely on Apple to distribute the really edgy stuff no one else would dare to publish!

An author can always distribute an ePub book directly from their site. When you click on it, it can be directly imported into the Books app.

No one is currently preventing you from homerolling a mobile operating system and building your own smartphone (provided that you avoid or license existing patents). It would be difficult to break into that market, establish share and make money in the short term, but no one is actively being prevented from doing so (see Chinese knockoffs).

I fail to see how you see the above scenario as some flavor of monopoly.

The problem here is that Warren was arguing in either ignorance or bad faith by implying these orgs need to be broken up because they are too big or monopoly’s. They are neither. I could sit down today and create a new Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon and release it. There will be no consequences or jackbooted thugs coming to shut me down.

Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you should be able to use scary words to shut it down.

The reality is that people like Warren want to dictate winners and losers in the market. If you feel privacy or business practices aren’t to your liking, you don’t have to use Facebook or Amazon. Don’t like that Google is censoring (or not censoring) something? Use Duck Duck Go, or Ask. But don’t pretend to be Teddy Roosevelt when you’re really just trying to project your personal biases on the market.

You're arguing against a strawman here. No one is using "jackbooted thugs will shut me down" as the definition of a monopoly.

You set up a false equivalence by equating monopolisation with outright coercion when in fact there are multiple types of soft and hard market power that define the degree to which a company has a monopoly in a given market (network effects for example).

Even where market power is not being overtly used to stifle competition there are strong and well established economic arguments for why the breakup of large incumbents can be net beneficial.

Regulation can also cut both ways - one of the main advantages enjoyed by large incumbents are barriers created by regulatory capture (e.g. regulations like GDPR) - small businesses simply do not have the resources to comply and remain competitive. In a sense all regulation has an element of picking winners - to dismiss it on this basis is foolish/disingenuous and completely mischaracterises the debate.

The point is to realise that corporations are private/public institutions and there is a trade-off in interests between the parties involved. Regulation is the art of balancing these interests at the socially optimal level.

> She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money. Not just at the voting booth but by intimidating companies into contributing more the PACs and political campaigns. We see this all the time and sadly people buy into it because using market tested phrases has become standard operating procedure for politicians. They pay to find out how to divide people.

Perhaps it is better to learn about Elizabeth Warren's history and check publicly available data about her funding before throwing up your hands and lazily announcing that "both sides are the same"? [1] Alphabet employees gave her almost $50k but the company itself has given her nothing, through PACs or otherwise. In the 2018 cycle, she received less than 1% of her campaign and leadership funding from PAC sources, with less than a third of that coming from business PACs (grass roots orgs like Emily's List make up the majority).

Her entire career has been built on doing the exact opposite of your allegation.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...

> If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products.

The main issue with the App store (in terms of antitrust) isn't one of consumer choice but rather of taking advantage of network effects to enable rent seeking behaviour. App developers face little real choice, this inhibits the development of new app markets which would otherwise create value for consumers/developers beyond the value lost by Apple shareholders. It's economics 101.

> She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money.

If these were her goals she would surely fair better with a carrot rather than a stick (tax breaks perhaps). Her current proposals would drive business owners to support her political opponents - hardly a recipe for power and money. The proposals may be somewhat symptomatic, but it is a far stretch to conclude the agenda which you outline.

You seem to have a misunderstanding about the purpose of antitrust regulation. It is not simply a matter of consumer choice or outcomes (a widely perpetrated view) - there are considerations of prices, coercion, competitive barriers and other outcomes, not only for consumers but for competitors, suppliers, workers, investors, citizens, etc.

Even when there is no evidence of a company actively exerting market power regulators still need to consider the potential that they might do so in future.

>isn't one of consumer choice but rather of taking advantage of network effects to enable rent seeking behaviour.

If Apple could rely on network effect alone then they could have a hidden setting to enable 3rd party apps to run on the device like Android does. The retort to this is that you're increasing the attack surface of rogue apps but I don't buy that personally.

Seeing what recently happened when Fortnite - a very popular game - went around the Google Play Store. It’s not to hard “to buy”

https://www.cnet.com/news/just-as-critics-feared-fortnite-fo...

>An example of why PACs are truly bad is a recent political office run revealed that one candidate, who could not see fit to pay their taxes on time, nor their school loans, had been on the part time pay roll of a PAC for nearly 200k a year. Seriously, you want to see how politicians roll in the money look how the shake down really pays them.

Look at what happens when a state officially becomes purple. The amount of money that flows in to make it go one way or the other is sickening.

Do you think Apple preventing the user from setting their default mapping app, default music app, or default mail app is anti competitive?

it might be a minor detail but it absolutely breaks how operating systems and deep links work if i cant set file and protocol associations. Im FORCED to either use Apple Mail OR avoid clicking email addresses and physical addresses and copy and pasting them into fields instead. Like I said, a minor detail on the surface, but I would argue massively anti competitive. Same goes with Microsoft forcing edge on people with alternative PDF viewers, or asking ARE YOU SURE when you try to switch default browsers. you should not be using your operating system position to force first party apps on people trying to switch. promoting them at the top of the app store list is one thing (which we can argue about being competitive cheating or not) but disallowing alternate defaults or dark ux patterns to trick users into new defaults is absolutely scummy.

Yeah, it seems almost like a naive/purposeful misunderstanding of what Warren means. Of course that's what Warren meant - the whole point of even talking about antitrust is that you believe a company used its dominant position to destroy the competition in a way that's less than fair/legal.

I think his point though is that the premise that these companies achieved their success through domination and monopolistic powers is inaccurate because they rose to prominence while not being dominate or possessing any monopolistic powers. Facebook beat out MySpace by making a better product at a time when MySpace had a huge lead. So through innovation and creating a better product alone a company can theoretically compete as the examples she cites did at one point. In fairness, he does go on to say that they have now reached a critical mass such that in the ad space nobody can compete because they throw off so much cash that they can deploy that into acquisitions or developing free products just to maintain their leads and steal share from up and coming companies. It's a complex issue.

One thing I didn't get about Warren's comment was her assertion that if you provide the store for others to sell in you aren't allowed to sell because you have access to data and product placement that gives you an unfair advantage. Okay according to that line of reasoning Wal-Mart and all major grocery chains should be broken up because they all sell private label merchandise. Or none of them should be allowed to sell private label merchandise because they can give it the best placement and know which products are best to make. Obviously that argument quickly falls apart because a consumer who goes to a grocery store is quickly going to become frustrated and go elsewhere if all they can find are the store's own versions of products that they are shopping for. Amazon and Google have demonstrated a very clear understanding of this since they started, knowing that giving the customer what they want quickly and conveniently is the most important thing. If it happens to be Amazon's own brand of duffel bag or Google's own restaurant reviews based on the search then so be it. But I seriously doubt Google is withholding Yelp results to be anticompetitive. The far more likely explanation in my mind is that a searcher would rather see a Google Map with all of the restaurants and pictures and reviews quickly and reliably and Google knows that. That they might profit by it is a happy accident not because they control the means of search. Sooner or later the better product experience is going to win out regardless of whether it is made by Google or somebody else. Google has tried for a decade to compete in social and has failed despite having far greater resources for most of that time.

In short, I think "monopoly!" is a convenient scapegoat for the Yelp's of the world so they don't have to admit that Google simply built a better product experience than they did.

There is no world besides maybe Beats where any of the acquisitions that Apple made would have ever ended up being competitors.

The entire reason for almost any investor backed company to exist is to be acquired. You don’t have to look any further than YC. In its entire history only one company that it has invested in has ever gone public.

Which anti-competitive moves?