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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

It's more like:

Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls.

Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them.

They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing system.

Apple is not obligated to advertise those third party stalls over their own.

If they don't like the arrangement they can always go somewhere else (there is an even bigger stadium in town that has available food stalls).

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Yes, and that's part of why you pay $10 for a domestic beer, and $5 for a hot dog.

So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.

But what if you’re not selling food, but merchandise targeted at this particular team’s fans. You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium - you have no choice but to suck up the fact that on the vendor map of the stadium, where it says merchandise, is actually Apple’s food court. Nobody is going to find your t’shirt stand.

>You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium

For starters, nobody forces you to sell merchandise for this particular team's fans...

But the analogy breaks down here, because merchandize such as t-shirts is not dependent on the stadium to be used. You could sell it outside the stadium.

Whereas iOS software leverages the fact that the iOS is being sold, maintained, having the necessary APIs, and so on, and that iOS devices are being made and sell decently and lure people willing to pay for apps.

So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...

The physical analogy (i.e., stadium) doesn't work at all for the appstore, because aspects of the physical world actually matter in terms of analyzing retail monopolies in ways that are irrelevant to a fully digital marketplace.

A privately owned stadium is not be required to open up its space to third-party sellers. But once it does, it cannot then abuse its position as the landlord to interfere with the market activities of those third parties. That's the part you're missing in your fervent defense of Apple's antitrust activities--Apple didn't have to open up the app store to third parties, but having done so, they must now act in a non-abusive matter.

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