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> Are you going to mandate what features Apple, or any manufacturer of devices with embedded software, can or cannot implement?

In fact, yes. Just like we mandate cars have seat belts and third brake lights, airliners have emergency exits, automobile fuel contains no lead or added ethanol, houses use electrical wires per code, and so forth.

Government can simply mandate a maximum fee (like credit card interchange fee regulation in the last decade), or force the system to allow sideloading (like busting the AT&T attached device monopoly in the 70s), etc.

Not to mention, the EU just ruled recently on what Apple can or cannot include in their actual hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22204174

I think lumping this in with health and safety regulations is a super weak argument. In fact it’s no argument, the two are clearly not comparable at all.

I’ll accept the comparison to credit card fees though. As I said I’m not against all oversight of any kind. I just don’t think the 30% is all that high.

> What’s the alternative. Are you going to mandate what features Apple, or any manufacturer of devices with embedded software, can or cannot implement? Are you going to mandate by law specific features for side loading that all manufacturers have to implement in all devices containing software? What features, who gets to specify them, how will this be enforced?

Well, it has been done for Microsoft, it could be done for Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

(I'm just stating a fact, not judging whether that is a good or a bad idea.)

If the government forces a platform open and hands it over to a consortium of industry leaders, as well as associations of independent developers and open source foundations... sure why not?

Because the government should not have unilateral power over a platform you've poured your own time, money, and effort into developing.

That would be theft. I am honestly amazed that people are still in favor of gross government overreach in the era of Trump.

You can say the same about Ma Bell, or Standard Oil.

The pre-edited version of the original post asked the ludicrous question "So now we’re going to have governments design the software in our phones", so he got a ludicrous answer in kind. But in theory, if Apple's control of the App Store platform constitutes a monopoly, it would not be gross government overreach to pursue antitrust, as it has done historically, even if it has been unfashionable in recent decades.

> if Apple's control of the App Store platform constitutes a monopoly,

But it's not a monopoly. The vast majority of the "app store" ecosystem is the Play Store. Apple's "App Store" is a minority player.

Otherwise you could arbitrarily divide any platform recursively until something is a monopoly in need of getting regulated.

The OP article argues that it is a monopoly. You are free to agree or disagree with its thesis. However, my statement was that "if Apple's control of the App Store platform constitutes a monopoly", then the government should have free rein to do so, as it has repeatedly done so in the past.

Indeed. I would agree with you if Apple was a monopoly in this space.

>If the government forces a platform open and hands it over to a consortium of industry leaders, as well as associations of independent developers and open source foundations... sure why not?

Because the platform only exists because somebody created it, somebody specific not some consortium.

I don't want my iPhone OS to be created by a consortium, I want it to be run by Apple...

And because if that happens I would promptly go find a phone with a curated locked down store again. If I wanted otherwise I would have bought an Android phone, with my _choice_.

And, if the unlocked store charges independent app developers lower fees, and if market trends favor the non-locked down store over the locked down store- say in the example of Android vs. BlackBerry OS- then the apps would flock to the former over the latter.

So the reward for developing a successful valuable product that hundreds of millions of people like and trust, is to take it away and give it to somebody else? Wow.

If that consortium is so great, why don’t they just make their own product. Let the public decide what they want.

Their reward is being the most valuable company in both the world, and perhaps much of human history. Their reward for restrictive anti-competitive behaviors is antitrust investigations.

Monopoly or anticompetitive regulation is intended to prevent behaviour enabled by market domination. Nothing Apple is doing is like that, they’ve been doing the same since they had 1% market share. The public chose them because this is how they do things. It makes no sense to punish them for that. Justifying punishment simply on the basis of success is morally unjustifiable.

Either the government can tell Apple how to run the App store, or the government can limit iPhones to < x% of the population.

I will say it's embarrassing that we've allowed one company's products to become such a status symbol that there is no alternative to the insecure masses, but such is the present world.

Then again, perhaps competition itself is obsolete, and we should just get on to centralized socialism already.

I'd love to see a Congressional panel ask why developers need an OSX device to build for iOS and still have to pay a fee to Apple for the privilege.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Is it that all software companies should be required to support developing on every platform for free?

The iOS application frameworks are Apple products based on the libraries in OSX. In fact in many many cases they are the exact same libraries in OSX, and apps running in the iPhone simulator actually run against the OSX libraries under the hood, not iOS versions of them. To develop iOS apps on another platform, Apple would have to port their entire development tool chain, and their OS application frameworks and test tools to other OS platforms. Why should the be coerced into doing that? These are all their products, what gives you the right to demand that they spend millions of dollars adding features and doing all that work?

Should we coerce Microsoft into porting the Win32 development stack and tooling to OSX and Linux? It doesn’t make any sense. If you don’t want to use their products, don’t.